THE Edinburgh Festival Fringe is open access; so themes that emerge are not planned, but give an insight into the creative community’s concerns. Grief is everywhere this year, and so are reflections on mental health. I counted seven monologues about growing up in a church and being forced out of it on account of being LGBT+. Seven! Even in a festival with 3000 shows, that’s a lot. I can only admire the chutzpah of the woman who repeatedly emailed me to say how much readers of the Church Times would appreciate reading about her show 50 Ways Jesus Ruined My Life. We’ll never know!
It is entirely unsurprising for comedians to include an anti-God rant in their set. I don’t mind that; I listen and reflect. But I sense an audience yawning that they have heard this too often. I’d love to hear a comedian launch into a pro-God rant. If he or she could make that funny and fierce, it would be genuinely shocking.
Until then, the Christians at the festival are increasingly imaginative in holding out something life-giving. The City of Edinburgh Methodist Church has created an open-air experience, Lost in Wonder, at which, free and unticketed in a prime location, festival participants can listen to spiritual music, pause in front of art, or relate a story about a moment of wonder in their life while someone responds to it in watercolours. It’s a brave attempt at mission using the festival’s own culture, staffed by enthusiastic (to be honest, too enthusiastic) church members. It’s a far more creative idea than the underhand approach of another church, which was inviting people to their service by handing out flyers that disguised it as a theatrical event.
It is a mark of the confidence with which Christians are engaging with the festival that the programme now includes a Festival of the Sacred Arts with music, theatre, and art. In Dancing Ash Wednesday, Paul Burrows, a classically trained dancer and priest, responds to Anne Young reading the famous poem. Sometimes, the choreography interprets the words literally, sometimes allusively, and (sadly) sometimes inaudibly, because, although the Edinburgh churches can match the rest of the festival creatively, they have a journey to go technically. But it made me happy, because the last time I saw someone dance to T. S. Eliot was Cats.
In Scaffolding, a newly widowed woman cares for a severely disabled daughter. She mounts the scaffolding around her church, which is under threat of closure, and fires unanswerable questions at God. Written by Lucy Bell and movingly acted by Suzanna Hamilton, this little gem of a play attracted warm reviews. Fascinatingly, it casts the audience in the role of God, who, near the end, breaks his silence and speaks with words of love.
God also makes his presence known in A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God Whoever Reads This First, but two American Boy Scouts in the mid-1960s find it increasingly difficult to be sure whether they are worshipping God or their President. Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland won several awards for this energetically physical and ultimately poignant play. We meet them as boyhood comes to an end, trying to understand a world in which the reality of the Vietnam War begins to affect their lives. It features a delightful scene in which an eight-year-old furtively takes communion and is at once completely right and completely wrong about what he has just done.
Huge themes are in focus in A Play By John, which touches on another of the festival’s unofficial themes, assisted dying. Two coffin-makers may or may not have agreed to end each other’s lives, which they may or may not do, because they may or may not actually be in a play. If the jokes don’t always land, and the pace flags, it’s nevertheless a splendidly ambitious piece about trust and power by Marc Wadhwani and Jules Smekens, with rat-a-tat, absurdist dialogue. There are hundreds of young companies crowd-funding, borrowing, or mortgaging their futures to fund the enormous cost of discovering in Edinburgh whether their work can move a live audience. I really hope that MULE will be one of the few that gain momentum.
There is a superb coup de théâtre towards the end of Nation, which I absolutely did not see coming. It makes you question everything you have seen so far. The theatre-maker Sam Ward created this piece before the rioting that disgraced the nation earlier this summer; so it is remarkably prescient. The story that he tells is one in which an act of kindness to a stranger is first misunderstood and then becomes a trigger for accelerating violence. He paces the in-the-round stage, hand aloft like a sorcerer, weaving an eerie spell amid haze and distorting music. Not everyone liked this show, but I swallowed it whole.
Although many shows at this year’s festival lean into darkness and anxiety, there are hundreds that simply bring joy. In Breathe, by Half a String TC, tiny puppets of bugs and seeds creep across the forest floor. They are filmed and projected live on to a huge screen. Meanwhile, there are songs, sound effects, and the story of how one acorn out of half a million during a tree’s lifetime grows into an oak. It is utterly beautiful. The children around me were captivated. In a frenetic festival, this was a moment when I genuinely was lost in wonder. Tell the Methodists!
In contrast, Sawdust Symphony could well have as its alternative title I Daren’t Breathe. A wildly popular show, it features three men doing every astounding thing imaginable with wood, hammers, glue, sawdust, and superhuman circus skills. They build, they balance, they juggle, they swing, and they make us laugh. One of them flings a hammer across the stage, and a hand shoots up through a trap door, catches it, and disappears. By the end, the wooden stage has revealed its many surprises; Michael Zandl, David Eisele, and Kolja Huneck have made a magnificent mess; and a whooping audience has had its understanding of both carpentry and circus turned on its head. Literally.
The excellent Shotgunned shows us 30-second glimpses of a relationship, zigzagging backwards and forwards in time. Fraser Allan Hogg and Lorna Panton play two immensely likeable characters, whose love cannot survive the tragedy that they have to endure in their young lives. You will have to believe me that there is a lot of laughter along the way to a bittersweet conclusion. Matt Anderson’s deft writing gives you hope not only for this pair, but for all twenty-somethings trying to negotiate a life that often is just not fair.
Back in church, Bellringers is, to put it mildly, confusing. In an unspecified era, two men have gone to the tower during a thunderstorm in the belief that ringing the bells will ward off an apocalypse. Daisy Hall’s début play revels in language, particularly the names of rural villages, but as Luke Rollason and Paul Adeyefa bicker, console, and tell bizarre stories to give themselves a sense of being in control, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand what’s going on. I believe that the meaning of life is something to do with mushrooms, but that may only reveal how confused I was.
There’s nothing confusing, though, about Primary School Assembly Bangers Live! James Partridge has gained television attention for this. He’s a Year 5 school teacher — one of those charming, inspiring ones you never forget. From a keyboard, he leads the audience in singing “Who put the colours in the rainbow?”, “One more step along the world I go”, and a host of other hymns. Between songs, he reminds us hilariously of schooldays and the 1990s.
Two hundred millennials (and your rather older reviewer) joined in with delight. Given the early hour, their unrestrained enthusiasm cannot be blamed on alcohol; so I choose to attribute it to the Holy Spirit. I don’t know whether or not it was worship, but it is a nostalgic, emotional blast. Who would have predicted that my enduring memory of the 2024 Fringe would be yelling “Shine, Jesus, shine” while trying to blink back tears?
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe continues until 26 August.
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