HELP // Bae

Some 25 years ago, at the peak of his band's chart fame with Sit Down, Tim Booth of the band James did an interview with one of the weekly music papers in which he mentioned having reached “the enlightened state of fuck it”. It's a glorious – and evidently memorable – phrase, whose echo resounds through Help: a set of sketches by new comedy duo Bae that promise the audience an aura shakedown and a double serving of kale-flavoured happiness.

There's much to satirise in the lifestyle and self-help industry, whether it's the advice to steam your vagina given on Gwyneth Paltrow's blog Goop or the Hemsley sisters' preoccupation with the consistency of stools. In creating their parade of seminar leaders, chat-show hosts and Ted-style talkers, however, Bae are as concerned to unmask these women's micro-aggressions, insecurities and failures as they are to expose their teachings as quasi-mystic mumbo-jumbo. From the Californian guru who consistently speaks over others to the vaguely Teutonic woman who recommends groping as a method of winning people's attention and admiration, not a single one among them is beguiling as a personality.

The problem with this approach is that it risks creating the impression of heteronormative white privilege laughing at anything other than itself, by presenting Buddhism as intrinsically funny and lesbianism a lifestyle choice, and equating being “a bit of a mess” with being a loser. It also avoids the question of why people, particularly women, might find or even seek a salve in alternative therapies, “clean” eating, yoga or mindfulness. The politics underlying the self-help industry are fraught, with capitalism and neoliberalism creating the conditions in which mental health problems flourish, before selling the “cure” to considerable financial gain. Is mindfulness a way of numbing the brain to acceptance of rather than anger against social problems, or a step aside from conventional western ideas about how to live? Complicated questions underlie this material: by inviting us to join with them in declaring “fuck it”, Bae avoid the more difficult discussions that might point the way to actual enlightenment. (MC)

Help is on at 11.45 at Just the Tonic @ The Mash House until August 27th (not 20th). See venue for accessibility information - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/help

Debunking vagina steaming: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/30/sorry-gwyneth-paltrow-but-steaming-your-vagina-is-a-bad-idea

Debunking “clean eating”: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/bake-offs-ruby-vs-the-hemsleys-the-bad-science-behind-clean-eati/

Debunking monetised happiness: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/12/happiness-capitalism

The pros and cons of mindfulness: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/23/should-we-be-mindful-of-mindfulness-nhs-depression

Mindfulness put to the test: http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/my_trouble_with_mindfulness

Stella Duffy on the benefits of mindfulness and yoga: https://stelladuffy.wordpress.com/2016/07/29/the-quiet-after-the-raging/

DON'T PANIC! IT'S CHALLENGE ANNEKA // on the button

A solo comedy show in which writer and performer Sophie Winter plays all the parts, including her boss, her mum, her best friend and 90s TV star Anneka Rice, Don't Panic! It's Challenge Anneka is all about anxiety. It uses humour and silliness to demystify and start conversations about a serious subject.

Sophie worries to a debilitating extent, making daily life incredibly difficult. The people around her don't understand the panic she regularly feels, advising that what she really needs to do is pull herself together and get on with it. Sophie even berates herself – she's a privileged young woman from Hampshire who has suffered no traumas of note. She has a job, a decent income and a roof over her head, what has she got to be so anxious about? Her guilt only makes her feel worse.

Anxiety disorders, which often manifest as excessive worry, fear and a tendency to avoid potentially stressful situations, are some of the most common mental health problems we experience. Modern life is anxiety inducing, but the fight or flight response is ancient. When a human believes they are in danger, their breath shortens, their heart beats faster, they sweat – all symptoms of a panic attack.

After Edinburgh, Don't Panic! It's Challenge Anneka will tour secondary schools, running workshops exploring mental health for students in Year 9 and above. This makes sense, as young people are most likely to experience anxiety. A global review of existing scientific literature by the University of Cambridge published in June this year found that four in every 100 people experience anxiety disorders, with women and people under 35 affected the most.

The literature review highlighted the need for more research, especially into how anxiety affects marginalised groups. Dr Louise Lafortune, Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Institute of Public Health, says: 'Anxiety disorders affect a lot of people and can lead to impairment, disability, and risk of suicide. Although many groups have examined this important topic, significant gaps in research remain.' (HB)

Don't Panic! It's Challenge Anneka is on at Summerhall (venue 26) until 28 August (not 22nd). See venue for accessibility information - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/don-t-panic-it-s-challenge-anneka

Anxiety UK: https://www.anxietyuk.org.uk

'Women and people under the age of 35 at greatest risk of anxiety': http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/women-and-people-under-the-age-of-35-at-greatest-risk-of-anxiety

'Living with anxiety: Britain's silent epidemic': https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/15/anxiety-epidemic-gripping-britain

'Anxiety: the epidemic sweeping through Generation Y': http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/health/anxiety-the-epidemic-sweeping-through-generation-y/

'How It Actually Feels to Live with Severe Anxiety': http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/anxiety-and-me-189

It Affects Me: http://www.itaffectsme.co.uk

PERHAPS HOPE // Company Here and Now

Circus may not seem like the most obvious medium through which to explore climate change, but watching Perhaps Hope it starts to make a certain kind of sense. What other art form involves so much risk? Where else do you see humans courting danger, even death, with such abandon? The circus artist's willingness to edge as close as possible to the brink and stare oblivion in the face is a pretty good metaphor for the world's inaction on climate change.

Company Here and Now describe Perhaps Hope as an 'eco-apocalyptic circus show', and its three acts feature a repeated set of sequences that gradually unravel. The soundtrack is integral to the piece, weaving written extracts in among the music. Key words like 'anthropocene' and 'hyperobject' play out over the strings, Laurie Anderson and REM.

The LA Review of Books explains what we mean by a 'hyperobject' in relation to climate change.  In 'Global Warming and Other Hyperobjects', Stephen Muecke explains that a hyperobject is something vast, something that challenges our assumptions about human mastery over things. Hyperobjects are 'scary game-changers, and they have a touch of the sublime'.

Circus is a display of human mastery over physical constraints – it is a space where a person can balance on one leg on the head of a man, or on the top of a wine bottle. It is a space where people take on gravity and win, if only momentarily. And so it is a potent space in which to talk about issues that challenge human mastery. Perhaps Hope underlines the performers' frustrations and fears about climate change. Through its physical unraveling, it explores the psychological impact of the knowledge that we may be facing the end of the world as we know it.

- Helen Babbs

Perhaps Hope is on at 17.30 at Underbelly’s Circus Hub on the Meadows until 22 August. Wheelchair Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/perhaps-hope

'Global Warming and Other Hyperobjects': https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/hyperobjects/

 'What is climate change doing to our mental health?': http://grist.org/climate-energy/what-is-climate-change-doing-to-our-mental-health/

'Climate Change Will Have Broad Psychological Effects': http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/06/climate-change.aspx

'Human Health: Impacts, Adaptation, and Co-Benefits': http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/WGIIAR5-Chap11_FGDall.pdf

'Saving the World Together: 5 Shows Tackling Climate Change in Edinburgh': http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/saving-world-together-5-shows-tackling-climate-change-edinburgh/

'Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever': https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever

THE TALK // Mish Grigor

It's a basic fact of parenting that children grow up to do things you might personally find regrettable: contract sexual diseases, for instance, or make theatre, or worse, make theatre about contracting sexual diseases. Mish Grigor's parents have approved a version of her text for The Talk but not, she twinkles, this one. And whether or not that or anything else she says in the show is true is irrelevant; she transcends old-fashioned morals and conventional proprieties the moment she describes the size of her father's cock in a reported conversation with her mother, and just keeps travelling from there.

At the heart of The Talk is a frustration: that every one of us is alive because two people had sex, and yet culturally we're terrible at talking about it. Grigor plunges her family into discomfort when she starts interrogating them about how they fuck: no one can understand why she's doing it, but that incomprehension is part of the point. The prim silence we observe around sex allows all manner of inequalities to persist: not least, the one demonstrated within Grigor's own family, whereby her father is cheerfully being sucked off by a third wife, while her mother is single, wary of online dating, and contemplating a future in which perhaps she never has sex again.

Lack of communication also breeds misinformation and fear: the fear that Grigor confesses feeling not only for but of her brother, now living with HIV. It's left to him to explain, patiently, that modern medication makes the virus undetectable in his blood stream. No one knows what effect it will have on the body long-term, he adds, but even if it kills me, at least it will stop me killing anyone else.

In this, and throughout the show, the words of Grigor's family are spoken by members of the audience: she takes our presence in the room as consent, and in doing so glances at another critical problem caused by lack of decent conversation about sex. The show relies on general embarrassment for its humour: if everyone in the room were comfortable rather than coy in talking about their bodies and its pleasures, The Talk would lose much of its piquancy. But society as a whole might gain, Grigor argues: especially the people within it who aren't heterosexual cis-men. (MC)

The Talk is on at 16.00 at Forest Fringe (Out of the Blue Drill Hall) unitl August 20th. See venue for accessibility information - http://forestfringe.co.uk/edinburgh2016/artist/mish-grigor/

Another argument for more and better talking about sex, in the Wardrobe Ensemble show 1972: The Future of Sex: http://www.thewardrobeensemble.com/#!1972-the-future-of-sex/c13ut

On Paul Goodman, whose 1960 book Growing Up Absurd argued that the fettering of adolescent sexuality was crucial to subduing the human spirit within a capitalist system: http://www.paulgoodmanfilm.com/old/the_relevance.html

Writing on consent from the Edinburgh fringe: https://katewyver.wordpress.com/2016/08/08/zero-something-important/

On the 3D model of a clitoris, to be used in French sex education: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/aug/15/french-schools-3d-model-clitoris-sex-education

On HIV treatment: http://www.tht.org.uk/myhiv/HIV-and-you/Your-treatment/HIV-treatment