Summerhall

Darkfield’s hallucinatory audio dramas are practically their own genre and I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable to say that if you’ve seen one before, you basically know what you’re getting yourself into with a newie. ‘Seen’, of course, is not the operative word: like predecessors ‘Seance' and ‘Flight’, ‘Eulogy’ takes place in total blackout conditions, inside a sealed shipping container, with the show prerecorded and relayed via headphones - a trippy audio drama relayed in disorientating binaural sound. There’s a twist with this one, which is that our headsets have microphones in them, and throughout the show we’re asked a series of yes/no questions about ourselves - it’s mostly at the beginning and I started to wonder if there had been any point to it, but it actually builds up to an extremely amusing twist at the end – it’s a throwaway gag, but it’s a good throwaway gag. Otherwise, it’s a traditional Darkfield adventure: that is to say, a batshit crazy story that involves us being entered into some sort of bizarre contest at a strange hotel, where we’re put under the charge of a ‘helper’ who seems to be tasked with taking us through a ritualistic series of actions that must be followed to the letter if we’re to succeed in the contest. We do not follow them to the letter… and things get very dark. The plots in Darkfield shows always seem to follow the vertiginously swirling logic of dreams, with abrupt changes in location and a cheerful disregard for coherence. That’s fi

Somewhat disorientating at a festival full of actual stand-up comics, Marcelo Dos Santos’s monologue ‘Feeling Afraid as if Something Terrible is Going to Happen’ is a play structured like a stand-up set, with Samuel Barnett’s neurotic gay comedian protagonist working up a routine apparently based upon his character’s real love life. It’s framed around his relationship with a nice American man, whose personal details are chopped and changed as the show wears on, but who is always extremely hench (I learned the phrase ‘cum gutters’!) and extremely affable, to the point that he somewhat freaks Barnett’s character out - all the more so when he discovers that his new boyfriend has a medical condition that stops him laughing. The meat of the show is the comedian’s suspicion – and, indeed, fear – of the stability the American offers, and his constant indulgence in largely depressing casual sex on the side. The title comes from his innate, self-loathing fatalism: he doesn’t allow himself to enjoy life because he’s already convinced the worst will happen. Maybe the self-loathing gay fuckup who is also a comedian trades in a few tropes, but the eventual problem he faces – that it infuriates him his boyfriend doesn’t laugh at any of his jokes, even though doing so might literally kill him – is a pleasingly absurdist one.  It’s funny, and it takes real skill from director Matthew Xia to direct an actor in a small in-the-round quasi-stand-up set. Barnett is absolutely terrific: funny and

It’s hard to know where to start with ‘Still Floating,’ a new piece of writing by Welsh performer and producer Shôn Dale-Jones. A surreal piece of storytelling that flips between the present and his award-winning 2006 show, ‘Floating,’ it’s a confusing hour that lacks focus and is frankly uncomfortable to watch.  ‘Floating’ follows the character of Hugh Hughs when his home on the Isle of Anglesey breaks away from mainland Wales. In 2022, it seems to double as a metaphor for Brexit, in which Hughs’s wacky head teacher is a sort of Welsh Farage. In the parallel present plot, Dale-Jones plays himself: he returns to his home island, also Anglesey, after his mum suffered from a nasty fall, and stays there for a month.  It sounds simple enough, and perhaps it could have worked if Dale-Jones had focussed on these two storylines. But there were too many distractions. He kept re-explaining the format of the show (just get on with it!) and surreal sketches kept popping up out of nowhere, interrupting the plots. In one, he mimes swimming in the Atlantic, stripped down to his knickers and wearing a harness made from oranges and a cardboard box on his head. In another, he decides to force the audience to watch him suffer ‘seven minutes of pain’, and gives up after 30 seconds.  To be fair to Dale-Jones, it’s a fully one-man show: he runs around from his laptop to sound pedals to props and back again. But the whole thing is just stressful to watch. The show is described as ‘warm-hearted’, b

Every Fringe needs a Big Tear Jerker, and this year the title unquestionably goes to Haley McGee’s ‘Age Is A Feeling’, a prodigiously wise, sad and beautiful contemplation of a life. A barefooted McGee sits in a high wooden chair in front of us. Her age is somewhat indeterminate – she could be anywhere from late twenties to early forties – a fact that suits the show, which she performs in a circle of flowery poles, each with a word that corresponds to a story. At intervals throughout, audience members are invited to choose from a selection of the words. The stories that aren’t chosen are discarded, and we never get to hear them (though in some cases we get a brief outline). It’s kiiind of a gimmick: McGee’s point is that nobody ever truly knows a person, not even themself, and so we’re deliberately presented with an incomplete life. But what we’re presented with doesn’t feel particularly incomplete, and I kind of wonder if McGee just wrote too much material for the show. But it adds a certain artsy structure to proceedings, gives it a form beyond McGee just telling us a yarn - it’s a bit of a gimmick, but it’s not gimmicky. Anyway: McGee’s narrative starts at her protagonist’s twenty-fifth birthday: she recounts her dad telling her his belief that you can only hire a rental car from that age because it’s only then that your brain has finished developing. Somebody tells her age is a feeling, and McGee’s monologue goes on to try to convey how somebody’s entire post-25 life migh