David PollockAs August draws to a close, the movement to bring art to our screens while Edinburgh stages are dark welcomes the Traverse’s exciting digital programme
It’s the third and final week of the virtual Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and it’s debatable whether some of the makers of this year’s work, let alone their audiences, have changed out of their pyjamas. In another ‘everything up is down’ moment, many of the works shown or heard will still be available – or even premiere – next month. For example, the Shedinburgh Fringe Festival has just announced that it will broadcast an exclusive interview with Steve Coogan on September 3.
It wouldn’t be Edinburgh, meanwhile, without a healthy Traverse programme, and this week Scotland’s new-writing theatre unveiled a number of online works. Declan and Shielders are reviewed elsewhere, while a personal standout was Irish playwright Fionnuala Kennedy’s stunning Removed (★★★★), a piece that has already been seen live in Belfast and Dublin.
Under the direction of Emma Jordan, Conor O’Donnell plays Adam, a young boy taken into care alongside his brother, who spends his youth bouncing in and out of foster care and homes. Seated on a sofa, O’Donnell’s intense and relatable performance is largely unadorned, allowing the audience to focus on the poignant sense of disappointment and loss he unearths.
Elsewhere in the Traverse’s programme, its Breakfast Plays series has been recreated as audio-only dramas. Jamie Cowan’s Contemporary Political Ethics (Or, How to Cheat) (★★★) is a striking and exciting idea that perhaps could have done with another draft to hone the tantalising scene Cowan has set.
It is set in a quiet polling station on election day. Robbie Jack and Anna Russell-Martin play invigilators Terry and Hannah, both with different political outlooks, but similar – and potentially self-serving – political ambitions. Bhav Joshi, meanwhile, plays Kev, a deeply cynical and disinterested young man sitting in as research for his modern studies class. The cast is excellent, yet the sense of physical confrontation inspired by the McGuffin of a dropped ballot paper distracts from the raw and only partly unleashed human insight pregnant in the situation.
Rebecca Martin’s Rabbit Catcher (★★★★), however, is perfectly suited to these circumstances. Directed by Gareth Nicholls, it stars Russell-Martin once more as Ren, a young woman dead yet risen in the woods around Inverness, where she meets Reuben Joseph’s devil and Karen Fishwick’s fellow dead girl. With a touch of reverb added by sound designer Oğuz Kaplangi, the evocative sense of folk horror and magic realism in this subtly feminist piece holds dark, gripping reflections on male violence.
As this is our final fringe round-up of the year, we must make space for a smaller venue that has been doing sterling work putting artists’ work online. As ever, theSpaceUK has an enthusiastically varied programme, but I’d thoroughly recommend Nessah Muthy’s The Last Clap (★★★★) as a highlight.
It’s a poignant, video diary-style series of vignettes that follows a young actor through lockdown, from the last round of applause she took on stage, then returning home to care-home work in Stoke, to the final clap for carers – and the kind of lovely, unheralded work that will hopefully surprise audiences once more on Edinburgh stages a year from now.
See listings.edfringe.com, traverse.co.uk and online.thespaceuk.com for full show details and information on how to book and donate.
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