Keith McKenna reports on this year’s West Midlands links at the Edinburgh Fringe.
This year’s Edinburgh Festival contribution from the West Midlands included a celebration of the work of Sarah Kane, a number of new plays, and a couple of great musicals.
Meanwhile, The Great American Trailer Park Musical, arrives at the Alexandra Theatre for its English premier on Tuesday following its Edinburgh success.
The brash comedy of this American production won large audiences and on the night I attended generated a good deal of laughter. The polished performance transported us to a Florida trailer park where Norbert, the husband of an agoraphobic, fell for the charms of Pippi, a stripper on the run from her frightening ex-boyfriend Duke. The show treated its characters with affection and sympathy. But its story is slight, the characters have no depth, and its rock musical score is too unvaried.
A bleaker vision of America appears in Birmingham’s Through the Window Theatre production of Sondheim’s musical Assassins. Dan Avery, its producer, explained that “it seemed to fit a year in which the American Dream came crashing down.”
It tells the story of nine people who have tried, and sometimes succeeded in, killing American presidents. The director Neil Robinson drew out the seriousness and humour of the piece. Mikey Pope is riveting as a disturbing but funny Sam Byke taping messages to Nixon and Bernstein on route to hijacking a plane he intends to fly into the White House.
But in a cast of strong performances David Clark is particularly striking as John Wilkes Booth, persuasively dominating every scene he enters. The accompanying musicians effortlessly shift between musical forms ranging from the uplifting folk style of the balladeer, to the gospel-like music of the character Charles Guiteau.
Shrewsbury School have for many years performed big musical productions at the festival. In this year’s musical Harry, the character of the title is forced to work in a cardboard factory after his father, the chief executive, dies. This was an impressive production of well choreographed scenes, faultless singing and good acting. Ben Edmunds has a powerful stage presence as Harry. Hugh Fergusan and James Sutcliffe ooze evil in the roles of the sinister clerks Bill and Jack.
Birmingham University’s 3 Bugs mounted a fine 10th anniversary production of Sarah Kane’s play Crave originally performed in Edinburgh just months before she committed suicide. Since then her reputation has grown, largely as a result of student enthusiasm. The director Daniel Pitt sensitively stressed the play’s contrasts of innocence and desolation. Entering the stage to the song Over the Rainbow the four characters desperately try to connect with each other through highly poetic stories of childhood loss and abuse which leaves performers and audience emotionally exhausted.
Out of Your Knowledge from Steve Waters. the current head of Birmingham University’s playwriting course from which Sarah Kane graduated, is a fascinating new monologue performed by Patrick Morris. It brilliantly evokes the landscape and characters Morris and Waters encountered when they retraced the 90-mile journey the poet John Clare walked in 1841 from an asylum in Epping Forest to his home in Northborough. Morris shifted easily from quoting Clare’s poetry to suddenly becoming one of the characters they met on route.
In the play Call for the Condemned, Birmingham University students gave us a picture of hell as a frenzied call centre where targets are set for characters to phone and tempt the living into damnation. William Martin is particularly impressive playing the demon Greed. Flicking through the Financial Times and celebrating the fact that “global capitalism is still riding high”. Unfortunately the characters are superficial and the jokes repetitive.
There was an increase in the number of plays which dramatise interviews with people involved in political events. Among the best of these was Steve Gilroy’s Motherland which gave us the voices of women from the north-east of England whose relatives had been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. On a small stage littered with ammunition boxes, Helen Embleton, a 2006 graduate of the Birmingham School of Acting, gave a very moving performance as a number of these women. They told us of recruitment taking place against a backdrop of pit-closures, of the deaths caused by military incompetence and the military’s often callous treatment of families.
This year the comedy section of the festival was for the first time bigger than the theatre section.
It included the Birmingham University students’ show Friends of Old Joe which on alternate nights would imaginatively improvise sketches based on audience suggestions. The highly entertaining result carried us from prisons in the deep south of the United States to the wild outback of Australia.
