EdFringe 2016

Mobile / Paper Birds Theatre Company

Mobile marks the second installment of Paper Birds Theatre Company’s trilogy on social identity. Performed in a disused caravan before an audience of nine, the play aims to explore the emotional ambivalence caused by social mobility. After a brief, somewhat awkward ‘name game’ on deck chairs outside, the guests are invited in, offered biscuits and other hospitalities while our host gives us an overview of her situation. Her story is a familiar one: after the abrupt termination of a long term relationship, she finds herself without a flat to live in or a safety net to catch her. She is forced to return home. Perhaps in attempt to salvage some sense of progress, she shuns her mother’s actual home in preference for the caravan instead.

As Cindy tells her story her tone is apologetic and polite; she avoids dwelling on the disappointments of the previous years, avoids judging her absent mother, avoids making any real value judgements at all. Yet the caravan itself seems a working class symbol that she is silently wrestling against (physically misplacing items, shifting clutter, moving seats). Having spent her twenties affluent and in love, you can sense that she perceives her surroundings differently now; senses a tackiness to it and is simultaneously burdened by the guilt of this knowledge. Here, the immersive format works well; as we politely engage with our host, there's a vague, unspoken discomfort; the cramped seating arrangement bringing home her sense of constriction.

Cindy’s tale is augmented with verbatim recordings of those who’ve ‘made it’, other working class heroes who found riches or prestige later in life. Yet, similar to our host, their stories progress falteringly; they stammer or equivocate as they describe their past, they alight from ideas as soon as they land upon them. It’s as if the subjects are caught between two grammars; the rules of one silently militating against the other.

Indeed, this is one of the most intriguing aspects of the play, discussions of class leaves the subjects tongue tied and awkward. It seems there isn’t a shared language or set of values by which to explore the idea of the working class. The speakers are forced to perceive themselves from a myriad of perspectives, from within and without. At times, they see social hardship as part of their personal narrative, an origin story by which they define themselves; at other moments they perceive it as a past that they have overcome, something to be defined against.

We see these sort of mixed messages echoed on a larger scale by society and within the media. The very existence of a working class in the UK is apparently subject for debate, with politicians proudly declaring its extinction even while growing numbers of the population identify with the status. On a more qualitative level, perceptions of the working class seem to vacillate wildly from objects of derision (as indicated the the slew of ‘poverty-porn’ programmes rolled out each season) to exotic beings that enamour (look no further than the surging popularity of grime music among the middle classes). These kind of mystifications seem increasingly dangerous, particularly in a society as polarised as ours. As the recent referendum illustrates, there appears to be a mutual bafflement across classes and across the country itself.

Mobile plainly conveys the dislocation and ambivalence that can accompany social advancement. Instigated by a social scientist and the product of many year’s research, the play maintains a broad focus; through a series of foggy, personal anecdotes, the show highlights the bewildering process of talking about and understanding class; a concept which is so emotionally loaded and conceptually slippery. Yet beyond the realm of the play, this conceptual ambiguity translates into real-world, physical consequences. For the first time in recent history, the ‘health gap’ between the rich and poor is widening and there now exists greater discrepancy than ever before (since the early 90’s, the gap has increased by 1.7 years). The explanation for this — that the poor are making ‘damaging lifestyle choices’ — remains deeply provisional. The very impulses driving these choices on a systemic level remain shrouded. Without a shared vocabulary, we arrive at an impasse. As conversations about class become increasingly elliptical, the links between class and physical health reify, transform into an inscrutable fact. If the experience of class becomes ineffable, health becomes a privilege, awarded to some, on a basis that is deemed either arbitrary or mysterious. (SG)

http://www.thepaperbirds.com/

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/labour-says-the-working-class-no-longer-exists-so-why-do-60-per-cent-of-us-claim-to-belong-to-it-8452739.html

http://www.consented.co.uk/read/life-on-the-dole-britains-obsession-with-poverty-porn/

http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21701257-results-paint-picture-angry-country-divided-class-age-and-region-country-divided

http://www.bbc.com/news/education-36170289

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/a-25-year-gap-between-the-life-expectancy-of-rich-and-poor-londoners-is-a-further-indictment-of-our-9061888.htm

AN ACCOUNT OF A SAVAGE / Wrong Shoes Theatre Company

The Oxford Dictionary defines the noun 'savage' as 1. a member of a people regarded as primitive and uncivilised, or 2. a brutal or vicious person. In An Account of a Savage, we meet both.

Joan was found on the edge of a forest sixty miles from the capital. It's thought bad weather and a subsequent lack of food flushed her out. We're introduced to her after her capture, and it's clear from the outset that life out of the woods isn't treating her well. Joan has become an object of popular fascination, and the subject of scientific experiments. 

Set during an unknown period in the not-all-that-distant past, An Account of a Savage presents a damming portrait of the medical profession, and by extension anyone in a position of power. By the final scene, the stage is smeared with Joan's vomit and blood, she's trussed up and only semi-conscious, and her endless roars and screams are still ringing in the audience's ears.  

From Romulus and Remus – the brothers raised by a she-wolf, who went on to found the city of Rome – to Mowgli and Tarzan, the feral child is the stuff that stories are made of. Likewise the savage, noble or otherwise. Caliban was raised by a witch rather than a wolf, but his fate demonstrates how one human can enslave and degrade another in the dubious name of civilisation. 

Feral children stories continue to fascinate. In 2002, the Telegraph ran an article with the headline: 'Wolf boy is welcomed home by mother after years in the wild', while more recently, in 2015, the BBC published a story featuring the photography of Julia Fullerton-Batten called 'Feral: The children raised by wolves'. The article was as much about child abuse and neglect as it was about humans living with animals. 

If you had any romantic notions about feral children, An Account of a Savage comprehensively dashes them. It shows the violence we are capable of inflicting on the vulnerable, on people we consider different from ourselves. The savage here is not the child, but those who have been trusted with her care. (HB)

An Account of a Savage played at C-nova at 16:45 until 13 August: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/account-of-a-savage 

Definition of 'savage': http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/savage 

'Feral: The children raised by wolves': http://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/story/20151012-feral-the-children-raised-by-wolves

'Wolf boy is welcomed home by mother after years in the wild':http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/romania/1390871/Wolf-boy-is-welcomed-home-by-mother-after-years-in-the-wild.html

'6 cases of children being raised by animals': http://theweek.com/articles/471164/6-cases-children-being-raised-by-animals

'Feral Children: Lore of the Wild Child': http://www.livescience.com/41590-feral-children.html 

'FERAL CHILDREN': https://www.damninteresting.com/feral-children/

GREY MATTER // Spasm

Neurocriminologist Adrian Raine is a controversial figure in British science. He researches the biological basis of crime and asks questions that others shy away from. If you could use a brain scan to predict someone would become a psychopathic murderer, for example, shouldn’t you do that?

Raine’s thesis is the inspiration for Grey Matter, a play set a few years hence in a secure neurotreatment centre. This facility is where young men will find themselves if they fail their 18+ test – an assessment of their likelihood to commit murder, which is now compulsory since a mass school shooting. Scanned, probed and treated, they can get out if their test scores improve – but the prospects are grim in the desolate, violent environment, and meanwhile, their real lives outside move on without them. 

The parallel drawn by the show’s creators to today’s young offender institutions could hardly be clearer. 5000 young people are currently detained, often with little hope of rehabilitation and sometimes at the risk of extreme violence, as a Panorama programme earlier this year showed.

Yet, if there is a way to predict crime, do we have a moral duty to do so? The film Minority Report explored such questions, using the psychically-gifted precogs to enable authorities to catch perpetrators before crimes had been committed.

Raine’s precogs are the brain scans of offenders, on which he indicates enlarged or damaged areas he says could have predicted their behaviour. However, as many opponents point out, in modern social neuroscience, brain scans are notorious for their pretty colours and poor statistical significance.

Not even Raine’s discovery that his own brain had structures similar to his psychopathic test subjects made him abandon his perspective. His own wayward behaviours seemed to fizzle out in the environment of a new school at age 11.

But others may not be as lucky. Grey Matter shows us the possible risks we face if a government technocrat decides to adopt Raine’s theories to tackle crime instead of grappling with the much knottier societal problems that are its more likely roots.

- RM

Grey Matter ran at C Venues until August 29th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/grey-matter 

Adrian Raine’s work reviewed: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/may/12/how-to-spot-a-murderers-brain

Treatment of young offenders: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/13/young-offenders-institution-restraint-injuries

Panorama programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06ymzly

The problem with trying to use brain scans statistically: http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/abs/nrn3475.html

BRAIN MATTER(S) // Fen'Harel Theatre

Are you right-brained or left-brained? The two performers in the physical theatre production Brain Matter(s) take on the roles of one person’s interconnected brain as they struggle together to negotiate the challenges of life.

The idea that our brains' hemispheres take separate responsibility for emotion and rationality, confidence and doubt, anger and self-control, is one that brain-training gadgets and airport self-help books would love us to buy into. Brain Matter(s) deftly plays on these notions in the actors’ entertaining dialogue and choreography. The two halves are sometimes fitted snugly together as one, but at other times tumble, balance and fight, like an angel and devil warring for control of the one body.

There is some scientific basis to the belief that the two halves of the brain have different specialist functions. It first gained traction in the 19th century when French neurologists Marc Dax and Paul Broca realised that patients who had lost the ability to speak had all sustained damage to the left-hand side of their brain.

Broca’s area is still the name for the functional region in the brain’s left frontal lobe relating to speech production – although it’s sometimes found in the right frontal lobe of left-handed people, just to confuse anyone hoping for a clear-cut two-sided arrangement.

But this finding hints at the truly interesting aspect of brain hemispheres, and the focus of current neuroscience. Do the two halves process information differently? And how do they work together to produce all the complexities of human ability and behaviour? 

The staging of Brain Matters allows plenty of contemporary thinking about such issues. The female performer takes the more rational, ambitious persona, while the male performer is emotional and impulsive.

Another modern notion in neuroscience is that the specialism in our hemispheres gives us more ability to multitask. This production draws on all the performers’ skills to bring us new thinking on the old left-brain right-brain divide.

- RM

Brain Matter(s) ran at Venue 13 until August 27th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/brain-matter-s 

The myth of left and right brains: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-myths/201206/why-the-left-brain-right-brain-myth-will-probably-never-die

Marc Dax and Paul Broca and the discovery of the speech area of the brain: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17056493

Broca’s specialist language area explained: http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_10/d_10_cr/d_10_cr_lan/d_10_cr_lan.html

The advantages of having lateral speciality in your brain - multitasking: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1810119/

LAST DREAM (ON EARTH) / Kai Fischer

Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, made his pioneering solo flight on 12 April 1961. Last Dream (On Earth) uses words, imagery and live music to recreate his experiences of countdown, takeoff, weightlessness, and fiery but safe return. 

It’s a spectacular soundscape, and each audience member hears it immersively and intimately through their own individual headphones. But in painful contrast with Gagarin’s triumphant tale, a second story is also told– the desperate journey of refugees trying to reach Spain across the sea from Morocco in a child’s dinghy.

The two stories of peril, bravery, persistence and adversity intermingle and interlink creatively, and we have to ask: could I do this? What would it take to make me risk everything? And how are people changed by such experiences?

Even before their sea journey starts, the refugees in this story have already travelled thousands of miles, been subjected to indignities and uncertainties, and had to bargain, plead and pay.

Little wonder that in Britain, studies show higher rates of depression and anxiety among refugees compared to the national population, with those at highest risk being children, and women who have experienced abuse on their journey.

Figures show that of all people who migrate, asylum-seekers are the most likely to have multiple traumas. Experts have called for more support for those in the asylum system, but the intense politicisation of the issue continues to dog decision-making.

Astronauts, by contrast with refugees, are pampered travellers, rigorously trained for their journeys into such a risky environment. But the psychological impact of living in space is a very topical issue. While Yuri Gagarin spent just 108 minutes on the first spaceflight, a journey to Mars at current speeds would take nine months, one way.

A critical factor in maintaining mental health en route will be discovering how to improve astronauts’ sleep, while light and dark cycles disrupt their natural circadian rhythms.

And could there be genetic impacts on the human body from spaceflight? NASA hopes to answer that question through studying Scott Kelly, a veteran of a year-long space mission, and his identical twin brother, Mark. (RM)

Last Dream (On Earth) ran at Assembly Hall until August 28th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/last-dream-on-earth 

First Orbit, a film featuring audio and imagery of Yuri Gagarin and his mission: http://www.firstorbit.org/watch-the-film

Refugee and asylum seeker health issues: http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/health-of-migrants-in-the-uk-what-do-we-know/

Psychological wellbeing of refugees and asylum seekers: http://isp.sagepub.com/content/57/2/107.abstract

Refugee council facts on asylum: http://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/policy_research/the_truth_about_asylum/facts_about_asylum_-_page_5

Medical monitoring on the International Space Station: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/1025.html

Articles about Scott Kelly and his year-long space mission: http://www.nasa.gov/1ym/articles

MADE IN BRITAIN // Tez Ilyas

'Remember how no one got blown up at London 2012? I did that!' Comedian Tez Ilyas is referring to his Civil Service role on the Olympic security team. But he likes to leave no unmentionable unmentioned during his show Made in Britain.

Today Ilyas has left office life to pursue a career in comedy. His set explores what it means to be a British Muslim - in a post-Brexit period when anyone considered an outsider finds themselves living under an unprecedentedly critical spotlight.

Such hostility leads to long-term impacts on health and welfare. UK figures show that people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent experience much higher levels of some diseases, with scientists identifying experiences of racism and discrimination as crucial issues.

Nonetheless, recent opinion has shifted blame for community woes to minorities themselves. Ilyas gives short shrift to the former head of the Racial Equality Commission, Trevor Phillips, whose warning that Muslims were 'failing to integrate' played easily into the hands of a scaremongering press.

Ironically, it was the tragic Paris attacks that provided Ilyas with his first media break, a spot on BBC Radio 4's The Now Show that propelled him towards his current recognition. Now, he seems determined to use the limelight to highlight big issues that resonate individually with those who share a similar upbringing - but make everyone laugh.

Large families, parental pressures and arranged marriages are all personal experiences he chooses to talk about in this show – but llyas does not assume he is a spokesperson for the Asian community - indeed, he says there isn’t just one British Asian community. But his voice is significant in a country where research shows that direct and indirect racism damage children’s development, in ways that shape their entire lives. (RM)

Made In Britain ran at Pleasance Courtyard until August 28th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/tez-ilyas-made-in-britain 

Hate crime following the referendum: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-eu-referendum-racial-racism-abuse-hate-crime-reported-latest-leave-immigration-a7104191.html

Research by Yvonne Kelly, Professor of Lifecourse Epidemiology at UCL, into the impact of racial discrimination on child health: http://childofourtimeblog.org.uk/tag/racism/

PDF on UCL research into ethnicity and health: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/icls/publications/bn/ethnicity

Coverage of Trevor Phillips’ remarks about the Muslim community failing to integrate: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/10/uk-muslim-ghettoes-warning/

Has multiculturalism failed in the UK? Not really: article by Professor Anthony Heath: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/10/multiculturalism-uk-research

DREAMCATCHER // Dreamcatcher

From Shakespeare to Emily Bronte and beyond, many authors have given dreams the power to direct, challenge and reveal. In Dreamcatcher, young Indian playwright Kashyap Raja explores whether dreams may hold the key to unlocking your subconscious mind and your destiny.

The significance of sleep is a hot topic in modern science. Researchers have recently uncovered evidence that our brain has a plumbing network called the glymphatic system, which they believe may be responsible for clearing out dementia-causing toxins while we doze.

But dream analysis is still on the borderline with pseudoscience. Sigmund Freud’s idea that we act out our desires in dreams is undermined by a study showing that paralysed people dreamt about walking less than average, even though they all expressed a desire to regain that ability.

Carl Jung also taught that dreams are highly significant, containing truths and visions that emerge from different levels of our unconscious mind. This is the scenario that Dreamcatcher explores, with a machine that can look inside living people’s dreams, where, it’s revealed, you can always find your heart’s desire.

So does science support the notion that dreams can reveal the workings of the subconscious mind? Unfortunately neurobiological theory suggests that dreams emerge as we try to make sense of sporadic firings of nerves in our brain stem, which randomly activate memories. 

But scientists continue to explore what’s going on in the brain’s unconscious. The latest experiments show we can do complicated maths, as well as making rapid-fire judgements that guide our behaviour, without even knowing we are doing it. Is this how our destiny asserts itself?

The more that experts probe how our brains work, the more we realise how much processing is going on in our unconscious without our awareness. Currently, though, the suggestion that dreams carry great significance seems like wishful thinking. (RM)

Dreamcatcher ran at theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall until August 27th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/dreamcatcher 

The discovery of the brain’s glymphatic system: https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/3584/scientists-discover-previously-unknown-cleansing-system-in-brain.aspx

Significance of sleep to brain cleansing: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may-flush-out-toxins-during-sleep

Neurobiological reasons for dreams: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2010/04/07/why-do-we-dream/#.V9m5A_krKUk

The power of our unconscious mind: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160315-the-enormous-power-of-the-unconscious-brain

HOUSE AND AMONGST THE REEDS / Clean Break

HOUSE AND AMONGST THE REEDS / Clean Break

House is a play about a reunion in a British Nigerian family. Two sisters and their mother gather to mark a birthday – but it quickly becomes apparent that problems from the past, including mental health issues, mean any celebrations are premature. 

SHIMMER SHATTER // Sofie Hagen

Sofie Hagen’s show, Shimmer Shatter, busts a few myths about introversion. It clearly indicates that being an introvert does not mean you are cold and closed-off. It doesn’t mean you won’t stand up and be very funny in front of an audience. And it doesn’t mean you are unable to tell people about the strangest and most personal aspects of your life, like the time you married a plank of wood and invited your school friends around as witnesses.   

What is true, though, is that inside an introvert’s brain particular things are happening. The neurotransmitter dopamine is to blame. It makes us all, whatever our personality, more talkative, alert and motivated to take a risk.  

But while extroverts love the thrill of chasing the release of more and more dopamine, for an introvert the joy of dopamine more quickly turns to overstimulation. In fact, as Dr Marti Olsen Laney has recently written, introverts favour the reward of a different neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. Very differently to dopamine, this chemical leads us to turn inwards, to reflect and focus, preferably somewhere calm.  

As an introvert, Sofie Hagen reveals that she favours spending periods of time at parties hidden away in the toilets. She says walls are good because they are a place where a person is not.  

Yet she is still a great people person, and the combination of comedy and honesty in her show has clearly struck a real chord with the audience.

At the moment it feels like introversion is getting all the attention it may never have wanted. Books like Quiet by Susan Cain, and her TED talk, present the introvert/extrovert divide as the most fundamental dimension of personality, with at least a third of people on the introverted side. 

Maybe the time of the introvert has come. With the help of high profile people like Sofie Hagen, perhaps introverts will get their time to speak – if the extroverts of the world can just stop talking for a moment. 

- Rebecca Mileham

Shimmer Shatter ran at Liquid Room Annexe until August 28th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/sofie-hagen-shimmer-shatter

Why extroverts and introverts are different: http://www.quietrev.com/why-introverts-and-extroverts-are-different-the-science/

BBC article on what makes someone an extrovert: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130717-what-makes-someone-an-extrovert

Dr Marti Olsen Laney’s book: https://www.amazon.com/The-Introvert-Advantage-People-Extrovert/dp/0761123695/?tag=quietrevol-20

Susan Cain’s TED talk The Power of Introverts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0KYU2j0TM4

EDINBURGH IN THE SHADOWS // Beattie & Scratchmann

‘Fear is a wonderful thing, in small doses. You ride the ghost train into the darkness, knowing that eventually the doors will open and you will step out into the daylight once again.’ This is author Neil Gaiman’s explanation of why we love a scary story, and it well described the experience of joining Alex Beattie and Max Scratchmann for their bloodcurdling show Edinburgh in the Shadows. 

The evening began with tales about the 16th-century Scottish obsession with witchcraft, which led to 4000 executions. James the Sixth was fanatical about catching witches, who he said went around gnawing dead children’s bones.

According to psychologists, terrible tales such as these give an audience the buzz of an intense shared emotional experience. In addition, the emotions of fear and pleasure create indistinguishable physical responses in terms of heart rate, breathing and pupil dilation. 

Another story from the shadows dealt with the grim life and times of Jessie King, baby farmer. In 1889 she appeared before the High Court in Edinburgh accused of the murders of children she had been paid to care for. Convicted and hanged, there was no such fate for her controlling husband.

I was reminded of the enormous appeal of the Horrible Histories series of children’s books, despite their branding as ‘glorifying and trivialising violence’ by some parents. Psychoanalysts believe we undergo the experience of a terrifying tale as a kind of safe catharsis of the horror of real life and its pressures.

But for their final trick, Beattie and Scratchmann had a different type of story – a cold-case murder. This was about George Meikle Kemp, a self-taught architect who gained the commission to design the Scott Monument, but then mysteriously drowned in the Union Canal.

Psychologist Les Lancaster believes the appeal of a mystery is intrinsic to the human mind, and part of our evolutionary heritage. He calls mysteries the ‘ultimate trail of breadcrumbs,’ inviting us to seek answers. This audience certainly enjoyed coming along for the ride. (RM)

Edinburgh in the Shadows ran until August 27th at Cowgatehead

Mark Griffiths on scary films: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-excess/201510/why-do-we-watching-scary-films

The enduring appeal of horror: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/halloween-horror-films-movies-scared-a6713446.html

Mysteries solved by Les Lancaster, professor of transpersonal psychology at Liverpool John Moores University: https://www.psychologies.co.uk/self/why-mystery-matters.html

HOW IS UNCLE JOHN? // Creative Garage

Abuse often comes shrouded in code. It comes in signs. Physical marks and distress, eyes that won’t meet yours, garbled speech, a sort of radical shrinking. There’s the less obvious, mental iterations. Rapid and sudden introversion, anxiety, depression: another sort of radical diminishing.

How is Uncle John? is the show that deals with these codes. It’s a duologue dealing with sex as power and economic capital. It’s a show dealing with sex trafficking. Even more particularly it’s a show dealing with a mother and daughter attempting to discuss- allusively, brokenly- the shattering effects of its aftermath and trying to piece together something approaching a new start.

“Uncle John” is a code and a sign. It’s a safe-phrase, used so Hope (the daughter) can alert her mother to danger. Even with all of its generic masculinity, it is an incantation that can’t banish away male violence. Anxiety permeates the whole tone and mood. There’s a mother's evident and obvious anxiety. There’s the anxiety of the vulnerable, exploited Hope. And there’s the pressing anxiety that no simple safe code can expel a world of violence meted out to the vulnerable. It’s a dramatic microcosm of the ‘real’ world, one in which the use of sex, force and power rule, and the shattered lives of the weak stand as testimony. (FG)

How Is Uncle John? played at Assembly Hall - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/how-is-uncle-john

Modern Slavery in the UK- http://www.unseenuk.org/

Understanding the Language of Narcissistic Abuse- http://www.elephantjournal.com/2015/10/understanding-the-language-of-narcissistic-abuse/

Threatened Child (Extract)- https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8VIg9STL-wUC&oi=fnd&pg=PP11&dq=the+rhetoric+of+abuse&ots=KFwjjP6uwF&sig=k76qR5vNR9QzvZj6KEb6j90ytcc#v=onepage&q=the%20rhetoric%20of%20abuse&f=false 

Trafficking Survivor Stories- http://www.equalitynow.org/campaigns/trafficking-survivor-stories

F*CKING MEN // King's Head Theatre

Ten interlocking scenes present separate sets of lovers, each semi-ironically riffing on different ‘aspects’ of love. The platonic ideal. ‘Simple’ carnal lust. Tortured archetypes (‘Actor’ and ‘Journalist’) playing out and struggling with their desires, counter-desires and the simple physical fact of their bodies. 

F*cking Men is a reflection on what it means to live out what could queasily be termed the ‘gay male experience’ surrounding sexuality and perception, commitment and relationships. The title is something of a red herring. Whatever nudity there is remains secondary to the ideas surrounding the aforementioned themes. The bodies are used as props, showing the way that the relationships depicted subtly morph and modulate under external and internal pressures and strains.

The way that sex and body can be subtly weaponised is also deftly explored. It’s a messy, fraught exploration that deals with the ugly, implicit guilt and repression in denied sexuality.  The one scene without any sex (the meeting between ‘Journalist’ and ‘Actor’) is a meeting point between paranoia, fear and self-loathing, all focused on the body and messy sexual desire. Yet resolution isn’t found in the act of sex, either. As each scene shows, it is the sheer multiplicity of desire that makes it such a complex field of enquiry. Whether it is denied or temporarily fulfilled seems to make no difference. Resolution is as far away as ever.

- Francisco Garcia

F*cking Men played at Assembly George Square Studios - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/f-cking-men

Being Gay: Politics, Identity and Pleasure- http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/newformations/09_61.pdf

Homophobic? Maybe you’re gay?- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/homophobic-maybe-youre-gay.html

Evolution of Gay Theatre- http://www.juilliard.edu/journal/evolution-contemporary-gay-theater

Fringe: Queer Art & Film Festival- http://www.fringefilmfest.com/

DROPPED // Gobsmacked Theatre Company

It’s an irony as old as time. Women may be seen as fit subjects for every conceivable violence, but they are not suitable for fight in war. From recent conflicts in Iraq, Afganistan and elsewhere, women's roles in the armed forces seem to extend little past the 2D. Physical, mental, societal violence is fit and fair game. But for a woman to fight in times of conflict has, until very recently, been seen as a frightening or morally disgusting transgression.  

Dropped may deal with a fictional Middle Eastern conflict with Australian personnel (the show originally ran at the Adelaide Fringe earlier in 2016 and was awarded the prize for Best Local Theatre Production), but it’s topical concern to British audiences is amplified by July’s lifting of the ban on women serving in close combat roles in the British Army. The performance poses the question to the audience: what effect does the violence of war have on women?

The answer, if there is one reducible answer, is that there is a difference, if only because of the warped saint-like expectations visited on women: those of holy mother, or kindly protector. They may experience the same traumas, deprivations and horrors as the male soldier in times of war, but the concern visited from outside isn’t to do with them as soldiers, but as mothers or uprooted occupiers of the domestic space.

We are led as an audience to believe that Sarah Cullinan and Natalia Sledz’ characters have witnessed the harm of a child, though it remains shrouded in mystery whether this a just an effect of PTSD related trauma. The effects of David McVicar’s direction leaves it purposefully ambiguous and offers no ready made, trite conclusions as to the effects of violence.

- FG

Dropped played at the Pleasance Courtyard - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/dropped

British Army’s Women Soldiers to Go Into Combat- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/12060225/British-Armys-women-soldiers-to-go-into-combat.html

On Motherhood and Violence- http://makhzin.org/issues/feminisms/on-motherhood-and-violence

Women, Trauma and PTSD- http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treatment/women/women-trauma-ptsd.asp

Gender based violence and the global hypocricy that fuels it- http://www.humanosphere.org/opinion/2016/06/gender-based-violence-misogyny-and-a-global-hypocrisy-that-fuels-it/

Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War- http://www.unicef.org/sowc96pk/sexviol.htm

SPILL: A VERBATIM SHOW ABOUT SEX / Propolis Theatre

SPILL: A VERBATIM SHOW ABOUT SEX / Propolis Theatre

Verbatim theatre may have its limitations, but as a way of meshing together oral histories and competing testimonies it has an effectiveness that ‘conventional’ theatre and performance can be more leaden in conveying. 

50% LIABILITY // The Emslie Effect

Stripped down to its bloodless essentials, life is- give or take- a series of disjointed happenings, comings together and comings unstuck. There are birth pangs, there are death pangs. Big deal. John Emslie’s 50% Liability is a play that has something to say about all these things, plus one of those other elemental, everyday components: luck. Particularly, exclusively, bad luck.

In all honesty, it’s a show that deals exclusively with accumulated bad luck. How it stacks up, adds together and hardens into all that you’ve got. The genetic bad luck of being born, in a ‘scrawny’ (and Emslie makes this go a long, long way) frame ripe for the horrors of adolescence and high school, ripe for the bitter comic irony of becoming a male stripper in 80s Aberdeen (‘quite a conservative place’) having to carve out a niche hovering on the borderline of mutual humiliation for both stripper and client. Of all the petty, excruciating layers of incomprehension between the generations.

There’s not much in the way of linear narrative. But, for Esmlie, that’s sort of the point. He presents his life as a series of fluid, semi-connected catastrophes, each one more seemingly inevitable than the last. A broken neck in a slapstick occurrence at work, a near-death dream trip to Alaska, the use of his claims money to finance the show itself. In a sense, it’s a play that deals with how misery breeds misery and accumulates, as if by stealth. It’s a play that deals, blithely, with causality, with self-pity. With how it can take a whole lifetime to scramble clear of unpropitious beginnings. How that might be an impossibility in the end.

And finally, it deals with a kind of gallows hope. That even now, after a more than a lifetime's worth of ‘bad luck’, there’s the creeping anxious hope that ‘things can only get better’.

- FG

50% Liability played at C Venues - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/50-liability-1

Exotic Dancers: Gender Differences In Societal Reaction, Subcultural Ties, and Conventional Support- http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol10is1/bernard.html

Naked Ambition: The Truth About Male Strippers- http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/sex-industry/naked-ambition-the-truth-about-male-strippers-7820919.html

Chance: A Key Role in Life- https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/ChanceCanPlayKeyRole.pdf

BIT OF SUNSHINE / Bloody Deeds Productions in Association with Kilter Theatre

BIT OF SUNSHINE / Bloody Deeds Productions in Association with Kilter Theatre

How do you write anxiety? How do you act it? Two questions that present wildly unsatisfactory answers. There are the obvious ways, the tics, the coiled up physical tensions, the wild, unkempt hair, the wildly roving eyes. There’s the breathy, machine guy delivery of dialogue, or the visible signs of ‘nervous breakdown’. 

EVERY DAY I WAKE UP HOPEFUL // Christian Talbot

It’s one the enduring footballing cliches, parked somewhere alongside “a game of two halves” and the absurdist non-sequitur “sick as a parrot”: “it’s the hope that kills you”. Like all good cliches it invites you to consider an alternative, a refashioning, a making new. John Patrick Higgins’ Every Day I Wake Up Hopeful is an attempt at just such a refashioning. 

Its cousin cliche is the idea of “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”. The falling at the final hurdle when success seems assured. It’s the sense that no matter how propitious the current, no matter how favourable the circumstances, failure is as inevitable as night bleeding into day. Why bother at all? What if the goal that’s agonisingly fallen short of, night after night, is one that can’t be reversed? What if the ultimate, unrealisable victory is in self-annihilation?

For Higgins, and for Malachy (played with hangdog sensitivity by Christian Talbot) hope is the impediment. The current running throughout Malachy’s undistinguished life and his equally undistinguished prospective death (a blunt razor blade belonging to his dead father, a last meal of KFC and a litre of mid-range supermarket white wine) is a Beckettian belief that the only thing better than dying is never having been born at all. Yet it’s not clear that Malachy fully believes his own rhetoric. He stays alive, after all.  

There’s a bit of Larkin, too. For Malachy, as for Larkin, “life is first boredom, then fear”. In this instance, it’s a fear born out of being haunted at the noteless suicide of his much younger partner Skye (“a fucking stupid name, but she was Australian”). It’s a fear that his comfortable, undistinguished life isn’t a subversive comment on the fruitless vanity of others, but just a sad, flabby waste. It’s a suspicion fuelled by self-pity and acute self-knowledge. That’s what makes the play such an effective comment on suicide, its acknowledgement that humans are seldom rational actors, particularly in the matter of life and death decisions. In the end, as Malachy observes, “it’s the fucking hope that gets you”.

- FG

Every Day I Wake Up Hopeful played at Sweet Grassmarket - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/every-day-i-wake-up-hopeful

From Beckett to Stoppard: Existentialism, Death, and Absurdity- http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/beckstop.html

The Silent Epidemic of Male Suicide- http://www.bcmj.org/articles/silent-epidemic-male-suicide

Existential Stress, Anxiety and Meaning Making in Your Life- http://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/anxiety-schmanxiety/2015/04/existential-anxiety-stress-and-meaning-making-in-your-life/

Have Men Been Let Down Over Mental Health?- https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2016/may/18/men-suicide-mental-health

The Mind in Solitude: An Interview With Claire Louise-Bennet- http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/tag/samuel-beckett/

A DREAM OF DYING // Fake Escape Theatre

Life is just a matter of appropriate planning. A good life is a well ordered life. The fullest life is the most neatly divided life. Birth, school (“with outstanding grades”), a lucrative job, a beautiful wife, a spacious suburban house, grinning suburban children, early retirement, grinning suburban grandchildren, a cheerful death and a well peopled funeral. It’s so simple, so simply broken down.

All that’s known of the ‘real’ Peter Bergmann is that he spent the last few days of his life in 2009 in the Irish city, Sligo. Every possible step had been taken to eradicate any clues relating to his identity. No tags on his clothes. No identification. No personal effects. No traces of a life. Even the name was an alias. It endures to this day, a mystery unresolved and apparently unresolvable.

Treasa Nealon’s script seeks to provide something approaching context to this strange, poignant tale. Lawrence Boothman’s performance as Bergman is pitched at a hypersensitive frequency, at turns vaudevillian, needy, broadly comic, shatteringly fragile and wildly allusive (there are strains of Yeats and Beckett throughout). 

As an audience we are treated to a spectacle at once manic and potentially hallucinatory. Boothman’s performance and multi-angled characterisation leaves it unclear whether the memories of family life and friendship are real or the projected fragments of an unhealthy mind. It plays with our ideas about self-determination and agency. The illusion of life being a simply ordered thing is supplanted by the realisation that the only real control we have is over our deaths. It’s not just a dramatic concern, but one that we deal with directly (and indirectly) in our society. It’s the question of the ‘right’ to die, and the question what significance an unexamined, ‘unmourned’ death has in comparison to conventional notions of dying as an event.

- FG

A Dream of Dying played at theSpace @ Surgeon's Hall - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/dream-of-dying

Loneliness Swallowed Me Up- https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/may/28/emily-white-loneliness

Life-hating Loneliness- https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/suffer-the-children/201303/life-halting-loneliness

Sense and Nonsense: an essay dealing with the ethics of schizophrenia research- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920996498001285

 A short essay on the mystery of mental illness- http://noelbell.net/resources/world-mental-health-day-resources/the-mystery-of-mental-illness/

Self-Determination: A Buffer Against Suicide Ideation- http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2012-Bureau_SaLTB.pdf

THREE JUMPERS // Unearthed Theatre

A council worker watches on as a young man takes a running jump to throw himself off a bridge. He pulls back at the last moment. The young man, elegantly dressed, starts to converse with the dry witted street sweeper and the tone shifts. Things are revealed to be more complicated, as things often are.

Soon we are joined by two others and a queue forms at the bridge. A queue of suicides. They start to squabble and confer and details start to drip down to form a patchwork of connections. Unemployment, childlessness, the absence or death of love. The mutual connection through one female character.

Three Jumpers treats suicide as something more than just a one-off kind of ultimate madness, or a sudden burst towards self-annihilation. It shows the sometimes farcical, even grimly humorous faces of self-loathing and depression. It’s all in the conversation- after all, isn’t the absence of dialogue, the feeling that internal suffering is something to be born stoically and alone, that one of the biggest factors in suicide being the biggest killer of young men. It’s not that the conversations are flawless. They are often stilted and spiteful, yet strangely fluent in the way that desperate peoples conversations often are.

The play unfurls like a morality play without a moralising streak. Through its humor and subtlety it shows suicidal tendencies not as aberrations, but part of the complexity that constitutes being human.

- FG

Three Jumpers played at Greenside @ Infirmary Street - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/three-jumpers

Self-Determination: A Buffer Against Suicide Ideation- http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2012-Bureau_SaLTB.pdf

From Beckett to Stoppard: Existentialism, Death, and Absurdity- http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/beckstop.html

An Essay on Influence in Waiting for Godot- http://www.samuel-beckett.net/Penelope/influences_resonances.html

Campaign Against Living Miserably- https://www.thecalmzone.net/