Spank's Edinburgh Diary, Friday 23/08/2024

Reviewed today: Colin Steele & Martin Kershaw Play Chet Baker & Stan Getz, Guy Montgomery’s Guy-Mont Spelling Bee, James Whale: Beyond Frankenstein, Making Marx, My English Persian Kitchen.

Day six of eight, and have you noticed what’s missing yet? We’ve done films, music, comedy, book readings, even a bit of cookery. But what about theatre? We’ve not seen anything yet that could be classed as theatrical, not even stand-up with pretensions. Well, today that all changes, as we're starting the day with three plays back to back. Sure, they're all one-person plays, but those are the economics the Fringe is working with this year.

There are certain key names that come up over and over again when you think about Edinburgh Fringe theatre, and Guy Masterson's is one of them. I would have said in the past that he was only Fringe famous, but The Shark Is Broken is still touring the UK some five years after opening here, so maybe he's a bit bigger than that now. This year he's in Edinburgh as the director of Making Marx, a one-woman show written and performed by Clara Francesca. Masterson has always been drawn to historical true stories, so fans of his work may well be drawn in by its subject matter - the life of Jenny Marx, the wife of Karl, and how she's been forgotten by history.

I suspect quite a few people came into this expecting a straight retelling of Jenny's life, as I kept hearing their seats snapping back up as they started walking out around the ten minute mark. Because Francesca's partly looking at how much we can really know about historical figures. Her Jenny Marx is constantly arguing with the offstage author of the piece - how should she perform, what should she be thinking, is it even worth performing this piece in the first place? There's no denying Francesca gives her all in a ferociously physical performance, but the writing really isn't up to scratch, frequently falling back on cliched drama school histrionics. I'm slightly ashamed to admit one of my favourite moments in the hour is when Francesca approaches a member of the audience and asks "could you please hold this imaginary cup of water for me?" [long pause] [turns to next member of the audience] "Well, how about you?" It's a mess, but an interesting mess, and at the very least I was never bored. But you want a bit more from theatre than that.

We get that later on at the Traverse Theatre, which remains the home of the best new theatre writing at the Fringe. My English Persian Kitchen is the story of an Iranian woman who flees from her abusive husband and attempts to start a new life in London. The twist is, she's telling us her story while cooking a traditional Iranian meal on stage - as I've always said, nobody ever went broke on the Fringe doing shows where food is on offer. And that food is given away to the audience at the end of the show, making it the only thing on the Fringe this year where the content warning reads "depiction of domestic violence, loud noises, dairy and gluten".

While queueing for our bowl of ash-e reshteh at the end, I heard a couple of punters behind me saying "her English is really very good, isn't it?" Which is partly a little cringeworthy, and partly a testament to the craft on display when people think we're hearing the actual first-person testimony of the woman on stage. The story is actually by Atoosa Sepehr, it's been written as a play by Hannah Khalil, and it's performed by Isabella Nefar. Nefar's performance is indeed extraordinary, as her story leaps without warning between different points in time, and she has to switch acting registers at a moment's notice. Those switches are aided by Dan Balfour's aggressively cinematic sound design, which has the whole of Traverse Two rattling with a constant bass rumble throughout the Iran sequences, keeping us as much on edge as the lead character. And the food's lovely, too. The Traverse has that high reputation for a reason.  

If we're having a theatre day, though, then we shouldn't just limit ourselves to the big names. So we head off to Zoo Southside, in what I think might be my first visit to the venue in about three decades, to see James Whale: Beyond Frankenstein. It may have the title format of an Edinburgh stand-up show, but it's actually a play written and performed by Tim Larkfield. It tells the story of James Whale, a lad from Dudley who went to Hollywood and achieved huge fame as the director of the original Frankenstein. The focus here is on what he did after that: he worked in a variety of genres, but became typecast as a horror director purely because he directed so many stone-cold classics. Unfortunately, he's creating transgressively scary stories just as Hollywood’s entering its puritan period with the introduction of the Hays Code, and it’s not the most sympathetic environment for a closeted gay man like him.

Larkfield is working with the bare minimum of trappings: he's got a jacket that comes on or off depending on the character he's playing, a director's chair and some bandages for the Invisible Man scene. Everything else is down to Larkfield on his own, telling the story as a series of one-sided conversations. Which makes it a shame that the audience tonight barely makes it into double figures, though it does mean that every person in the crowd has one scene performed directly at them. (The BBG is an extra in The Invisible Man, and I'm running a gay bar.) Film buffs will have a lovely time with this play, but it should have general appeal as well - it's a tragic story, ingeniously told. 

How about a clumsy segue at this point into some other stories about things being raised from the dead? Because there's been a fair bit of that in Edinburgh this year. I've already mentioned the Filmhouse, which was almost taken down by the collapse of the Film Festival two years ago, but is on track to re-open later this year thanks to a crowdfunding campaign. (We're delighted to see the posters on the front of the Filmhouse stating 'We are still funraising!') And it was a similar story with the Jazz Bar, which closed down for a while earlier in the year but was resuscitated just in time for the Fringe. So we feel we have to pay the place a visit in celebration of the reprieve.

We decide to see Colin Steele & Martin Kershaw, who are performing a double-headed tribute to Chet Baker and Stan Getz. Fun fact: Baker and Getz only played together three times, and apparently hated each other's guts. But those three times are sufficiently well documented that Steele (on trumpet) and Kershaw (on sax) can perform several of their duets, accompanied by piano, bass and drums. We also get some of the solo standards associated with Baker and Getz (My Funny Valentine and The Girl From Ipanema respectively). The publicity for this show has a quote from Stewart Lee that nails its appeal perfectly: "it made me hear that music as a living organism rather than a museum piece." Which, from a fan of squeakybonk free jazz like Lee, is praise indeed. The only way you could make this feel more authentic would be to pump the Jazz Bar full of cigarette smoke, except then they'd probably try to close it down again.

What's the best TV comedy show of the decade so far? That's easy: it's Guy Montgomery's Guy-Mont Spelling Bee. Montgomery - another one of our Antipodean Taskmaster people - started running Zoom spelling bees for his comedian mates during lockdown because he was feeling a bit depressed, and the results became so popular on YouTube that he's developed television versions of it for New Zealand and Australia. Could he sell it in other countries? Is it just a coincidence that he's presenting it on stage in the UK for the first time in the middle of the Edinburgh Television Festival? It wouldn't surprise me to learn that half the people in tonight's audience are executives from Dave on freebie tickets.

It's a straightforward format. A panel of comedians - here it's Tim Key, Emma Sidi, Nish Kumar and Rose Matafeo - take part in a series of rounds based around having to spell words of varying degrees of difficulty. This being late night Edinburgh, a few pints of beer have been thrown into the mix, with Kumar's performance suffering the worst from that. Also, putting Tim Key into an environment like this and expecting him not to cheat is just hopeless optimism. ("He's using a diphthong!" complains Sidi at one point.)

Fiendishly, Montgomery has baked his own name into the title to ensure that if the format is sold to other countries, he still has to be the host. Which is as it should be, because it's his unique blend of cheerfulness and sadism that lifts it way above a kids' game. Whether it's the homophone round where it's entirely the luck of the draw if you pick the right variant to spell, or the Golden Balls round where he literally splits the group into two teams along racial lines, it's hard to imagine anyone else who could drive this and make it work. Sort it out, Dave.