The Week on Stage at Edinburgh Fringe: From Blanket Ban to She/Her

It’s that time of year when critics rarely get to see daylight: the Edinburgh Fringe is back.

The world’s biggest arts festival is now in full swing, celebrating its 75th year as well as a return to normality after the pandemic.

This week, Fergus Morgan gives his verdict on four of the Fringe’s biggest theatre shows, from a Fleabag-esque one-man show to a docu-play about abortion law.

Join us next week when Isobel Lewis will be our woman on the ground for the biggest comedy and theatre happening at the festival.

Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen – Roundabout @ Summerhall ★★★★☆

Actor Samuel Barnett could read the yellow pages and it would be funny. The eternally youthful History Boy is at his angsty, animated best in Marcelo Dos Santos’s monologue Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen, another show worth catching in the 168-seat Roundabout.

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Produced by Fleabag’s Francesca Moody and directed by Matthew Xia, the show follows a gay, 36-year-old comedian through the ups and downs of a relationship, from the awkward first date onwards. It is a nice piece of writing – a frank, funny and occasionally filthy portrait of a man who habitually hides behind humour, neatly structured around a stand-up set – but it is Barnett that brings it to life.

He sparkles in what is surely one of the sharpest performances of the festival. With only a microphone and some nifty lighting changes from Elliot Griggs, he holds the audience in the palm of his hand, deliciously sarcastic and sardonic throughout. One can easily imagine his character following in the footsteps of Fleabag.

Half-Empty Glasses – Roundabout @ Summerhall ★★★☆☆

Paines Plough’s pop-up Roundabout stage is always the place to go at the Edinburgh Fringe for entertaining, engaging new writing. This year is no different: there’s Rafaella Marcus’s Sap, Maimuna Memon’s Manic Street Creature, and Dipo Baruwa-Etti’s Half-Empty Glasses. The latter is a thoughtful three-hander about politics in the playground, co-produced with Kingston’s Rose Theatre.

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Toye – a passionate, pained Samuel Tracy – is a 16-year-old star student. He’s dissatisfied with the lack of Black history in the curriculum and starts his own lunchtime lessons to rectify things. Over 70 minutes, the classroom becomes a battleground as Toye clashes first with his teachers, then with his friends. Kaleya Baxe’s sparse, sparky production syncopates with trippy, piano-led beats.

Some storylines – Toye seeking a scholarship to a private school, his dad suffering from Parkinson’s – do not feel fully fleshed out, and the characters feel a bit like ciphers at times. But Half-Empty Glasses works well as it was intended: a compelling consideration of activism in the education system.

She/Her – Assembly George Square Gardens ★★★☆☆

Nicole Ansari-Cox’s She/Her is a show that evolves with each new city it visits. Co-produced by Ansari-Cox’s own company Actors Rising and by her husband, Succession’s Brian Cox, it brings together a cast of local women and provides a platform for them to tell their own stories in their own way.

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Here at the Edinburgh Fringe, the seven-strong cast includes Ansari-Cox herself and American artists Michelle Joyner and Antoinette Cooper (all of whom were part of the project’s original run in New York last summer), plus Scotland-based performers Callie Rose Petal, Kananu Kirimi, and musical mother-daughter duo Mairi Campbell and Ada Grace Francis.

Each woman has their own moment in the centre of a dimly lit stage, the others supporting them with sound effects, harmonies and scraps of dialogue. The stories range from the gently witty (Campbell on her late-life discovery of marijuana) to the harrowing (Joyner on her son’s opioid addiction). Although it feels formulaic and doesn’t ultimately add up to more than the sum of its parts, it is still a diverting and diverse hour of storytelling nonetheless.

Blanket Ban – Underbelly Cowgate ★★★☆☆

Malta is one of most progressive countries in the world, except in one respect: abortion is illegal under any circumstances. Blanket Ban, from emerging company Chalk Line Theatre, is a playful investigation into why this is the case, and into what it is like to have an unwanted pregnancy there. It is essential and imaginative, but also scrappy and underdeveloped.

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The creative team (comprised of Maltese cast members Davinia Hamilton and Marta Vella, plus directors Sam Edmunds and Vikesh Godhwani) throw a lot at the wall – video interviews projected onto draped sheets, comedy sketches, dramatic duologues, animated lectures – and only some of it sticks. Hamilton and Vella are entertaining performers and they evoke the insularity of the island nation well, but the deluge of different devices dilutes its documentary purpose. The show would be vastly improved if some ideas had been left on the drawing board.