The strangest, most beautiful thing I saw at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe felt less like theatre than like mass hypnosis. In the silky, largely wordless “Dracula: Lucy’s Dream,” by the French-Norwegian troupe Plexus Polaire, Bram Stoker’s orange-haired Victorian waif Lucy, her body jellyfished into a loose nightgown, gets stalked and bitten by Dracula night after night as she darts among drifting monoliths. But the viewer is quickly disoriented, thrown by the presence of at least three Lucys onstage, not to mention a murder of Draculas, some of them hinge-limbed, human-size puppets eerily indistinguishable from the actors manipulating them. Each morning, after Lucy’s panicked helpers struggle to shake her awake, the cycle begins again, punctuated by lurid tableaux: three Lucys cradle three babies, then bite their tiny necks; a tri-headed Lucy kicks and hisses at her nurses. When the show ended, the audience burst into rattled applause, as if we’d been woken from our own dream, still unable to tell the reverie from the real thing.
That kind of bracing communal experience is exactly why people attend the Fringe, an event that launched, in 1947, as a thumb in the eye of a mainstream arts festival in the city. This was my first time attending, and though I know that the Fringe has changed a lot—it’s at once an avant-garde rumspringa and a bid for “Fleabag” fame—it was still a delirious spectacle, a choose-your-own-adventure of more than four thousand shows, featuring combo platters of standup, improv, clowning, drag, musical theatre, drama, circus performance, and burlesque. (Then, there’s the occasional shock show in which a performer, say, drinks his own urine.) In four and a half days, I saw twenty-one shows—twenty-two, if you count ten minutes of standup in a pitch-black dungeon. But even the duds were worth it. By Sunday, I felt not unlike Lucy: drained but craving just a little more.
Of dozens of venues, the most unusual was a sauna erected behind Summerhall, where I slipped into a bathing suit, then reclined with six fellow-guests on tiered wooden benches that surrounded radiant rocks. As the heat softened us into linguine, we absorbed audio excerpts of “The Waves,” Virginia Woolf’s incantatory “play-poem,” recorded by actors. Meanwhile, two sauna masters shovelled ice infused with fragrant oil onto the rocks and performed an Aufguss, a German ritual in which towels are twirled to spread scented air. During intermissions, we dipped into a frigid pool. I’m not sure how much the towel dance added, but the sensory overload hit me like a love drug, intensifying “The Waves,” with its braided soliloquies, and heightening the feeling that our individual minds were lapping like waves within a broader consciousness. That rush of insights went unscribbled, since notebooks don’t make sense in a sauna. But I left joyful and shocked, dizzy to my heels.
As it happened, both “Dracula” and “The Waves” also turned up in a very different context: Garry Starr’s bawdy, disarming “Classic Penguins,” a one-man show that is coming to New York this month, at the intimate Studio Seaview. In Edinburgh, at the enormous Pleasance Grand, the audience filed in to find Starr—the alter ego of the Australian performer Damien Warren-Smith—seated and facing the back wall, naked but for a top hat, a huge ruffled collar, a gentleman’s tailcoat, and penguin flippers. He swivelled to face us, smoking a pipe, from which he calmly inhaled, “Masterpiece Theatre” style. Then he stuck the pipe into his asshole and, somehow, expelled smoke both from there and from his mouth. “The Aristocrats”!
The intro functioned as a jovial dare: all bets were off, for his body and for ours. A fit, middle-aged man with a twinkling, louche charisma, Starr swiftly laid out the show’s intent, which was to celebrate each of the Penguin Classics paperbacks, thereby elevating the glory of “literaturaaah.” What followed was a sort of highbrow “Jackass,” an exhilaratingly silly cavalcade of slapstick, dad jokes, and audience participation, as Starr thumped each book on a desk, its cover displayed on a screen, and then performed a goofball gag, the style of which ranged all over the map. For “Dracula,” Starr slurped down “blood”; then, with his abdomen grotesquely distended, he swapped out the book for Sartre’s “Nausea,” then pulled on a white bonnet for “The Handmaid’s Tale.” His “Wuthering Heights” featured aerial gymnastics and an air cannon. These stunts may sound crude, but—hear me out!—the group experience felt liberatory and oddly innocent, a joyful dropping of taboos that erased any easy line between smart and dumb. A lot of the show’s effectiveness had to do with viewers eager to play along. At one point, some enthusiastic geezers embraced our nude m.c., and I teared up at the moment’s intimacy; it felt like a masterly trust game, although I guess that’s true of all well-made theatre, naked or not.
Clowning—the extreme sport of comedy—is deep in the DNA of the Fringe. Still, several of the best things I saw were small, earnest acts, such as the lovely “Jitters,” a scripted two-hander, by Ellen Robertson, about a wedding-day showdown between a wannabe trophy wife (a very funny Charly Clive, all evo-psych self-justification) and her soon-to-be stepdaughter (Robertson, wryly acidic). It was a clash between millennial feminisms that could easily have curdled into polemic but instead felt fresh and surprising. My other favorite was “Lions,” a more madcap but equally heartfelt show about fathers, starring Scott R. Sheppard and Alice Yorke, the artistic directors of the gifted Philadelphia troupe Lightning Rod Special. “Our dads are dead! Thanks for coming,” they announced, as they stood before a table full of paternal detritus: a basketball, a record player. What began as an anarchic vaudeville act performed in dandyish masculinity drag (ascots, wacky mustaches) evolved, in smart, layered stages, into a bittersweet eulogy, as the performers used the props to reënact—and investigate—their fathers’ lives, down to their deepest disappointments, all while dramatizing the disorienting limbo of a family making end-of-life decisions.
I’d hoped to spot the next “Operation Mincemeat,” but instead the first musical I caught was a vapid, if impressively belted, princess tale, “Bliss,” a glittery bummer that resembled “Six,” minus the wit, or “KPop Demon Hunters,” only two notches hollower. Significantly better was “Evita Too,” a more gonzo girl-power celebration that was definitely not for kids. To be fair, Louise Mothersole and Rebecca Biscuit, the brassy duo behind Sh!t Theatre, could have booked a black box and still hooked viewers merely by reciting the surreal résumé of Isabel Perón, Juan Perón’s third wife. Instead, the pair wove incendiary themes of sex, fascism, and feminism into a clever meditation on the relationship between shaggy shows like this one and West End blockbusters such as the O.G. “Evita.” Like Garry Starr, they used every tool at hand, jumping merrily from nude roller-skating to investigative documentary, in a production that culminated with the alarming sight of a jumbo-sized Evita puppet corpse whose face bore a suspicious resemblance to Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Less developed, but still appealing, was “The Real Kyle McCarren,” a soulful homage to the dead friend and former bandmate of the show’s co-creator and star, Andy Roninson. Staged concert style, the musical had a cerebral mournfulness reminiscent of “Tick, Tick . . . Boom!,” with a killer cast and strongly crafted indie-rock numbers that found new angles on grief, many from the perspective of a man too awkward for a group hug. If the show faded toward the end—hobbled, perhaps, by an unwillingness to take big liberties with a true story—it had a throb of authentic, unforced emotionality.
On my final afternoon, I squeezed in another gutsy little musical, a drag-queen fantasia about climate change called “Acid’s Reign.” It ran late, so I race-walked across town to the King’s Theatre, excited to see Ivo van Hove’s five-hour minimalist deconstruction of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” in Dutch, with subtitles, as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. Sadly, the production was a downer, draining Kushner’s masterpiece of color and humor and inserting, in their place, gloomy projections of cityscapes and, unaccountably, David Bowie songs. Maybe the idea was to strip away pageantry and get to a raw core, but now that Prior, the H.I.V.-positive gay man abandoned by his boyfriend, no longer wore drag, key jokes—“Ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille!”—were incomprehensible. Bold edits, such as eliding the wild, mesmerizing “I— I— I— I” of the Angel and cutting the special effects that herald her arrival, left me cold—and it felt oddly untransgressive for Prior to be mystically aroused not by a terrifying female seraph but by a blond male hunk in nurse’s scrubs. Maybe because I’d rewatched the cult-classic Canadian TV show “Slings & Arrows,” which depicts a Shakespearean theatre festival, I was uncomfortably reminded of the show’s preeningly experimental director Darren Nichols siphoning the passion from “Romeo and Juliet” in favor of an arid landscape of signs and signifiers.
That let-down made me feel grateful for the many shows I’d seen at the Fringe that had sashayed down the bright path “Angels” had burned, in the nineties, by treating gay life as a default, drag as an art form, and queer humor and rage as paired, crucial qualities. Among these was a gloriously weird, mock-nihilistic act called “Creepy Boys: Slugs,” in which a queer Canadian clown duo struggle to stage a dazzling extravaganza empty of meaning, only to find that various somethings—guns, the climate, gender anxiety, sexual desire—keep penetrating the razzle-dazzle. The show climaxed in a Bonnie and Clyde-ish stickup, a demand for arts funding at the point of a gun. That’s probably not an ideal solution, but “Creepy Boys” did leave me longing for a way for performers to take bigger, more ridiculous swings back in New York, where recent chatter has been about the difficulty of sustaining anything risky for long, let alone for about twenty dollars a pop. We have Coachella and Sundance; we have Burning Man, an immersive carnival that is far out of reach for most people. Shouldn’t there be a true, supersized Fringe in the U.S., a safe space that lets a hundred clowns bloom? ♦
