Abby (Janine Ingrid Ulfane) is in her late 40’s, a smart corporate woman, and the boss of Ben (Sean O’Neill) who is 12 years her junior. Her apartment is shrouded in veils, suggesting the dust from the collapsed Towers (an evocative piece of work from designer Nik Corrall). She is concerned about what’s happening outside the apartment, and suggests to Ben that he get out on the streets and help people, whilst knowing this is impossible if the mooted deception is to work. Abby wants her man to be a hero, but she could scarcely have chosen someone less heroic. Ben listens to his phone ring and ring as his wife tries to find him (we can easily fill in her painful side of the story), he whines, he whinges, he acts like a spoilt brat. Yet there is a coarse masculinity under his shirt and tie, and sexual passion, which must be the reasons Abby has stuck with him for three years. She is much more complicated: more intelligent, cultured and more successful in career terms, but she is restless, brittle and hectoring. Her conundrum is: can she run away with a man who isn’t decent enough to treat his wife and kids honourably, and who is such an opportunist he makes a global tragedy all about him?

Ben takes a lot of stick from his mistress: Abby rigorously goads him, trying to establish if he has the right stuff for their escapade. After a poignant section where she graphically describes his lack of emotional connection with her during sex, it’s hard not to see her as masochistic. Why are these two together? It is a relationship that’s very short on affection, but long on need, in his case primarily for sex, and power over his boss, in hers, for a man who will match her highest ideals. But, wretched though their pairing can seem, it is no more implausible than those of many, many couples.

There’s always the danger of artificiality in a duologue in real time about relationship conflict, because in life, arguments can play out over days, incorporating long bouts of inarticulacy and sulking. Once or twice here, it’s hard to believe the characters’ emotional journeys. However, Ulfane and O’Neill are both excellent, showing with raw power his unprincipled weakness, and her impossible yearning. Ultimately, Neil La Bute proves his status as a pitiless observer of male/female relations, and delivers a provocative and eloquent slice of modern debate that demands serious attention.

We’re Gonna Make You Whole bases its title on a promise that BP made to the victims, and is heavily ironic given the effects of the spill on a handful of the inhabitants of Louisiana portrayed here. A married couple ( Lennard Sillevis and Jordan King) squabble over how to receive compensation, as she coughs and retches and lives in fear of losing her unborn baby (as other women in the area have) and he, one of the men on the rig on the fateful night, suffers shock, guilt and fear of the future. Elsewhere, an actress (Yasmine Van Wilt) has lost her job on a TV show because of the weeping sores on her body, a fisherwoman has lost her business, and a research doctor, attempting to gather evidence of contamination (both played by Kara Peters) is prevented from continuing.

Immortalis Vox Productions say that the play was ‘inspired by more than 100 interviews with BP Deepwater Horizon survivors’. It is staged on two floors of a shop turned gallery in Battersea, and includes an exhibition of amateur portraits that the company invited locals from Grande Isle, Louisiana to paint, which it then, with commendable savage wit, entered into the BP Portrait Competition in the UK. None won, but given the scale of BP operations, I doubt this was a conspiracy.

Mostly, this event is agit-prop. If it wants further action from its audience, the company should supply an informative programme. The play itself is clumsily realised, poorly scripted and confusing. It wasn’t until I talked to one of the company afterwards that I discovered a piece of ‘information’ that could have been used to much greater effect, that is, the sabotage by BP of evidence supporting compensation claims (by allegedly ‘disappearing’ researchers). There are queasy notes struck, including Yasmine Van Wilt’s insistence on wearing very few clothes, which in spite of make-up representing sores, is clearly an excuse to show her beauty and is utterly jarring here. The show blurb promises to ‘press the boundaries of performance, incorporating cabaret, folk, jazz, blues, funk, film, dance, visual art and installation’. Barring a couple of decent folk songs by Sillevis and Van Wilt, this is extremely misleading. What it did do was make me read more about the oil-spill, and realise that this is a disaster which is definitely not over.

From unpromising material, Sam Shepard forges a titanic tale of collapsing rural America, encapsulated in a family of breathtaking dysfunctionality. Now 30 years old, Buried Child emphatically still works as a critique of the American Dream and its inability to stand up to reality. Through the perspective of the girlfriend, Shelly, in a sharp performance by Tala Gouveia, the audience sees the failure of the characters to adopt the wholesome roles of the traditional American family we hold in our imaginations. This ‘aint no Waltons. Mother is a tramp and worse, Father (an excellent John Atterbury) a manipulative SOB, the sons, the opposite of heroes, and the next generation in the form of the fresh-faced grandson (Joe Jameson) doesn’t look likely to turn things around. As Shelly leaves, we hope that she, intelligent and brave, will represent a better future.

Buried Child moves deftly between farce, poignancy and horror and etches itself into the mind. Though the first act could pick up pace, this accomplished production, directed by Timothy Trimingham Lee is highly recommended.

Baby Boomers and The Confetti Maker are a double-bill of plays directed by John Wright, a widely respected dramatist in the areas of physical and mask-theatre. If you have been following British theatre in the last 30 years, you will certainly have seen a play which has his mark upon it; not only has he founded theatre companies himself (notably Trestle Theatre and Told By An Idiot), but the students he trained at Middlesex University have carried his influence far and wide, making a Wright Bible of physical theatre tropes part of what we now understand physical theatre to be.

Baby Boomers is the first mask show Wright has directed for ten years. Two actors play an elderly woman and her husband in the present, and their younger versions in their early life together with the first flush of romance and subsequent loss and grief. They wear full-face masks and perform to a soundtrack of 1950′s songs. The most novel element of the piece is the use of balloons, representing everything from trees to hats to animals.

There is very little here that shows the gob-smacking brilliance of Wright’s best work. The actors perform imprecisely, moving casually in a way that shows disregard for the power of the masks. The story is ho-hum stereotypical, and there are many times when it is unclear what is going on. A (good) law of theatre is broken, in that the props become more important than the characters and the story, and we have to watch the actors fiddling with balloons in a way that destroys any potential magic. It is a sugary little piece, fuzzy and simplistic, with only a couple of moments of real charm.

By contrast, The Confetti Maker is an unadulterated joy. It begins with a witty bit of convention-shattering, where the actor playing the eponymous character (Frank Wurzinger) talks to his technician about problems with the script, then launches into the confetti maker’s world on the factory floor, showing how he makes his little scraps of paper, his quality-control routine, and what he eats on his meal-break (an unspeakably funny and gross piece of snack-eating). Wurzinger is in clown persona, naive, wide-eyed and increasingly crazed, and is physically dextrous in marvellously surprising ways. Unlike in the first play, the props all seem integral to the piece and are used with grace and flair. Within a minute of watching Wurzinger, you know you are in the safe hands of a consummate performer, though his character is so vulnerable and edgy, you cannot be sure what will happen next. As chaos reigns, the confetti-maker recites ‘To be or not to be…’; it is a mark of how much we care about him that the play can get away with that. I laughed long and hard, and felt moved to my core: this is the way that physical theatre can penetrate so well, using a clown to illuminate the human condition and show our universal concerns. I could have watched three times as much of Frank Wurzinger and still been begging for more.

Bertolt Brecht wrote The Caucasian Chalk Circle in America in 1945 whilst in exile from Germany where, as a Marxist, he feared for his life. The action of the bulk of the play is from 1918-1921 in Georgia, a time and place also riven by war, and where social stability is turning upside down. Bedevilled by wars as we still are, and with people’s revolutions breaking out in the Middle East, it seems apt for Blackeyed Theatre Company to be revisiting the work of one of the most overtly pro-plebeian and moral dramatists in the canon of theatre history.

The main plotline involves Grusha, a servant girl who rescues the baby son of her mistress, the governor’s wife, after a coup d’etat breaks up their home. Grusha (finely played by Anna Glynn) must then roam far and wide to avoid repercussions and keep the baby safe, and in doing so, makes personal sacrifices and encounters sundry crooks, oddballs and challengers. In the denouement, an anarchic judge, Azdak (played too politely by Ruth Cataroche, who is elsewhere very good), presides in judgement over the relative claims of the biological mother and Grusha using the eponymous chalk circle as a means to decide who has the greater right to keep the child, she who bore him, or she who cared for him. A narrator, Arkadi (a very strong Paul Taylor) sings the storyline and butts into the action throughout, observing Brecht’s dictum to keep us ‘alienated’ i.e. not swept up in the emotion of the story, but keeping our rational heads on.

Blackeyed Theatre bow to Brecht’s trademark ‘epic’ style in using very simple adaptable staging. Five actors play a much larger number of characters with great flair and deftness, as well as playing musical instruments in a satisfying troubadour-like way. The staging and simple timeless costumes, with occasional masks, enhance the sense of the play being a fable (Brecht used a medieval Chinese play and a bible story as sources) and seem meant to convey its durability as a story for all times. The director, Tom Neill, has made some very reasonable choices, and there are a few beautiful theatrical moments, but as the play steadfastly proceeded (it is awfully long), I craved more anarchy, lots more humour and much less honouring of Brecht’s vision. Times have changed radically of late, and it is not enough to project random TV news clips onto the set, as Neill does; the action could have done with more imports from contemporary life, art-forms or pop-culture. Brecht’s piece could easily take such modernising, though a significant edit would have helped concentration: in the audience beside me, schoolchildren texted and chatted, unmoved by the sterling labour onstage.

I’m glad I saw Blackeyed’s version of The Caucasian Chalk Circle: it’s a very accomplished history lesson. But it’s ironic that the parts of the play where I was most involved were those that were the most emotional. Does Brecht’s theory of theatre still hold up today? Discuss that one kids (if you can tear yourselves away from your I-Phones).

Eddie and Crystal, played with verve and nuance by Alan Drake and Charlotte Mckinney, are an odd-couple, both lonely enough to spend a romantic weekend with a virtual stranger in a rainy seaside town. Crystal is all chav-glamour and sexual boldness, Eddie wears a dreadful moustache and lives with his mum, but every time we think we’ve nailed these two as types, a new illuminating facet of them is revealed. In their intense (though sometimes desperately banal) interaction, it is as if every relationship between a man and a woman is somehow reflected.

The jokes come thick and fast (the attempt to act out Crystal’s sexual fantasy is uproarious) but the sadness of both characters is what pierces the heart. There are echoes of Mike Leigh’s grotesque-but-real characters here, though Farquhar, the actors, and director, Jason Lawson achieve an effect more satisfyingly subtle than Leigh’s over-caricatured comic creations.

In yet another Wilde revival, Oscar satirises a batch of upper-class personalities as they swap aperçus on the subjects of marriage, the differences between men and women, and the poor, and eventually arrives at the meat of the piece when he reveals an unmarried mother (quelle horreur) is secretly in their midst. Galleon Theatre Company, based at the misleadingly named Playhouse (it is tiny), have chosen to update the play to the 1950’s.

This production has a classy feel, the acting is largely excellent, and the difficult space is managed well by director Bruce Jamieson. The play is not Wilde’s finest: it is always enjoyable to feast on a portion of his wit, but here I am over-stuffed, and want more seriousness around the sexual politics in the piece, exemplified by the fallen woman, Rachel Arbuthnot (a nicely-tortured Mary Lincoln), being forced to spend years in the wilderness, whilst the stock of the dastardly father of her child, Lord Illingworth (smoothly played by Kevin Marchant) has only risen. Nevertheless, Wilde’s being a feminist at all makes him special, for his era and his class, and there are many chortles to be had at his lacerations of hopeless men (and bitchy women).

The only clear effect of giving the play a 50’s setting is that we can enjoy some nice fashion of the period. Otherwise, the language and social types felt very much of their time, and if I half-closed my eyes, I still saw bustles and frock-coats.

Black Watch the play is visceral, noisy, macho and busy. The action shifts back and forth between a pub in Scotland sometime after their tour of duty where a playwright tries to interview the soldiers, now in civvies, most of them restless, chippy and suspicious, and the war-zone in Iraq, where the heat, boredom and occasional atrocity provide the substance of their lives. In between, there are set-pieces of physical theatre, the most effective being a dressing-up parade in which the ensemble deftly change the historical uniforms on one actor (Jack Lowden), manhandling him like an Action Man as he speaks the story of the regiment.

The staging, in a rectangular space reminiscent of the Tattoo ground with seats banked on the long sides, is largely effective and occasionally frustrating. When actors barely look straight at the audience, they don’t let us into their characters’ emotions. The Scottish accents, though having their own beautiful musicality, occasionally test a Sassenach’s comprehension when the action is far distant, even though the actors wear mics. There is no missing the sound effects and music though, which are sometimes so loud I felt bludgeoned by the sound designer, and taken out of absorption.

What’s missing in Black Watch is an invitation into the darker recesses of the minds and souls of the characters. Then, perhaps we are simply shown the truth. These boy-soldiers are crudely misogynist, their play-fights and games, banal. Commonplaces about modern fighting abound: war is bad and chaotic and dictated by distant cruel politicians; when soldiers are away from home, they crave sex and takeaway food; American bomber pilots are gung-ho; you can only rely on your mates. I suspect the play would have had far more impact on its first showings, 4 years ago. Since then, the public have learned a lot more about Iraq, in the media, in The Hurt Locker, in verbatim accounts. There is no doubt that Black Watch is a very distinguished example in the canon of war-plays and may work well as a historical piece in a revival some years hence. If you haven’t seen it, the Barbican’s current revival certainly provides a window on war, but it is not as moving as it is informative about the regiment of the Black Watch.

I stayed out till 3am last night, slept badly and consequently now, on the train home, feel like half human, half discarded husk. Miraculously, my last show, on Sunday, was my best, with the biggest house and, as far as I am able to judge, my tightest performance (I don’t mean drunk, do not presume you know me). Perhaps I was inspired by the presence of my director, Laura Eades (now performing her own utterly unique show, Patchwork, just for the last week: a late-night treat), by the other mates there, or by the international producer (la-di-da). It’s good to end on a nice one.

My show-watching reduced towards the end, and I got more stuck into other activities (not all involving pubs). All in all, I managed to see about 14 shows over 3 weeks and it was a good spread over all genres. The most atrocious piece I saw was nominated for a Fringe First (out of step with the arbiters of taste….again). It was a horrible mish-mash of every contemporary theatre-trick in the book (puppetry, projected images, dances with bits of material etc). Worst of all was that the acting was weak, the script poor and it appeared to have been directed by someone with not just a vision, but several visions, all of which they tried to cram into one play. Yet again, and somewhat conventionally, I observe that there is no substitute for good performers, a well-wrought text and direction which serves both.

I selected shows mainly because friends were associated with them but other reasons were:
1. Massive success on the Fringe last year (and I can’t bear missing out on a phenomenon)
2. I happened to be walking past a venue, at a loose end, when something was starting
3. I was sheltering from the rain
4. My best friend recommended it (she also took me to my cruddiest show, see above, but I’ll forgive her in time)
5. I ducked in to escape a noxious ex-boyfriend (God, he’s put on weight!)

My favourite show was ‘No Child’, a tour de force performed by Nilaja Sun, a beautiful, passionate actor who plays out her experience of teaching ‘Our Country’s Good’ to a class of kids in the Bronx, ‘becoming’ all of the young people, as well as other teachers, the janitor etc. I play all the characters in my play, but felt this woman had taken that schtick to a whole new level. I felt physically moved when watching it: my stomach started to churn, and my heart actually hurt, even as I was laughing with joy. It’s an absolute killer.

Other shows I enjoyed a lot, in no particular order:
1. The Friendship Experiment – two Scouse actors in a startling, hilarious feat of physical, and yet oh so verbal, theatre
2. Beach Hutt Mutts – charming, sunny storytelling by two blokes who know their craft
3. Next! – very funny and insightful actor’s experience of auditions
4. Wolf – spooky physical theatre
5. Frisky and Mannish – heart-warming and uplifting pure entertainment for pop music fans

Informal ‘performances’ appreciated:
1. Two young boys selling stick insects on Meadow Walk (capitalism’s not dead! – oh no, that’s a bad thing…)
2. Sundry drunks decorating pavements attended by police or paramedics IN THE DAYTIME. Impressive self-sabotage.
3. A fiddler on a tightrope strung between two trees (not a drinker, clearly)
4. The white Rasta proprietor of the Pavilion Cafe who took three years to bag and sell me a Danish pastry. Remember Neil from The Young Ones? Half that speed.
5. ‘The Most Pierced Woman in the World’, chatting to bystanders with a face full of ironmongery and lurid make-up, wearing a bride’s dress and a hat your aged aunt might like, made of fabric roses. Alluring, yet repulsive.
6. The nineteen different hen parties at the bar/cafe/club Revolution where I went with my cousins from Fife (mistake) on Saturday night. Why are pink felt Stetsons, angel’s wings and gladiator sandals fit for breaking rocks in a quarry considered cute and naughty? I have been known to toy with vulgarity myself, but these wenches make me look a veritable Coco Chanel.

Perhaps the best part of the Fringe this year was meeting some old friends (by accident or design), both creatives and civilians, and I would like to honour them here:
1. Aidan, my host and one of my oldest friends – thank you for giving me a bed in your elegant flat and putting up with my misconceived ramblings.
2. Kath Burlinson, sharer of above flat, best mate, artist-extraordinaire and supporter of me when up, down, in or out.
3. John Hegley – wit, visionary, sage.
4. Roy Hutchins – an excellent two and a half hour lunch, the best feedback I had on my show, and wonderful stories, both sweet and sour.
5. Cast of Wolf – sexy bunch, much fun
6. Andy Linden – ever the gent. Kind, funny honey-bun, and protector against rain and wind on The Loft Bar roof.
7. Karen Koren – warm and voluptuous as ever. Great to see you and be issued with pass to above.
8. Phil Whelans of Pros from Dover, formerly my colleague in impro troupe Spontaneous Combustion (Edinburgh Fringe 1990-93) – you still got it, bro.
9. Trixi, Linda, Sean, Chris, David, Lucy, Janet, Linda L, Sue, Neil – all you gorgeous non-luvvies who saw the show and fed, watered, and were kind to a decrepit old actress. Never stop.

I’m sending the boys round to:
1. The pigs that broke glass on my stage every day and never cleaned it up (so I had to, lest I cut myself to ribbons – never thought I’d side with Health and Safety Nazis, but on this matter, I so do)
2. The company who made the noisy air-conditioning at the back of my venue (if you didn’t sit in the first few rows, you needed an ear trumpet)
3. Every mag and paper, online or otherwise, who ignored my show. How can a piece that’s had at least 8 uniformly great reviews in the past and which audiences routinely praise be so lost to sight? (C’mon, I’m allowed a whinge, surely…) (No. – Ed)

What did I glean as an artist from the Fringe Experience?
1.That I need to be much more careful about a venue next time. I don’t want a ‘par can-tan’ ever again from oversized lights on a small stage. I shall be the investing in a train up to Edinburgh to check over a space beforehand in the future, and not being so punk-rock about it all (just turning up and trusting that a vomit-covered nightclub would be perfect….doh).
2. With regard to my show’s impact, I was like a homeless disabled junkie leper up against Reagan, two Bushes, two Clintons and an Obama all at once on the Presidential Campaign that is the marketing drive on the Fringe. So many acts with money behind them! Next time, I need a bit more to spend than the two fluff-covered Maltesers I had in my moth-eaten purse.
3. If you do the show, and you’re proud of it, and you give it all you can, then you are a man, my son….sorry, er, went into sanctimonious poem there. You know what I’m saying…
4. Loads of ideas for my next show. Just hanging out at the Edinburgh Fringe, never mind seeing other shows, stirs up the imagination and gets things moving, like prunes on a stuck intestine. I’ve absorbed the ferment of theatrical creativity by a process of osmosis, just by showing up. No matter how bladdy difficult being a theatre-maker is, I will not stop, at least not until I’m being fed through drips in an oxygen tent (ooh, there’s an idea for a piece…). It’s addictive, art. Thanks for reminding me that it’s a good addiction, Fringers (well, less harmful than some of my others).

I’m spent now. Home beckons. If you want me in the next week or so, I shall be lying down. Thanks to whatsonstage.com for letting me write these blogs. Enjoyed writing them (a lot). No more…body in meltdown…head fuzzy…let me g……

(Alison Goldie was pronounced DOA at Kings Cross Station. Whilst checking her over, the words ‘break a leg’ were uttered and she suddenly revived and demanded that we powder her nose as she had a show to do, no matter how small the audience…Ambulance Crew)

Then I toddled off to meet a friend for lunch. On my way to the Mound, I bumped into Alistair McGowan, looking dapper and lovely (in splendid trousers). He was returning from doing William Burdett Coutts’ chat-show. I know him from the stand-up circuit from years ago and he’s always been a truly genuine and warm person, not at all slebby. While we gassed for 10 minutes, two different people asked for his autograph. He was charming to them. When we parted, I gave him a bear hug, in testament to how much I really like the guy, though our meetings are rare and brief. If you see Alistair McGowan limping around with a dislocated shoulder, that’s my bad…(Alistair himself won’t understand that contemporary slang as he didn’t know that ‘sick’ now means ‘good’).

Then I had lunch with my friend, Linda the homeopath. I say ‘friend’; in fact, Linda and I have only hung out together on a week’s holiday in Spain a few years ago, but we’d stayed in touch, so that when we were both going to be at the Fringe, we reconnected. This is a great Fringe phenomenon: old acquaintances turning up in Edinburgh, and because of the heady business of the whole place – emotions being high, theatre being shared – the friendship that may be of no long duration or depth becomes charged and layered. My show, Lady in Bed, tends to stimulate witnesses to tell me some hilarious or hideous stories from their own love-lives and a few times this Edinburgh, I’ve repaired to a pub after the show with friends (or strangers) for a great orgy of story-telling. Linda, like others, did not disappoint with the love-tales.So much material! I feel another play coming on…

Linda and I parted in the (precious) Edinburgh sunshine (with another bone-crushing hug from me – I just can’t DO air-kissing) and I went off to do my show. I’ve given up worrying about getting attention for the creature this Fringe, and now just devote myself to enjoying the performance (and ‘committing’ to it every time, as John Hegley reminded me to do the other day, instead of worrying about reviews or career progression. Thanks, John, needed a bit of that wisdom).
In the audience was a local man who was coming for the second time, this time to bring his brother. I knew he really ‘got’ the show so as we talked over my collecting bucket afterwards (Free Festival, dudes) I suggested a drink and off we trooped to a gorgeous old man’s pub I would never have found without a native. My fan, Ray by name, turned out to be a music anorak of the best kind (he’d really appreciated the soundtrack to my play which covers a number of top tracks from the history of popular music) and we bonded over anecdotes and ravings about everyone from Edith Piaf to Led Zeppellin. Sometimes, when I meet another music-nutter, all we do is trade names of bands or songs in lieu of actual conversation, and so, a conversation might go:
A: Barry White.
B: Oh yeah! Amazing! Dusty Springfield.
A: Incredible. Leonard Cohen.
B: Don’t get me started…Cake’s version of ‘I Will Survive’..
A: Way better than the original…
Ad nauseaum.

After a couple of ales with Ray and co., I drifted off again (loving the rolling Edinburgh vibe), wandered down the Royal Mile a bit (you know, that lower stretch going down to Holyrood, you never go there do you? It’s scarey away from the crowds isn’t it, even though you hate them sometimes?) Then I went to see my only show of the day, Beach Hut Mutts, chosen because, as with nearly all the shows I’ve seen this year, it has old mates in it. Roy Hutchins and Tony Haase. What a great show! It’s utterly bonkers, yet with a strong narrative backbone that keeps you locked in. The actors are mature men, no longer the Fringe archetypes they were once, but boy, have they got some energy. They banter away, playing ‘themselves’ in the story, and sort of half-playing a bunch of other characters, evoking the seaside, and an earthquake, and underground caves just by describing them with voice and gesture. They sing songs that are music-hall with a twist. They are unfailingly charming and witty and loveable. Here is a gem of a show, tucked into a basement at the Free Festival, with small audiences and no ‘attention’ from the media, and yet the performers give it their all and entertain us to the marrow of our bones. That’s commitment for you, right there.

How could my (randomly-generated) day get any better? It was raining at midnight so, after some bevvies with The Mutts, I took a taxi home, suddenly having that typical Edinburgh Fringe realisation that I hadn’t had any dinner. My cabby was an instantaneously likeable chap, and when I expressed a need for chips, he pulled up at an excellent chippy and turned off the meter whilst I fetched a bag of salty ones. What a gent! We shared about 8 minutes of Time in that cab and both chortled away about the life, the universe and everything. That was my last ‘friend’ of the day.
Chips stuffed, I sat in bed for a final skim through the Fringe reviews on my laptop. All those shows I will never see. All that print, and barely any of it about me. All that jostling for position and hunger for glory. Sod it, I had a blast yesterday.