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Edinburgh Fringe 2025 Day 4 REVIEWS (Orpheus, The Great Gummy Bear War, Stamptown, and more)
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Theatre Reviewer
That we recommend.
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Foreign.
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James Richardson
I'm James Richardson and I host the Totally Football show four times a week. If you're not familiar with it, perhaps you'd care to give it a listen in the season ahead. Because we cover all the big stuff Premier League, Champions League in depth, European League coverage, Football League and more. We've got insights and analysis from the best reporters in the industry and we got quizzes and nostalgia too. Plus, we're going to be bigger and broader than ever for the season ahead. So check out the Totally Football show wherever you get your podcast. The rest is not as good as the Totally Football Show. Unbelievable. This.
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- [02:18]
Theatre Reviewer
Oh my God. Hey. It is day four for me at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and my 21st show was one of several I have seen so far about climate change in the Beautiful Few Future is coming at the Traverse Theatre, Flora Wilson Brown is writing about the climate crisis from three different historically separated angles. We switch between these brilliantly written two handed scenes meeting women across history, the first being Eunice, a historic female scientist whose findings won't be read or considered by the Royal Society in London. Next, we meet a young couple in the modern day initiating a workplace romance, unaware of the fact that the climate crisis is about to impact them hugely. And finally, about a century in the future, we meet two colleagues living in a world already ravaged by the climate crisis. It' familiar of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, if only because of the different time periods happening simultaneously and the science of it all, admittedly with less thermodynamics. And despite the fantastic scene work, strong performances, good direction, I spent a lot of this play wondering what we were building towards. We do get there by the end, I think, when we eventually arrive at this complex combination of obvious existential despair and also optimistic hope. It's something of a call to action. But more than anything else, it's an examination of the humanity that exists at the centre of the the climate catastrophe as it was anticipated, as it is being experienced and as it presumably will be. If you want to see it for yourself, go and check it out at the Traverse theatre. So my 21st show at the Edinburgh Fringe, Charlottesville, calls itself the play that Trump doesn't want you to see. And that's because it recalls the events which took place just under 8 years ago this month in Virginia when the Unite the Right rally took place with devastating consequences. And writer and performer Priyanka Shetty acquaints us with the nature of her thesis immediately in this solo show, which is as much a lesson about the alt right as it is a condemnation of their actions. And as such it's something of a hybrid between performance and journalism. And that's where these shows can get a little bit tricky, because while a personal route into this story can be very effective, you also run the risk of centering yourself. And there is a subplot that runs alongside the trial and a recollection of the events and recreated interviews with witnesses and other local residents in which we find out about Priyanka's academic mistreatment, which in the way that it's characterized to us feels racially motivated. Unfortunately, there's something of an unnatural quality to the delivery, to the recreation of local accents as well as body language, while pre recorded news clips are recreated and performed by Priyanka herself at one point there is a Trump impression, which, if I'm being completely honest, sounds a little bit more like Jennifer Tilly. And occasionally the qualities of authenticity and honesty that become so important to shows and stories like this start to feel a little bit more like arrogance that being said, this remains obviously a hugely important and impactful piece of theatre that you can see at the Pleasants Courtyard whether Trump wants you to or not. One thing you will find plenty of here at the Edinburgh Fringe is eye catching show titles and this one grabbed me with about 5 minutes notice. This was God Is Dead and I Killed Him. This is a solo show from musical storyteller Callum Patrick Hughes. He is accompanying himself on guitar, often underscoring the personal stories and anecdotes that he is sharing from his own life, which are seemingly unrelated at first, but begin to tell a bigger story about his relationship with to faith. Whether that's faith in God and organized religion, something that he came to in his adolescence as a lonely youth searching for community only to then shed it later in life and experience a sort of a grief alongside that, or faith in something a little more ethereal, whether that's horoscopes or witchcraft or ghosts. Fittingly, there's something more than a little bit magical about Callum himself and the way that he tells a story and the way that he crafts community in the room, the way that he laughs at his own jokes, easing the tension of the difficult memories that he is sharing and empowering the entire room to be able to withstand more and more emotional weight. He also sings beautifully, but it's really only the occasional musical phrase. I definitely think the ratio of music to storytelling in this could shift a little bit, but I liked the inclusion of Shine, Jesus, Shine and Gethsemane. And interestingly enough, just when I was searching for some greater sense of connectivity in the show, he invoked the audience and brought our personal stories and even individual audience members into the show. If gig theatre is an increasingly popular form, this is busking's answer to that and I enjoyed it very much. Go check it out at Pleasance Courtyard. I have just witnessed the most absurdly brilliant thing. An Edinburgh Fringe show performed with gummy bears. This is a solemn and bloody recollection of the surprising choice of the Gummy bear nation to wage war against their neighbors, the dinosaurs. Performed wholly in Italian and subtitled throughout. Which makes the whole thing even funnier because the delivery of all of these lines, as well as the writing of the lines themselves, is so solemn, so filled with horror and gravitas. And yet what we're looking at is the puppeteering of gummy bears on this glossy, semi reflective tabletop surface. It's hysterically funny. All of the descriptions of these individual gummy bear characters like Dirty White and Raspberry Red and Apple Green. The description of Lemon Yellow, who was as yellow as a lemon and looked to the heavens with his yellow face and felt passion soaring through his yellow heart. Like, this is what we're talking about here. And as hysterical as the whole thing is, as they move them around this table and they create battlefields and they create the illusion of gummy bears running to deliver a declaration of war, somehow they also manage to conjure the pathos of war and invoke a lot of other real world international crises. And though I never anticipated saying this sentence in my entire life, there is something unexpectedly impactful and powerful about the great Gummy Bears war. And I urge you to become part of the intimate audience seeing this show at Zoo Playground. It must be seen to be believed. So Show 25 was another autobiographical solo show, this time from Lucy Barat. It is called Standing in the Shadows of Giants. The giants in question are her brother, who became a legit rock musician with the band the Libertines, as well as his collaborator, who also lived with them for a time, Pete Docherty. And because of this, Lucy, who is also a performer, a writer, a musician and an actress, as we discover through her brilliant performance in this play, which she has also written and co composed the music for, has spent her entire career measuring her success in proportion to his. She almost immediately breaks the fourth wall to let us know that the story she is telling is 96.7% true. And it's one of a lifelong desperation for validation which ultimately leads her down some very self destructive pathways. And it's interesting because this is not the first time that I've heard a story like this. This Nicola Wren also developed a solo show that I saw a few years ago. She, as the sister of Cole, plays Chris Martin. Riffing on a lot of similar ideas about comparative success. This one admittedly ventures to some darker territory. Lucy has lived more of a life and shares that with us unapologetically. I also want to credit the brilliant direction and the writing. This is so smartly worded. I was on multiple occasions struck by a really fantastic turn of phrase, more so than I've been over the past couple of days. And although we're having the same famous brother conversation as in that other show that I mentioned, this one really surpasses that idea by highlighting that Lucy's issue was not only that she had a very successful brother, but also the disparate treatment of young men and young women in the entertainment industry. This show muses on celebrity, but goes even further and conveys something really important about humanity. Go and check it out at the Traverse Theatre. My next show at the Edinburgh Festival for 2025 was motorhome Marilyn at Gilded Balloon Patterhuss. This starring Michelle Collins and as Denise, a perhaps washed up later in life Marilyn Monroe, impressionist who at this point has almost everything working against her. She is trying to find work in a dwindling industry that has lost interest in Marilyn. Although admittedly no one cares about Marilyn Monroe as much as she does. To the extent that not only has she collected a lot of memorabilia from her life, dedicating her entire life to emulating her, but also is slipping her own anecdotes into memories from her past. This in conversation with her pet snake, Bobby. She is otherwise pretty much alone in the world. She is also evading police questioning. All of which I think would actually make for a pretty interesting story if it wasn't written in such a one note and monotonous way. It was hard to ignore the audience members checking their watches and actually leaving the performance halfway through. And this isn't the fault of Michelle Collins, who is doing a great job with this not uninteresting character. It has more to do with a lack of variety in the staging and in the script and the inherently inorganic nature of the framing device. She is performing these extended monologues about her past to her pet snake. And if she talked to the snake that often, then the snake would know this already. This wouldn't be the first time that these stories had come up. And there are what feel like inconsistencies in characterization. There is this cobbled together tragic backstory. And while her circumstances are clearly meant to feel pretty tragic, the overall performance probably isn't to this extent. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can find Motorhome Marilyn parked at Gilded Balloon Pattern Huse. So admittedly, I am nearly 30 shows into the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and I am in the midst of a nine show day. Today specifically, however, that was objectively insane. I just saw the new musical Falling in love with Mr. Delamort and it started on such a fascinating, melodramatic European musical theatre Frank, wild, horny kind of a note. I was into it. It was gothic, it was romantic. Rob Tripolino was singing the hell out of that school. Objectively well written music throughout the thing. They are bringing back the Pattersong and I am here for that. They also have a theremin played on stage as part of their orchestration, which is novel and also creepy. It just entirely lost me in the middle. I became baffled because Every character we met was insane, which stops being funny and just starts being weird. I had no idea what was going on because he was meant to be this charming figure who we know from the beginning to have ulterior motives, but as soon as the guests who he invited arrive, he suddenly becomes the least charming person. I just think that there's character notes that need to be ironed out, but it's actually quite close to being a compelling piece of theatre. But there are storytelling issues and characterization issues that, for a long chunk of the middle of that show, kept me from being able to figure out what exactly I was looking at. Don't get me wrong, we circled back to something entertaining and wild and a little bit strange, and I don't hate that. For new musicals at the Edinburgh Fringe. And if you want to try and figure out what the hell it is, you can find it at SeaArts Aquila on the Royal Mile, here at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Okay, let me paint you a picture here. Let's say you're at the Edinburgh Fringe one year. You have this extraordinary revelatory theatrical experience, seeing a show that is based on Greek mythology, musical storytelling using original acoustic music and spoken word poetry. And those same theater makers, those same artists, are bringing another show based on a different Greek myth back to the Fringe. And you're a little bit scared that because that first experience was so special, nothing can possibly live up to how singularly memorable and magical it was. And then it does, using completely different theatrical techniques, using a slightly smaller company, but once again curating this incredible audience atmosphere, which takes these shows from brilliant and smart and dramaturgically sound musical pieces, and utterly transformed them into these moments of community and togetherness. I'm talking about Orpheus from writing Granger at Summerhall. This was such a wonderful theatrical experience that there are insufficient superlatives to do it justice. And for what it's worth, I also think it's incredibly accessible because this falls somewhere between traditional storytelling and gig theatre. What they do is they extract the humanity from these ancient stories and they tell them in a way that speaks to where the human race is right here, right now. They find the beauty and the heartbreak of it, and they utterly democratize the theatrical experience so that we can share in those painful and powerful emotions as well. It's incredible. Go and check it out while they are briefly here at Summer hall and go and see everything they do in the future. So I am walking back from the Pleasants courtyard after one o' clock in the morning, which can only mean One thing I have just had my very first experience of Stamp Town. This is an Edinburgh fringe comedy staple and this time I was the uninitiated. I have not yet entered the world of Stamp Town late night comedy variety lifestyle cult. This was not dissimilar to other late night fringe variety shows featuring acts from around the festival like Ruben Kay's the K Hole. Only I would characterize this one as significantly more chaotic. They did a lot of really hilarious stuff using sound effects, using character comedy. There were burlesque acts, there were music comedians, there were bits on bits on bits on bits. At one point it just devolved into like a 10 minute hot dog food fight between the audience and the performers on stage. Riotously funny, wildly unpredictable even to the individuals on stage. Nobody had any idea what was happening next. Every single show is unique and that's a huge part of why it's such a brilliant experience and why people keep going back. It is not necessarily for the faint of heart. Depending on the lineup, it may also not necessarily be for under 18? S but if you on either of those things, go and check out Stamp Town at the Pleasants Courtyard here at the Edinburgh Fringe. Now you can fly anywhere in the world and pay discount prices on your airline tickets. Book a flight today to London, Paris, Madrid or anywhere else you want to go and pay a lot less guaranteed. Call the International Travel Department right now at Low Cost Airlines, 8002-1551-4180-0215-5141. That's 800-215-5141.
- [15:29]
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- [15:41]
James Richardson
Hello everyone, I'm James Richardson and I host the Totally Football show four times a week. If you're not familiar with it, perhaps you care to give it a listen in the season ahead because we cover all the big stuff. Premier League, Champions League, in depth, European League coverage, Football League and more. We've got insights and analysis from the best reporters in the industry and we've got quizzes and nostalgia too. Plus, we're going to be bigger and broader than ever for the season ahead. So check out the Totally Football show wherever you get your podcasts. The rest is not as good as the Totally Football Show.
- [16:18]
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