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
2.4 mile swim. 112 mile cycle. 26.2 mile run. The athletes look more like spiders as we are shown a video of Sian Welch and Wendy Ingraham crawling across the finishing line of the 1997 Ironman Triathlon. The women push themselves past exhaustion to the point where their legs will no longer carry them. Their mental strength and determination lumps them over the line where they collapse, limbs twisted.
Paul Wady was accidentally diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome at the age of 41, after a run in with the police following his behaviour in a cinema. During the 12 years since, he has collected experiential anecdotes and evidence from other people with autism diagnoses and their families, helping to create a picture of what ‘Aspie normal’ is.
Nils Bergstrand was the first disabled person to graduate from the musical theatre course at London's Royal Academy of Music. He auditioned after a passion for singing revealed itself through therapeutic exercises in acknowledging positive responses to the world, undertaken to cope with the post-traumatic stress of losing his leg.
Finders Keepers is a devised play using mime-based physical performance and puppetry to convey the story of a motherless girl who lives with her dad, and one day finds an abandoned baby that the pair care for together until its real mother returns to claim it. The production is loosely based on the story of Moses, and the final moments show the child's foster mother leaving home, perhaps to follow and become the baby's nanny.
Within the story material, described by the company as 'a live cartoon', the show hints at issues around care and loss without explicitly interrogating them (we see moments: the ritual of kissing an absent mother's portrait, different situations involving saying goodbye to a child, the adoption of a stranger to the family).
Finders Keepers is is billed as 'accessible to deaf and hearing audiences in a shared experience', and isperformed by two women, one of whom hears, one who is partially deaf. It has been directed by Caroline Parker MBE, who grew up deaf in a hearing household, and we we are shown a world where significant sounds happen as part of the storytelling. The feature that distinguishes deaf audiences from Deaf ones is that they identify themselves as belonging within a majority hearing culture.
There are utterances whose meaning is not always reflected in visual portrayal; trumpet playing and headphones used as devices to soothe the baby; plot shifts in the story marked with pre-recorded soundtrack noises - most prominently the infant's cries, which the characters repeatedly hear and respond to.
During the periods of the show where the baby is crying, a string of lanterns above the set flicker. An extra layer of semiotic interpretation can translate that visual signifier to the understood fiction of a distressed child, by watching the ensuing responses of the cast onstage and extrapolating through repetition, or through familiarity with flashing and/or vibrating baby monitors for parents with hearing impairment.
Whilst we may all share the same theatrical environment, deaf, Deaf or Hearing audience members will receive differently nuanced versions of the story, as with lived experience.
- KK
Finders Keepers is on at 11:45 at ZOO until August 27th. Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/finders-keepers
On making theatre for D/deaf and hearing audiences: https://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/2015/may/12/staging-theatre-deaf-hearing-audiences
On the differences between being deaf and Deaf: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/opinion/d_or_d_whos_deaf_and_whos_deaf.shtml
Resource of information for Deaf parents and professionals working with Deaf parents: http://www.deafparent.org.uk
Organisation dedicated to enriching the experience of CODAs (Children of Deaf Adults): http://www.coda-international.org
Collection of lectures on affectional bonds: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Y1ifjsdRGjsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Making+and+Breaking+of+Affectional+Bonds&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiemKj7rr_OAhUmLMAKHWUYCSMQ6AEIJDAB#v=onepage&q=The%20Making%20and%20Breaking%20of%20Affectional%20Bonds&f=false
Lynn Ruth Miller is 82, and she's been doing stand-up for 12 years. The focus of This is Your Future is ageing, and it features faulty hearing aids, fractured limbs, replacement hips, mammograms and colonoscopies. It also discusses the joys and perils of geriatric dating – google it and you'll find a range of websites aimed at 'senior singles', although Miller suggests the obituaries are a good place to find out who's newly available.
Amid the photographs and frocks on display in the Imperial War Museum's exhibition Fashion on the Ration (in London last year, now in Manchester) was an unsettling panel equating the wearing of make-up with national morale. Women in the 1940s, it suggested, were encouraged, obliged even, to look their best at all times, regardless of shortages, fatigue, anxiety or bombs; to keep their hair neat, their lipstick bright, and present a trim figure that told the men fighting: we believe you're winning.
The two elderly women whose voices are heard in Mighty Heart Theatre's When I Feel Like Crap I Google Kim Kardashian Fat speak of the past with a glow, as a time when women felt less media and social pressure to conform to a particular look or body image. Whatever they did have to contend with, they didn't have Photoshop or Instagram, or an unregulated diet industry revelling in its ability to profit from human insecurity. But the more depressing impression to emerge from When I Feel Like Crap..., a verbatim show constructed from interviews and online surveys with “self-identifying women” of all ages (and, it's implied, backgrounds), isn't the known problem that personal appearance is a political issue, but the unknown extent to which that policing has been internalised, as one voice after another confesses to judging others as severely as herself.
More upsetting still is the extent to which these women have risked, and experienced, physical harm as a result of their obsession with body image. One woman describes her most successful diet as smoking rather than eating; two others gave birth to premature babies because they willingly malnourished themselves while pregnant; one was hospitalised with excess acid after eating only oranges and another destroyed her metabolism and ultimately developed cancer of the rectum from a lifetime of extreme dieting. When a woman listing off her approaches to weight loss says “anorexia is the only thing I've never done”, the pressing need for better education about physical and mental health couldn't be more clear.
The material is cumulatively devastating, yet Mighty Heart – researcher-performers Lisa-Marie Hoctor and Sam Edwards – leaven it with defiant humour and a buoyancy reminiscent of the Eggs Collective. Dressed in skin-tight leopard print that embraces every one of their lumps and bumps, they sing one interview in the style of a Disney princess (their gift to the woman told that she was too heavy, by a mere 2kg, to play the role of Tinkerbell in Disneyland) and transform a “Scouse beauty routine” into a cheeky game show. And there are just enough stories of women rejecting the entire premise of body image policing, whether by wearing “loads of make-up because it's always in my size” or recovering from bulimia and beginning to find genuine pleasure in the way they look, to make the note of hope at the end of the show chime real.
That hope is dependent on all bodies and shapes being accepted. It's no good celebrating the natural curves of “real women” (cf the Dove campaign) if it leaves naturally thin women feeling condemned as less than real. This is where the note of inclusion struck by the phrase “self-identifying women” is so vital. “No one aspires to be normal,” says one woman, but perhaps they might if the notion of normal were expanded beyond its narrow limit to encompass the full spectrum of humanity.
- MC
When I Feel Like Crap I Google Kim Kardashian Fat is on at 16.40 at Silk Nightclub as part of PBH Free Fringe until August 27th (not Tuesdays). See venue for accessibility information - http://freefringe.org.uk/edinburgh-fringe-festival/when-i-feel-like-crap-i-google-kim-kardashian-fat/2016-08-17/
On the diet industry: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/aug/07/fat-profits-food-industry-obesity
On sugar addiction: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/aug/07/fat-profits-food-industry-obesity
On physical and psychological effects of dieting: http://eating-disorders.org.uk/information/the-psychology-of-dieting/
On anorexia and mental health: https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/e/eating-disorders
On the language that surrounds gender non-conformity: http://morganpotts.com/2016/gender-discourse-an-open-letter-to-sisters-uncut/
The Eggs Collective: http://www.eggscollective.com/
Mighty Heart's site: http://mightyhearttheatre.wixsite.com/mightyhearttheatre
If you're in or near Manchester, the Fashion on the Ration exhibition is wonderful: http://www.iwm.org.uk/exhibitions/iwm-north/fashion-on-the-ration-1940s-street-style
Among the 17 women interviewed or writing first-person about their experience of political activism in Helena Earnshaw and Angharad Penrhyn Jones' invigorating book Here We Stand is Eileen Chubb, founder of the charity and campaign Compassion in Care. She became, much to her own surprise, an activist after working for years in care homes run by Bupa, and discovering widespread abuse of the elderly inhabitants. At the bottom of the homepage of the CiC website is a melancholy dedication to Pat Gifford that reads: “After witnessing the abuse of a loved one in a care home, Pat Gifford was so affected by this experience that she became increasingly afraid of growing older and needing care herself that she took her own life.”
Zero Down is set in a small-town care home in which abuse of the elderly patients is carried out on a daily basis: not by staff but by management, who allow the store cupboard to run out of wet wipes and humans to sit in their own faeces for hours before bothering to send a nurse to them. These are all typical of the routine cost-cutting carried out by an organisation run in the service of profitability and not in accord with basic humanity. Working on zero-hour contracts, the nurses are expected to pass their shift not at bedsides but in a staff room, waiting to be summoned by electronic buzzer to a specific patient, clocking in only as and when they are called. Unsurprisingly, this raises the women's own stress levels and sets them at odds with each other.
Writer Sarah Hehir tells two stories here: the visible one of the working women on stage, and the invisible one of the disintegrating humans trapped in their beds. One of the nurses, Benni, is a single mother of three at the mercy of a neoliberal economy, failing to keep her head above water because the system is constructed for her to drown: sympathy for her contracts each time she spews a racist slur, then expands as she reveals her detailed knowledge of individual patients' tastes, habits and frailties. That kindness is contrasted with the exploitative purpose of Erin, an aspiring journalist reading up on female war reporters as she attempts to make her mark by following the example of Eileen Chubb. The distance between conniving Erin and compassionate Eileen becomes clear, however, when the young woman confesses that changing the soiled nappy of a patient makes her think that euthanasia is a good idea. Her tone creates an ambiguity as to whether she means self-elective.
The picture of decrepitude that Hehir presents has almost nothing appealing about it. It's not just a dramatic construct that Benni is the mother of small children: whether at home or at work, her life is one of changing nappies. But she also describes carrying a male patient to the toilet to spare his feelings of mortification at being so infantilised: an act of generosity that helps him continue to value his life. But that generosity also requires the energy of the young: in Michael Haneke's acutely observed film Amour, an elderly man grows unable to care for his declining wife, and when money can no longer buy what she needs, he, like Erin, begins to see euthanasia as their only option. The question woven through both strands of Zero Down is one of value: how shall we value human existence, and what happens when power and profit are the margins or expression of that value?
- MC
Zero Down is on at 13.00 at Pleasance Courtyard until August 29th (not 18th). Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Hearing Loop - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/zero-down
Publisher page for Here We Stand: http://www.honno.co.uk/dangos.php?ISBN=9781909983021
Compassion in Care: http://www.compassionincare.com/
What exactly is neoliberalism?: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/booked-3-what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-wendy-brown-undoing-the-demos
Alexander Zeldin discussing Beyond Caring, his play about workers on zero-hours contracts: http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/the-director-as-god-is-bullshit/
Diary of a woman who chose euthanasia: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/23/euthanasia.cancer
Two views on Haneke's Amour: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/feb/28/amour-advert-for-euthanasia and http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/surviving-amour
Without words, and with masks, Finding Joy explores the impact dementia has on both the person with the disorder, and the people around them. Joy is a widow, living independently. She's visited regularly by her daughter and grandson, who witness her gradual deterioration. It starts with Joy putting strange items in the fridge, and a mix-up between some salad cream and some milk, and ends with her retreating into the past as the present becomes too confusing.
Dementia is a progressive disorder. It affects how the brain works, and in particular the ability to remember, think and reason. According to the Alzheimer’s Society, 850,000 people in the UK suffer from dementia. Worldwide, it's estimated that 135 million people will be living with it by 2050, and there have been warnings that a 'dementia tsunami' is coming. That said, the age-specific risk is thought to be falling, for men at least. The New Scientist reported this April that incidence of dementia in men in the UK has fallen by 41 per cent; there was only a 2.5 per cent drop for women.
There's no cure for dementia, and treatment tends to focus on making people's lives as comfortable and dignified as possible. In Finding Joy, the grandson visits one day bearing the gift of a toy dog. It's a glove puppet, which he brings to comic life to the sheer delight of his grandmother. At moments it seems like Joy thinks it's real dog, at others it's clear she knows it's make believe. Either way, the dog makes her happy and eases her distress.
In the real world, some dementia patients are being treated with PARO, a robot harp seal, and the results seem positive. Researchers at the University of Brighton say PARO reduces agitation and aggression, and promotes social interaction. An article in The Guardian quotes Claire Jepson, an occupational therapist at a specialist assessment unit for dementia patients. She says the robot seal 'allows people to still feel a sense of achievement, a sense of identity. They become the carer instead of the cared for.' Put simply, the robot is enabling some patients to find joy.
- HB
Finding Joy played Assembly Hall at 16:30 until 14 August - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/finding-joy
'What is dementia?': http://www.ageuk.org.uk/health-wellbeing/conditions-illnesses/dementia/what-is-dementia/
Alzheimer's Society: https://www.alzheimers.org.uk
Alzheimer's Research UK: http://www.alzheimersresearchuk.org
Dementia was one of the challenges nominated for the 2014 Longitude Prize: https://longitudeprize.org/challenge/dementia
'Dementia incidence for over 65s has fallen drastically in UK men': https://www.newscientist.com/article/2084859-dementia-incidence-for-over-65s-has-fallen-drastically-in-uk-men/
University of Brighton's PARO Project: https://www.brighton.ac.uk/healthresearch/research-projects/the-paro-project.aspx
'How Paro the robot seal is being used to help UK dementia patients': https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jul/08/paro-robot-seal-dementia-patients-nhs-japan
'PARO Therapeutic Robot': http://www.parorobots.com
Magic Me, UK-based intergenerational arts organisation who run arts programmes with residential care homes, inc. people with dementia: http://magicme.co.uk
In Only Bones, we watch a solo physical performer (Thomas Monckton) manipulate his own body parts to create the illusion of characters, relationships, and scenes that, when taken all together, conjure a surreal story of evolution, arriving at the presentation of himself as a whole human being.
The setting is in the Dissecting Room at the Summerhall, once used as a veterinary lecture demonstration theatre. This enhances the anatomical focus on the human body and its movement capabilities. The most important set element, though, is the hanging shaded lamp that masks Monckton’s face until it’s revealed as part of the exploratory journey through the body that begins at his toes and ends with the voice.
The lamp casts light and shadow that make the body parts appear as spotlit objects in space - how do they move? What can they do? This, in turn, triggers the imagination, harnessing the human capacity to anthropomorphise and project story onto inert, non-literal stimuli.
Monckton trained in circus technique in his native New Zealand, before studying physical theatre-clown at the renowned École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in France. The intense study of physical control and analysis of bodily expression these institutes provides allows Monckton to explore the communicative capacities of minimal human movement. Our imagination conjures prehistoric sea creatures from the independently undulating digits of a weaving hand; a couple setting out to consumate a date appear in the movement of wrists and fingers; genetic experiments resulting in hybrid life-forms emerge from a pair of fists and associated vocalisations.
As his body discovers itself, creating a head, using the plasticity of his facial skin to mold identities, and at last using verbal language, we are shown an abstract origin story that spans all of life and arrives in humanity.
- KK
Only Bones is on at 20:30 at Summerhall until August 28th. Wheelchair Access - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/only-bones
On the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq: http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/staffhome/siryan/academy/theatres/lecoq,%20jacques.htm
Only Bones OU - a parallel video work stemming from the Only Bones project: https://vimeo.com/143630618
Dr Vincent Bellonzi on plasticity of the human body: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0XZfDZxR9g
Types of body movements: http://philschatz.com/anatomy-book/contents/m46398.html
‘Imagining Other Minds: Anthropomorphism Is Hair-Triggered but Not Hare- Brained’: https://static.squarespace.com/static/51e3f4ede4b053e5f0062efd/t/5474a9b4e4b09a953cc54329/1416931764853/anthropomorphism-is-hair-triggered.pdf
‘Evolution of Life’ timeline: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17453-timeline-the-evolution-of-life/
Have you ever heard of Hansen’s disease? What about its more common name, leprosy? A disease that feels like it should belong in the history books, more than 200,000 people are still diagnosed with Hansen’s disease every year around the world, mainly in South America, Africa, India and south-east Asia. Given this distribution in the developing world, it’s easy to forget that it was a problem in the US until well into the 20th century.
US company Deep Water Theatre Collective set their play, Bend in the River, in the Carville National Leprosarium in the early 1940s. Shut away from the world, the residents are stigmatised and shunned, rejected by their families and communities. They’re forced to change their names, and are tended for by Dr Guy Henry Faget and his team of dedicated nuns who act as nurses and spiritual counsellors. The exact cause of the disease is unclear – although it’s known that certain bacteria are involved – and there are no good treatments, only isolation from the world and the hope of a clean run of twelve monthly skin scrapings.
As Faget’s research starts to lead to new hope for a cure, resident Stanley Stein resurrects “The Star”, a newsletter describing life at Carville and raising awareness of the disease. Other residents carry on with life in the confines of their quarantine, falling in love, falling pregnant and volunteering for endless clinical trials of the latest therapy. Finally, something works. It’s a new drug called Promin, and the effects are astounding. It makes Faget’s name as a researcher and changes the lives of many Carville residents.
Mandatory quarantine for people with leprosy was revoked in the US in the 1950s, once it became clear that the disease wasn’t nearly as contagious as had been feared. Today Carville is a museum dedicated to Hansen’s disease, brought back to life for just one week here in Edinburgh.
- KA
Bend in the River has finished its run at Greenside @ Nicholson Square - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/bend-in-the-river
Promin – the first breakthrough drug for leprosy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promin
The National Hansen’s Disease Museum: http://www.hrsa.gov/hansensdisease/museum/
The Carville Star: http://www.fortyandeight.org/the-star/
Previous issues held at the Louisiana Digital Library: http://www.louisianadigitallibrary.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15140coll52
Leprosy in Louisiana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprosy_in_Louisiana
Is Hansen’s disease contagious?: http://www.medicinenet.com/is_leprosy_hansens_disease_contagious/article.htm
Information about Hansen’s disease: https://www.cdc.gov/leprosy/
Nearly 40 per cent of the UK population claim to have experienced a ghost, according to a MORI poll from the late 1990s, while a smaller but significant percentage – around a third – claim to have had some kind of paranormal experience. In this talk for the Edinburgh Skeptics on the Fringe, professor of anomalistic psychology (basically ‘weird stuff’) at Goldsmith’s University, Chris French, explains what might be going on from a rational, science-based perspective.
What follows is a straightforward explanation of several normal physical and psychological phenomena that cause people to believe they’ve witnessed some kind of paranormal activity. For example, many reports of poltergeists turn out to be straightforward hoaxes, notably including the founders of the modern spiritualist church, Maggie and Kate Fox, and the Amityville Horror which was popularised in a novel and films. Both have since been roundly debunked but still persist in popular culture as real.
One major cause of haunting stories is the poorly-understood condition of sleep paralysis, where a person partially wakes up during REM (dreaming) sleep. It’s remarkably common, and somewhere between eight and 40 per cent of the population are thought to experience it. Normally, the body is paralysed during REM sleep to prevent us acting out the physical motions of our dreams, so unexpectedly waking up in this state can be terrifying and disorientating. Even more distressing is the accompaniment of ‘dream hangovers’, such as visual, auditory and physical hallucinations. Given the similarities of these reported experiences across cultures, variously attributed to everything from sex demons (incubi and succubi) in Europe to the souls of unbaptised children on St Lucia, it’s likely that sleep paralysis is a much more common cause of ghost stories than previously realised.
We’re also hugely prone to creating things that simply aren’t there, such as seeing the face of the Virgin Mary in a cheese sandwich or inferring a ghostly whisper in crackling static. Alternatively, we fail to notice the blindingly obvious explanations for seemingly strange things right in front of our faces, as shown by the clever ‘Gorillas in our Midst’ study.
As French explains, the most important requirements for seeing ghosts are context and belief. You’re much more likely to spot a spectre if you’re a strong believer creeping around a reputed haunted house than a skeptic strolling through Sainsbury’s. But if ghosts are real, why should there be a difference? Like Fox Mulder in the X Files, some people just want to believe, and all too often their brain tricks them into thinking that they do. There is no cure, but approaching all paranormal claims with a broad, evidence-based and skeptical mindset will undoubtedly help.
- KA
Edinburgh Skeptics in the Pub is hosting Skeptics on the Fringe, Undiluted Brilliance, with a different speaker every night until August 28th, at 19:45 in the Banshee Labyrinth on Niddry Street - http://www.edinburghskeptics.co.uk/events-calendar/
Goldsmiths Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit: http://www.gold.ac.uk/apru/
The Fox sisters and the rap on spiritualism: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-fox-sisters-and-the-rap-on-spiritualism-99663697/?no-ist
The Amityville Horror hoax: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/ghosts/amityville.asp
Information about sleep paralysis – NHS Choices: http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Sleep-paralysis/Pages/Introduction.aspx
The invisible gorilla experiment – an example of inattentional blindness: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html
When a friend is going through a tough time and doesn’t want to talk about it, it can be hard to know how best to help them. Bring round a bottle of prosecco or three? Fire up Mean Girls on Netflix and order in pizza? Instead, Rhiannon Faith and Maddy Morgan made a show about it.
From the outset, Faith is a self-confessed neurotic, scared of everything. The show begins with a list of phobias, from the exotic to the mundane. Ablutophobia – the fear of washing. Arachibutyrophobia – the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, and so on. Then it delves deeper, exploring darker fears about sex and motherhood – the things we shouldn’t talk about. Morgan is the patient foil to her panicking friend, always running to the rescue and mopping up the drama.
To try and get over her fears, Faith seeks the help of her mother-in-law, psychotherapist Joy Griffiths. Together, she and Morgan attend cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), videotaping the sessions and interpreting them as dance pieces. First up, we learn that feelings of anxiety are the result of the body’s response to stressful situations – the classic adrenaline-fuelled ‘fight or flight’ reaction causing the shallow breath, racing heart and knotted stomach of a panic attack. Then we see CBT in action as Faith conquers her fear of answering the phone, stemming from being dumped over the phone by an early boyfriend. It’s played for over-dramatic laughs, but does a good job of illustrating the process of therapy, taking back control of past events and the feelings they evoke.
Halfway through, the focus shifts. The pair explore their formative teenage sexual experiences, each distressing in their own right and leaving their mark on the adult woman. We’re made to watch Morgan unravel in front of us, while Faith can only try and punch through the wall of pain to help her friend. It’s unsettling and achingly hard to watch in places, but ultimately a testament to friendship and the benefits of identifying, acknowledging and ultimately tackling our deepest fears.
- KA
Scary Shit is on at 13.45 at Pleasance Courtyard until August 29th (not 15th or 22nd). Wheelchair Acess, Level Access, Hearing Loop - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/scary-shit
Rhiannon Faith: https://rhiannonfaith.com/
MIND – the mental health charity: http://www.mind.org.uk/
Anxiety and panic attacks: http://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/anxiety-and-panic-attacks/#.V7BE95grLIU
Help for survivors of sexual assault: http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Sexualhealth/Pages/Sexualassault.aspx
What is cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)?: http://www.babcp.com/Public/What-is-CBT.aspx
The phobia list: http://phobialist.com/
James Rowland’s monologue, Team Viking, is a natural second act to Liz Rothschild’s Outside The Box, which I had just watched. Both shows highlight the importance and the challenges of giving a loved one the burial they want, but tackle this sensitive subject in completely different ways.
Drawing on a (mostly) true story, the tale starts with his father’s funeral. It’s a huge but slightly soulless affair at which Rowland has given a moving eulogy. We then flash back to the childhood origins of Team Viking – Rowland and his friends Tom and Sarah – who are bound together by their shared love of re-enacting scenes from Kirk Douglas’ 1958 film The Vikings, full of “fighting, quaffing and wenching”. They grow up and continue much along these lines, supporting each other through the ups and downs of life: Tom the fun-loving Lothario, Sarah the organised engineer and James, who plays all the other parts.
Suddenly everything changes when Tom is diagnosed with a rare, aggressive and totally incurable cancer. Primary cardiac angiosarcoma is cancer of the heart muscle – a condition affecting around 0.001 per cent of the population. He’s not quite one in a million, but it’s close. The disease is a death sentence, claiming Tom’s life in a matter of months, and Rowland takes us through the heart-breaking process of watching his best friend slowly fade away knowing there is nothing that can be done.
For his part, Tom is adamant that he wants the kind of funeral they’d play-acted as kids, cast adrift on a burning boat. He achieves it through some fairly spectacular emotional manipulation, leaving Rowland and Sarah to figure out how to actually make it happen. The technicalities of delivering Tom’s big finale are described in fraught, hilarious detail, far removed from Liz Rothschild’s calm explanations of organising a funeral of your choosing and the legal aspects of obtaining a dead body for burial. It’s not an orthodox ending, and some parts of it were technically illegal, but Team Viking is a moving story of friendship, loss, and the importance of giving someone you love the send-off they desire and deserve.
- KA
Team Viking is on at 14:55 at Just The Tonic at the Community Project until August 28th (not 15th). Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Relaxed Performance - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/team-viking
Dead right – who does a body belong to?: http://www.goodfuneralguide.co.uk/2009/07/dead-right/
Cardiac sarcoma: http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/277297-overview
Macmillan cancer support - at the end of life: http://www.macmillan.org.uk/information-and-support/coping/at-the-end-of-life
Diagnosis of Liz Rothschild’s Fringe show Outside the Box: http://thesickofthefringe.com/week-two/outside-the-box
Death on the Fringe: https://deathonthefringe.wordpress.com/
