Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Flick | Champions | Frances Floats | In the Black | Shiva for Anne Frank

Flick

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 25 August

★★★★☆

Nurses are people too. Even those working in palliative care, catering to the needs – and, let’s face it, whims – of patients in their last days and weeks of life. Some of them carers will deeply miss, others they’ll be glad to see the back of. So when Flick’s eponymous protagonist encounters hunky new hospice arrival Mark, it’s hardly unreasonable that she should feel desire starting to stir. Or is it profoundly inappropriate?

Far from being a tragic love story of doomed attraction, however, Australian writer/actor Madelaine Nunn’s swift-footed, tricksy solo show is instead a sassy, wise-cracking comedy (for the most part), but also a work that manages to say touching things about grief, love and regret.

Nunn herself is a coiled spring of a performer, indulging her illicit yearnings through activities that test the audience’s approval and sympathy, but never without a wink and a knowing smile. As things slowly unravel, and as her penetrations into Mark’s life grow more intrusive, so Nunn’s character grows more convincingly unhinged, though it’s never without a moving sense of self-awareness that takes the audience along with her on her wild ride into unknown indulgences.

And it’s a mark of Nunn’s persuasiveness as both writer and actor that gasp-out-loud moments hit home, while miniature successes and gags take us firmly back on her side. So far so funny, and while it might be tempting to see the show as nothing but black, often inappropriate humour, it’s only in its closing moments that Flick examines the true motivations behind her deeply questionably behaviour, unveiling the sadness behind the show’s larrikin comedy. Nimbly staged by director Emily O’Brien-Brown, Flick is a rare Fringe mix of comedy and tragedy, and a show that’s balanced delicately between the two.

DAVID KETTLE

THEATRE

Champions

Pleasance @ the EICC (Venue 150b) until 16 August

★★★★☆

It is as if we have been permitted entry into some quiet corner of Andreas Constantinou’s psyche. Constantinou, the artist behind Champions – a performance-installation exploring grief, loneliness, and homophobia – recalls the lives of his late mother and father, who died within five weeks of each-other during the height of the Covid pandemic.

Constantinou sits, physically naked and emotionally vulnerable, listening to audio recordings of his parents and his therapist. Through an ingenious use of perspective, the set appears in 2D, like a cartoon of a living room made real. The stage could be a television screen or sheet of paper, and we witness him at many scales and from multiple angles, as by way of video projection, he also appears as one of two figures wrestling in an arena.

It is unclear if the spectators that cheer around the perimeter are there for sport or support – they swing from one to the other, mirroring the separate, and conflicting, attitudes of his parents. Indeed, his father’s disappointment and embarrassment at having a gay son is palpable, as he perceived manhood and homosexuality as mutually exclusive, and attempted to instil “macho” interests in Constantinou from an early age.

The two figures careen from the arena and into a field of wildflowers, fighting for ground on an ocean floor, and finally in a desert. The metaphor travels well: Constantinou is wrestling with his sexuality – this undeniable part of him that is so, undeniably, a part of him – and the expectations of his father that he could never hope to meet. The rawness and grit that accompanies this knowledge, like saltwater or sand in the mouth, recalls Philip Larkin’s 1971 poem, This Be the Verse, which famously honours the myriad ways in which parents inflict aspects of themselves, for better or for worse, onto their children.

JOSEPHINE BALFOUR-OATTS

THEATRE

Frances Floats

Braeburn at Gilded Balloon at Appleton Tower (Venue 140) until 24 August

★★★☆☆

At 40, Frances Mercanti-Anthony was convinced she’d die alone and unloved – and yet now, at 48, she has a wonderful husband, three children and a one-woman show at the Fringe. Whether you believe that this personal and professional success is a result of manifestation or luck, it’s clear that few deserve it more than Mercanti-Anthony. Effervescent and charismatic, she details the fluctuations of her life – and weight – with disarming honesty and humour via the unconventional medium of a slideshow. By flashing up images of herself at her thinnest and fattest, we’re encouraged to simultaneously examine our individual biases around weight and also fatphobia at a societal level.

Frances Floats is at its strongest when it focuses on its eponymous creator; the asides about 9/11 and Covid are interesting, but only serve to pull the spotlight away from an already compelling personal story. And while it may be billed as a comedy, the work is best when viewed through a more serious lens – one which gently reminds us to reassess prejudices around our own bodies and those of others. Mercanti-Anthony may insist that she isn’t trying to spark an epiphany in any of us, but we come away enlightened nonetheless.

ARIANE BRANIGAN

Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here.

THEATRE

In the Black

theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53) until 23 August

★★★☆☆

The opening scene of this one-man play from writer/director Quaz Degraft is a smart, wrong-footing signal of what’s to come. Degraft appears as Kofi, a young, black American man in an orange prison jumpsuit, known as “the Calculator” AKA “Calc” to his fellow inmates for his ability with numbers. He tells of how he got here, from his upbringing in a working class Ghanaian-American household where discipline was administered through his father’s fists.

Kofi comes from nothing and nothing is expected of him, but a chance “borrowing” of an affluent white friend’s parents’ BMW strikes a chord. He wants to sit in such plush leather seats again, but he wants them to belong to him. Through hard work and determination he makes his way into a job at a top New York financial firm, where he meets a woman, falls in love and earns big money.

Naturally this life eventually crumbles like a house of cards, but the reason for his imprisonment isn’t a predictable financial crime saga, rather a complex moral lapse when he finds himself trapped between the US healthcare system, a devastating physical abuse of power and the conditional nature of patronage afforded to a black man in his position. It’s an extremely DIY show, but Degraft’s a capable actor who structures and paces his story well, and even gets to show off a smooth singing voice.

DAVID POLLOCK

THEATRE

Shiva for Anne Frank

Zoo Playground (Venue 186) until 24 August

★★★☆☆

Shiva in Judaism, explains writer and solo performer Rachel McKay Steele, is a period of mourning observed for the dead. The hour-long Shiva she plans to hold for Anne Frank, she explains further, is more than a bit belated. There’s so much potential for what Steele has created here to land badly, but the fact it hits every mark throughout is a real tribute to the thoughtfulness and quality of the writing in particular.

In part it’s edgy, anal sex-referencing stand-up comedy, with Steele channelling Jewish humour traditions from the Borscht Belt to Seinfeld. In part it’s a celebratory revisiting of Frank’s tragic life and inspirational writing, with a fresh focus on what made her a relatable young woman; her talk of menstruation, her perceived sexual confusion, her amusing bitchiness. In part, it’s tap-dancing joyously to Chumbawamba.

To a great extent it’s Steele’s processing and reaffirmation of her own mixed Jewish-American heritage, from talk of the nose job she got aged 15 to her response to Israel and Palestine, which is open-hearted and compassionate to all who have suffered. She admits to a tension about discussing this – indeed, her performance feels tense and over-rehearsed, and hopefully it loosens up as the run progresses – but the power and importance of her demand for radical empathy resonates loudly.

DAVID POLLOCK

READ MORE: The Best Edinburgh Fringe Theatre 2025: Every show with a four or five star review from The Scotsman so far