Time to retreat, then, to the international festival, where three-and-a-half hours of Ibsen in German seemed an unusually appealing prospect. Even so, I had no idea it would be this good: if there has been a better show at this year’s festival than the Berliner Ensemble’s Peer Gynt (Lyceum, five stars), pin a tail on me and call me king of the trolls.
The word “unstageable” is often applied. Written in 1867, this sprawling verse epic about the nature of the self transports its audience from Norway’s fjords to a sprite-filled forest and the Egyptian desert, then back again. Each turn of the atlas’s page requires a different style. The adventures of young Peer demand a youthful zest. Peer the slave-trader and false prophet inhabits a world of pure slapstick. Peer the old man is a troubled philosopher. Yet Peter Zadek’s production makes the tone changes look effortless. This Peer Gynt is not short on laughs or spectacle — a naked woman astride a papier-mâché panto horse provides both — but it also offers satisfying moments of intimacy, notably the death of Gynt’s mother. Much of the credit goes to Uwe Bohm’s extraordinary Peer, who makes the tricky transformation from instinctive confidence to existential doubt entirely convincing. In the week when Edvard Munch’s The Scream was stolen from an Oslo gallery, it may be some comfort that another Norwegian masterpiece has been rediscovered and lovingly restored.
Back on the Fringe, Galileo (C Venue, two stars) is also a rediscovery, though its claims to greatness are less convincing. Thirty years ago, Tom Stoppard wrote a film script about the battles between the Italian astronomer and the church; it was never filmed. Now Collapsible Theatre, an enterprising student company, has adapted it for the stage. “New” Stoppard play premiered on Fringe — a coup by any standard. The trouble is, as with most lost works, there is a reason it hasn’t been rediscovered earlier. There is a polish to the writing that says “mature Stoppard”. So does the odd flash of wit (Galileo calls Copernicus “a Polish revolutionary — it’s a joke!”). Ultimately, though, this is Historical drama with a capital H, full of capes, but signifying — what?
Galileo may have been written three decades ago, but it’s part of a palpable trend. Biography and autobiography have swamped the Fringe in recent years. Why bother making stuff up when you can dabble in the stuff of real people’s souls, especially your own? The potential laziness of this approach is evident in Jeffrey Archer’s Prison Diary: Hell (Underbelly, two stars), which, despite a solid performance from Andrew MacBean, takes the disgraced peer too much at his own inflated estimation. It’s no surprise to find that Archer donated the rugby shirt he wore inside Belmarsh jail to the production. Noblesse not only obliges, but knows how to create obligations.
Simon Woodroffe shares a few things with Archer: not just the fact that he went to the same open prison, but also, on the evidence of his autobiographical How I Got My Yo! (Pleasance, one star), a towering ego. Woodroffe is the man who introduced us to the robot drinks waiter through Yo! Sushi, his restaurant chain.
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Unfortunately, though, it’s not the robot performing. Woodroffe recounts a rake’s progress, from school dropout jailed for dealing cannabis to life as Pink Floyd’s stage designer, then millionaire restaurateur. His ostensible message is that you can be anything you want, yet the really interesting question remains unanswered: not how Woodroffe got his Yo!, but why it mattered so much. That’s the difference between comic drama and corporate motivation. Oh, and the Ian Dury-style songs are awful.
Much more satisfying is Manchester Girl (Underbelly, three stars). Sue Turner-Cray’s solo show is loosely based on her years spent modelling in Tokyo. The play follows a well-worn trajectory — drugs, death and loneliness intrude on the idyll. Turner-Cray tackles her subject with such verve, however, that it seems newly minted. She has a strong physical presence, and her supporting cast of flaky models and dodgy men is conjured up with elegant economy. I particularly liked the bun-eating agency owner who tells Sara, Turner-Cray’s alter ego: “I’m sending you to Osaka, darling. It’s a catalogue town. A bit more forgiving of you fatties.”
But this year’s most moving performance inspired by real life is in Biographies in a Bag (Assembly, three stars). Lynn Ferguson’s monologue about trying to research a biography of Schopenhauer while suffering from postnatal depression is, as we’ve come to expect from the Glaswegian actress and comic, the antithesis of mawkish.
I can’t think of another performer who can change the emotional mood of a room so suddenly or with such ease. She left the audience quite literally not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
Happily, the epidemic of biographies doesn’t mean that the well-made play is dead. As ever, there is some fine new writing around. Linda McLean’s Shimmer (Traverse, four stars) concerns three women on a pilgrimage to Iona who are forced to shelter from floods at a B&B. Each has suffered a loss. The structure is circular, and as opaque as the streams of water that gush down Monica Frawley’s remarkable set, but slowly the dreamlike atmosphere imposes itself, helped by excellent performances from Lesley Hart and Una McLean.
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Open House (C Venue, three stars), by Helena Thompson, is a tightly scripted and well-acted drama about a bohemian student household thrown into chaos after one of its number dies. Gone (Pleasance, four stars) updates Antigone for the age of the spin doctor. Glyn Cannon’s adaptation is funny and savage by turns, and Nigel Hastings’s icily smarmy Creon makes the most of it. He is disconcertingly reminiscent of Geoff Hoon.
Almost as disconcerting is Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) (Pleasance, three stars), an edgy monologue by the New York writer Will Eno. Performed by the Hal Hartley collaborator James Urbaniak, all nervous aggression in his shabby, ill-fitting suit, it’s a portrait of a man whose ability even to tell a story is undermined by a morbid, ironic self-consciousness. I saw Thom Pain straight after Pauline Goldsmith’s remarkable, terrifying version of Samuel Beckett’s Not I (Assembly, four stars), which deals with similar themes, so perhaps the writing didn’t seem as radical as it might have. Then again, being compared to Beckett can’t be bad.
Last, but far from least, is John Clancy’s Fatboy (Assembly, four stars). This is Alfred Jarry’s Père Ubu given a contemporary make-over. More important, it’s a romp — a great, vulgar, cartoonish satire on the state of America, featuring a dazzling central performance from Mike McShane. His King Fatboy is a grotesque, sweaty death’s-head of a man (he looks like Mr Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life) whose only ambition is to consume and exert power for power’s sake. Well, as Peer Gynt might have said, a man’s got to dream.