Edinburgh Fringe Theatre reviews: Out of My Head – Alan Watts is Alive and Well… Dead | Enjoy Your Meal + more

Out of My Head – Alan Watts is Alive and Well… Dead

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33)

★★★★☆

Seemingly risen from the grave after his death in 1973 in the Californian hilltop hippie enclave of Druid Heights, the author and self-proclaimed “freelance philosophical entertainer” Alan Watts is here to tell us his story. Embodied for the purposes of this play by actor Jeremy Stockwell, that story at first appears as conventionally told as the real-life Watts was unconventional.

Amid a jumbled living room stage set in which we can almost smell the patchouli oil, Stockwell’s Watts gives us the straight biography, from his birth in Chislehurst in 1915 to his middle class upbringing and boarding school education, before he wilfully failed to win a scholarship to Oxford and began to pursue more alternative avenues in life. At first his religious leanings led him towards Episcopalian Christianity, then towards Eastern religion, in particular Buddhism.

That Watts was undertaking this journey in the years immediately after the Second World War, long before the Swinging Sixties brought such ideas into the mainstream, made him a pioneer and an early brand of the kind of Western guru who would later flourish. So far, so educational, until the point where Stockwell himself, by subtly clever and inventive means, intrudes upon the story he’s telling and provides his own parallel narrative.

Where Watts is grandiose, exuding a self-conscious air of above-the-fray wisdom, Stockwell himself is creaking, his thoughts turning to his own health and mortality. One man is self-aware and conscious of the world turning around him, and Stockwell illustrates his own concerns with honesty and humour.

The other appears to mould reality to his own desire through sheer force of will and charisma, as exemplified by a wonderful sequence in which Stockwell-as-Watts takes questions from the audience and improvises profound but largely meaningless answers. It feels like a reckoning with the counterculture that shaped so much of Stockwell’s generation, revealing a later-life realisation that even gurus are just making it up as they go.

DAVID POLLOCK

until 25 August

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Enjoy Your Meal

Summerhall (Venue 26)

★★★☆☆

Thanks to series like Boiling Point and The Bear, culinary dramas are all the rage right now. In those shows, though, the chefs can cook. In this alternative comedy from American writer and performer Cory Cavin, the cuisine is a long way from haute.

Cavin plays Wayne Swingle, a chain-smoking head chef whose restaurant is failing. We, the audience, are his diners for the evening. He introduces himself, flicks through a funny slideshow of his culinary heroes – Gordon Ramsay, Guy Fieri, Paul Hollywood – then sets about serving us some food from a station at the front of the stage.

Things do not go to plan. First, he repeatedly fails to make a cocktail, so hands out beers instead. Next, he makes a wrap containing most common allergens – shellfish, peanuts, dairy, and more – then has a reaction to it himself. Sporadically, he steps outside for a cigarette and a stressful phone conversation with the owner, who wants to fire him.

It is a great concept – Fawlty Towers meets Saturday Kitchen – but Cavin does not quite pull it off. The show feels underwritten and his performance underpowered. Still, the food, when it sporadically comes, is actually nice enough. And you might get a free beer.

FERGUS MORGAN

until 25 August

Lapdog

Just the Tonic Nucleus (venue 393)

★★★☆☆

How long can you keep up a fantasy before you start to lose yourself? Rachel Frost explores that question in her honest, deeply personal telling of life as a stripper in New York City. She discusses grappling with morals, the tension of giving more of herself to gain more, and shares secrets she has kept from herself and others.

A struggling actress, Frost became a stripper to help pay the expensive rent on her NYC apartment. But she reflects frankly on if it was ever really about the money. Was it her desire to explore her sexual fantasies? A search for validation? A mission to define herself?

Frost doesn’t just tell the story, she performs it. She brings her experiences to life with vivid yet grounded portrayals of encounters that avoid being overly sexual or graphic, but still convey the intimacy, complexity, and occasional absurdity of her world.

The show touches on everything from early sexual curiosity and teen intrigue (like buying her first thong) to more layered sections on identity and secrecy. It also showcases the beauty and strength of pole dancing as an art form whilst staying truthful to her relationship with it. It is an insightful story about identity, fantasy, and reclaiming your narrative.

SUZANNE O’BRIEN

until 24 August

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Confessions of a Lunatic

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39)

★★★☆☆

This new take on Dracula by Lewis Mullan clearly values novelty — a gender-flipped Count(ess) who’s looking to buy property in Scotland rather than London — but it’s at its best focusing on secondary characters from Stoker’s novel who can often be given short shrift in other adaptations. This centres on the relationship between Renfield (Mullaney) and Lucy Westerna (Elliot Shaw) the glamorous debutante who’s customarily Dracula’s first victim.

Here, Lucy is given an actual character rather than simply being pretty and sought after. Unsatisfied with the expectations of Victorian society and having at the attention of Dr John Seward (Aydan Macdonald) her sympathetic nature finds her drawn to Renfield — and by proxy Dracula (Arzaneira Deepsri). This is an interesting sideways method of tackling the story and it’s telling that Mullan’s invented scenes are stronger than the ones pulled from the book. Deepsri gives an interesting, almost Lugosi-esque, performance — rolling both her ‘r’s and her eyes — and it’s certainly novel to have a Dracula noticeably shorter than the rest of the cast. Lucy’s resurrection as the “bloofer lady” should be chillier or more grisly (or both) and the ending isn’t as effective as it could be, but this is still good gothic fun.

RORY FORD

until 22 August

Wenches!

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236)

★★★☆☆

Three lively performances and some inventive video effects go a long way to keeping this sly medieval satire fizzing. Set in Berlin in 1423, two peasants, Bertegilde and Nortburga (played by co-writers Maya Le Roux and Bianca Waechter) are feeling a little down after watching one of their friends burned at the stake. Deciding to visit the local witch (a perfectly cast Derya Celikkol) in an attempt to say a final farewell to their late bestie they get rather more than they bargain for when they unwittingly rip open the gates of space and time and gaze upon the sum total of human knowledge — the internet.

Produced by the Berlin-based, female-led Hysterie Theater, this is funny and absurd without ever really becoming absurdly funny. The script isn’t quite as sharp as it could be, but it’s fun to watch Le Roux and Waechter as they embrace feminism, post-feminism, performative hashtag political activism, and Crocs. While the satire is handled about as lightly as you could wish, the conceit of Bertegilde and Nortburga hosting a podcast is a bit of a drag on the show’s momentum in the latter half. Even so, it’s still a bright and funny hour, stylishly directed by Antonia Reinisch – and Celikkol’s disarmingly modern witch is a hoot.

RORY FORD

until 23 August

The Forum

C aquila (Venue 21)

★★☆☆☆

It’s seldom a good sign to come out of a show unsure of what you’ve just seen. And not in a pioneering-experimental-theatre kind of way. In the case of Desmond Devenish’s fraught solo play, it’s simply a case of heavy accents, swallowed words and quick but uneven rhythms obscuring the details of his dark tale of ambition, extremism and justice. Its themes are timely and provocative, but The Forum needs some substantial pruning and clarifying, and its delivery stripping back to basics, before it can make its mark and achieve the potential it surely has.

DAVID KETTLE

until 24 August

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