Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Chat Sh*t, Get Hit | Float | No Apologies | Dance Dance Involution + more

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 25 August

Why is it so unacceptable for women to be angry? The question simmers under the surface of this one woman show by theatre-maker and performance artist Martha Pailing, based at least partially on her own experience and directed by Fringe First winner Ursula Martinez.

Dumped by her long-term boyfriend two weeks after their trip-of-a-lifetime, she is forced to leave her London home, job and friends and move back to Blackpool. Living with her dad and working at the same fish and chip shop where she worked at 15, she suffers from crippling anxiety.

But in fact a lot of what she’s dealing with is rage, at the boyfriend, at how opportunities are never equal, at working hard but not earning enough. And that’s just the start (she has a list).

But what to do with that anger? Because it’s okay to rage on the football terraces when the referee sides with Bolton, but it’s not okay for a woman to speak her mind.

The anger management course is a bust - all the other participants are men with explosive anger issues - and her therapist is determined to convince her she’s too empathetic to wish anyone harm. She even envies the family dog for his direct recourse to expressing his feelings.

Meanwhile, on a podcast interview, trauma specialist Gabor Maté explains that repressed anger is causing a upsurge in auto-immune conditions in women. Seething silently while trying to be nice is messing with our bodies.

It’s a poised performance by an immensely likeable artist, funny, razor-sharp and precisely judged. Rather than immersing us in her own understandable rage, Pailing invites us to consider what rage we might be harbouring, and what effect that might be having on us.

Susan Mansfield

Float ★★★

Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Venue 24) until 25 August

An astronaut takes one giant leap for humankind, moonwalking where Barbie (limited astronaut edition) had gone before.

This is Indra Wilson, whose family couldn’t afford to buy them an astronaut Barbie but did manage to source a secondhand pregnant Barbie doll and dress her up in a homemade astronaut outfit. Thus pregnancy and space travel were linked in childhood Indra’s mind and now laboured as a metaphor in this work of personal catharsis for Wilson produced by F-Bomb Theatre.

On a twinkling set cluttered with planetary props, Wilson recounts their desertion by the father and pregnancy loss as a space mission, embarked on with hope and excitement before the crashlanding with tragic loss of life.

The painful journey to acceptance and the support along the way are rendered with pockets of clear-eyed eloquence.

Wilson is an engaging and confident performer. They clearly want to pay it forward and create a space to share a subject too often cloaked in self-blame, but the endless astral allusions are stretched too far, reinforced with an obtrusive but also bland galactic pop soundtrack and a compulsive need to be always interacting with some stage device.

Fiona Shepherd

No Apologies ★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 24 August

Kurt Cobain was a reluctant hero to many, an outsider saviour in a threadbare cardigan. As a young questioning teenager, Emma Frankland was more interested in his gender fluid assertions and cross-dressing tendencies - hence her projection here that Cobain was a trans woman, implicitly acknowledging that we make our idols in our own image.

The suitably grungey No Apologies is built round studio footage of Nirvana’s legendary MTV Unplugged show in New York, recorded less than six months before Cobain’s suicide.

Frankland has her own bootleg cassette of the subsequent album release, a precious relic of her grunge epiphany which she recreates in lo-fi tribute, right down to the stage decorations of lillies and candles.

Initially, her rhyming delivery veers between conversational and confrontational, but the show takes an even punkier ritualistic turn in the second half as Frankland manifests in a fabulous floral crinoline and enacts her own Icarus myth, practically swinging from the chandelier in defiance of attempts to clip the wings of the trans community while a distorted noise soundtrack rises in the background.

The imagery takes a turn for the messianic in the closing moments but, again, the intent is punk not pomp and while the script is shot through with latent anger, it is also a hopeful tribute to thriving not surviving.

Fiona Shepherd

Dance Dance Involution ★★★

theSpace @ Niddry St (Venue 9) until 19 August

“I have enough, our show is enough, our English is enough.”

Three Gen Z Hong Kong students, Dorothy Chow, Ashley So and Kathleen Wong, prepare for their performance by ‘lying flat’ – part of the movement that has evolved against over-work at the expense of one’s own financial, physical and emotional health, whether it’s in school, the office or at the Fringe.

Devised with director Eugene Ma, who was the tutor of the original team (Chow, So and Sheena Chan) at the Hong Kong Baptist University, the dynamic dialogue between the three women, as they debate their desire for competition, often in a way that is highly competitive, is fuelled by acerbic observations and at times overwhelmingly eloquent in a way that is simultaneously farcical and formidable.

What is an individual voice in a society where academic prowess has been made homogonous? This answer is here – in a brilliant critique and endorsement of the educational system that created it.

With three exceptional performances, the dialogue is ever on the edge of collapsing into the kind of first-class essay writing that’s its parodying. A series of set pieces, it culminates with an equally regimental megamix of TikTok numbers.

The show feels in need of a more developed overriding structure, but for a piece about breaking free maybe its absence is the ultimate a sign of success.

Sally Stott

All In ★★

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 16 August

This relationship two-hander starts off strongly with lots of rattling dialogue, sharp performances from a polished cast and an intriguing story about a couple, Henry and Marianne, on the night before they go into witness protection.

He’s frustrated and unemployed; she’s hiding something behind a professional façade. There’s lots of sexual tension, fuelled by unspoken secrets and a pressure cooker situation.

The drip, drip reveal of how we got here adds intrigue but its structure isn’t as smooth as the character’s conversation, as they become increasingly constrained by a worthy story about the effects of addiction that they’re forced to fit into rather than shape more directly.

Sally Stott

Life Would Be Pretty Dull Without Sex, Raves and MDMA ★★

theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall (Venue 53) until 16 August

Wily fortysomething clubber turned mother-of-three Bex Wall has the wide eyes, edgy energy and rattling stream-of-consciousness monologues of many a 1990s raver.

In a piece based on her real-life experiences, she responds to the death of her brother and being diagnosed with cancer by going on a drug fuelled sex seeking bender. It’s mindless, shapeless, sometimes tiresome, repetitive like the music and, as the extremes of Bex’s actions turn farcical, funny, weird, defiant, starkly unsexy and perhaps even feminist.

With emotions directly stated, an attempt to get the audience dancing at the end demands an unearned connection, but the Fringe energy is strong and awkward bopping of some committed participants only adds to this.

Sally Stott

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