Reviews by Jim Ralley

After a superb sold-out run in 2017, Apphia Campbell returned to this year's Edinburgh Fringe for one week only. Woke is her powerful show portraying parallel narratives of two womens' civil rights awakenings. It is great and important theatre that addresses systemic racism in the United States, and it feels especially important in a place as overwhelmingly white as the Edinburgh Fringe. Campbell plays two women, separated by 40 years of American history. Ambrosia is a young student, starting university in St. Louis, Missouri in the wake of the death of Michael Brown – an 18-year-old African-American man who was shot by white police officer, Darren Wilson. She gradually becomes more and more politicised as she meets fellow students and attends Black Lives Matter rallies and protests, demanding justice for Michael Brown. Her tale is told alongside that of Assata Shakur, a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army in the 1970s. We follow Shakur's journey from radicalisation to eventual incarceration following a shootout in New Jersey.The staging is smart and simple, putting Campbell's excellent performance to the fore, with lighting changes and simple physical affectations supporting the character shifts from Ambrosia to Shakur. Sound is used effectively too, bringing the blues songs to life, complementing the spoken word elements and building crowd scenes out of nowhere. As Ambrosia's story reaches its climax and she becomes ever more embroiled in the systemically racist practices of St. Louis' police and justice departments, so too does the energy of the play. Campbell has slowly taken us up to this point, building layers of meaning that span space and time and showing different facets of the central issues: "it's a dangerous blindness when you can't see another person is human," she says. "We are the victims not the criminals." Woke is great theatre, and the audience clearly agreed, demonstrating their approval with a standing ovation. I hope pieces like this pave the way for more diverse voices at festivals like the Fringe, because at the moment there is very little challenging the dominance of space and airtime by so many white male stand-up comedians.

Pechorin is a superfluous man. He has it all, yet seemingly has nothing. He's witty, smart and sensitive, yet also utterly manipulative and verging on sociopathic. He's the selfish, bored protagonist of Mikhail Lermontov's Russian classic A Hero Of Our Time, played with ferocity and bravery by the endlessly watchable Oliver Bennett. This production of a neglected classic is presented by HUNCHtheatre, a new company founded by long-term collaborators Vladimir Shcherban (award winning director of the Belarus Free Theatre), and Bennett. Their mission is to bring high quality art to both theatrical and non theatrical spaces, with initial versions of this piece being performed in Shcherban's living room and a basement lounge of a Soho hotel.The staging is disarming, with the audience lined up on either side of the small, claustrophobic Studio 2 at C Royale on George Street. As we enter the space, Bennett is sat on a stool in a military coat and sunglasses, staring into a huge mirror on an easel at the end of the room. This thin tract of stage is the setting for what turns out to be a powerful, sweaty and ingenious piece of theatre.Shcherban and Bennett are a strong director/writer combo. Their use of the space is playful, and the images they build over and over again lead to moments of real beauty. The scenes come thick and fast, from languishing in a rich spa town, to riding through the Caucuses on horseback and a royal ball. The performers transform the space with a glorious fluidity and dexterity.James Marlowe as Grushnitsky is an excellent foil to Bennett's Pechorin as their friendship slowly crumbles to the whims of Pechorin's manipulations. A frantic dancing scene with Princess Mary (Anastasia Zinovieva) is particularly affecting, and Marlowe portrays Grushnitsky's decline into desperation with skill and conviction. It's the female characters who failed to grab me in this adaptation. Zinovieva plays both Vera and Mary, the former an old flame of Pechorin's, and the latter a listless aristocrat. Unfortunately her accent and projection got in the way of many of her lines and I often genuinely struggled to understand what she was saying. Perhaps this was intentional, and the female characters in the piece are intended to be vague pawns in the games that men play. If so, then I'd have loved a little more explicit exploration of this. The producers describe this as "an examination of the Byronic hero in our age of gender war". It felt much more like a strong adaptation of a classic text, but still very much stuck in the morality and themes of 1840's Russia. Again, perhaps this is a statement on how nothing much has changed in 180 years, and that women are still subject to the whims of superfluous men with their ego-driven games and careless cruelty.

Void is really intense, in the best possible way. If you're looking for a break from the stand-up comedy and the wordy theatre then get down to The Old Lab in Summerhall, and strap in for 45 minutes of 'experimental dance and abstract glitch-video landscapes.'It's based on J. G. Ballard's short 1974 novel, Concrete Island, in which a man gets stranded on an intersection between several motorways following a car accident. The producers of Void quote the introduction to the novel in their programme: "We can tyrannise ourselves, test our strengths and weaknesses, perhaps come to terms with aspects of our characters to which we have always closed our eyes." It's pretty deep, dark stuff, and Ballard's source material primes us for scenes of dystopian man-made structures and psychological breakdown. Void does not disappoint. The stage is a brutal chain-link fence and a bare floor, and the sound of passing traffic sets the scene until performer/choreographer Mele Broomes explodes onto the stage, presumably flung from her car down the bank into this concrete island. What follows is an absolutely remarkable display of physicality; a terrifying, chaotic, controlled performance that is as beautiful as it is disturbing. This central performance works in perfect harmony (in the most discordant way) with the audio and visuals by Bex Anson and Dav Bernard of MHz. Glitching moons, green bars and red boxes flicker across the stage like images from a broken VHS player. Broomes twists and turns through this digital landscape like a reanimating corpse, then a shuffling amoeba, and finally a desperate human frantically drumming on the chain link fence with her high heels. There's also a short sequence with a huge black bin liner that is utterly mesmerising. Void replaces Ballard's white male protagonist with a black female one, and this shift brings the 40-year-old story right into the present day. Instead of a tragic figure trapped in the the amoral technological jungle of modernity, we see a desperate figure outside the system, trying to break in through the layers of privilege, patriarchy and institutional racism. This is a piece of theatre / dance / performance art that you need to 'experience', not just watch. It's definitely not for everyone, but I recommend you surrender yourself to its onslaught, then head to the pub for a debrief.

As a reviewer I'm fortunate enough to get free tickets to many shows. As it was the last Friday night of the Fringe I thought I'd invite some friends along to see John-Luke Roberts: Terrible Wonderful Adaptations. So I bought them tickets, we had a few beers beforehand and settled into the King Dome for an hour of absurdist cabaret from "an all-star cast of the Fringe's best comedians and worst idiots". Unfortunately I'd made a bad decision. After a decent opening from Roberts and his co-host the rest of the show was, for the most part, pretty boring. I wish I'd spent my £20 elsewhere. As I imagine did the guy sitting next to me who popped his headphones in and started listening to a podcast!Frankly I expected more from a show at the Pleasance. It actually felt more like a Free Fringe variety night. The reviews for this literary cabaret have been good, and Roberts himself is an engaging performer who held the space fairly well. But it struck me that perhaps he's stretched himself too thinly, with a solo show and the daily Alternative Comedy Memorial Society (ACMS) night at the Monkey Barrel. Obviously the point of the show is that comedy performers are invited to present a segment of a classically unadaptable text (last night it was Ulysses and Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu), so we're expecting the performers to fail in some respect, but not in the basic task of producing an engaging and entertaining three minute bit. Most of the acts felt like they hadn't made much effort, reading things off their phones, or simply repeating one gag until their three minutes was up. It felt messy, and not in an hilariously chaotic way. We had two Irish guys on stage drinking Guinness, a pair of underused musicians stood to the side (one of them filming the proceedings on his phone), and a lady at the back trying to make an audience member cry. At one point someone was invited on stage to eat an onion. The performances weren't all bad though. Luke Rollason was charming and cheeky, scooting in on his Heelys with a Casio keyboard strapped to his arm and an extendable table tennis net in the other. Madeleine Bye of Siblings Comedy was also excellent, doing an "ART" piece and covering herself and the stage with cooking oil.For me and my pals though, this show wasn't worth the ticket price, and I wish I'd spent my money elsewhere.

It's what Dan Simpson would want. The complexity and nuance of a finely wrought review, reduced to a few simple emojis. I'm going for: 'thumbs up' + 'slightly smiling face'.I had a nice time at Worried Face Emoji, where Simpson's gentle stand-up poetry lectures on the declining relevance of the written word in the face of the rise of the emoji. Over an enjoyable hour, Simpson takes the audience on a journey, which includes Jodie Foster floating in space, Lord Byron's dick pics, and an ode to the microwave, closing with a relaxing and funny guided meditation.Simpson is a poet, and his poems are the strongest element of this show. His univocalic poem (only using the vowel "a") is cracking; the emoji poem at the end is cleverly done; and the 'art lads night out' is a neat exploration of an absurd scenario.The final guided meditation was also a highlight, with Simpson and his tech support skewering this over-earnest spiritual practice with charm and playfulness.I was left wanting more poetry. The conceit of the show was clear from the outset, yet Simpson spent quite a lot of time on the 'lecture' element, explaining the link between the poems and the theme, expounding his views on the state of the English language and house prices for millennials. At times it felt like the powerpoint presentation got in the way of his delivery. After an amusing emotional graph of the show by way of introduction, the slides added little to the performance. If you want to spend an enjoyable hour in the company of a top poet as they explore one of the oddest and most important cultural communication tools of modern times, then Dan Simpson is your man. Catch him underground in the cosy Banquet Hall at Banshee Labyrinth from 18:40 every day, August 16-26th.

I was curious about IRL. A dance piece billed as a 'thought-provoking performance about navigating life in an increasingly intrusive and connected world'. It could have gone either way. But the young @YonderDanceCo from Alabama managed to find the sweet spot between interactivity, playfulness and profundity. The opening section is particularly beautiful. They asked us to take out our phones. Navigate to a specific website. And play the audio file that we found there. The sound of music drifting around the space, playing out of 60 different devices, all at slightly different times, was a gorgeous spectacle and a clever way to get us to 'lean in' from the very beginning.The inventiveness didn't stop, and it led to moments of real beauty on the stage at Greenside Nicholson Square. The dancers weave in and out of each other, in what the company call the "manipulated and accented use of pedestrian phrasing". A small group peels off to explore a new idea, the rest of the company mill around them, taking photos, sharing updates on Instagram, making video calls with friends and family. The interplay between focus and distraction, togetherness and separation, is neatly executed time and time again.You're encouraged to use your phone during the performance. At one point I found myself taking a photo of another audience member who was taking a photo of a performer who was filming his fellow performers. Meta as heck. And that's exactly what Yonder want. I was amazed at how, despite literally everyone having their phones in their hands for the duration of the piece, nobody seemed disengaged. This is the central theme of IRL. Our relationship with our phones. How they bring us together and pull us apart and delight and torment us. It's not a perfect show, and at times feels a little unfocused and lapses into cliche. How many times have we seen people on a stage pretending to be commuters on a jostling train? Luckily they push through the obvious and find these moments of beauty. 'plz "like" me' is a lovely scene that explores the schizophrenic relationship we have to social media; our desire to be liked juxtaposed with our fear of being exposed. And as IRL draws to a close, the lights dim. Perhaps the most engaging dancer in the company, Drew Martin (or @drew_martin1), stands upstage centre, his face lit only by the flickering light of his phone screen. Suddenly flashlights from the other performers' phones turn on. The audience start to turn theirs on too. It's a beautiful end to a surprising performance.You could do much worse than to check out IRL. But be quick. Their final performance is on the 10th August.

Barry promised he would "share [his] soul with you" at the start of the show, and golly, he really does. In an hour that takes us from South African robots to family revelations, via flapping meat bags and biscuit addiction, Ferns presents an always engaging, sometimes profound stand-up show.Barry Loves You is the latest show from Barry Ferns, proprietor of the Angel Comedy Club in London and 2014 'Spirit of the Fringe' winner. He's back with this slightly ramshackle, endearingly heartfelt show that attempts to tie his muddled mind together into an overarching theme: what is identity? It's a compelling subject, and Ferns weaves this question throughout his more standard stand-up bits. He challenges us to question our conception of identity, of the ability of the human mind to hold multiple truths at the same time, and of our inability to effectively communicate even the simplest thing to each other. "We're just animals", says Ferns, driven by hunger, sex and fear. The standout bit of the show for me was when Ferns really gave us an insight into the workings of his mind, in a mad stream-of-consciousness monologue about all of the thoughts that go through his brain when he's crossing the road. I left wanting a bit more of this version of Ferns, and less of the more traditional gags. He's clearly a seasoned performer and is comfortable on stage, dealing with hecklers and technical hiccups. But when he moves into the final act of the show, when he shares his soul with us, it feels a little out of place. He hadn't done enough in the previous 40 minutes to build up to the revelation: and it's a pretty big revelation. It's an intensely human and affecting part of his personal story that deserves a little more ceremony. As with many stand-ups weaving narrative elements into their performances, it lacked a little dramaturgy to hit the right emotional notes.Clearly Ferns is using this show to process elements of his own past, and that's a brave thing to do. Performance can be so useful for that, but I think it needs to be done with a little more control than he displayed in Barry Loves You. It left me slightly unsatisfied but definitely pondering the meaning of existence in some small way. Which I guess is pretty good for an evening in the pub.

A woman stands downstage right, a spotlight illuminating her from one side. She starts playing with her voice. No actual words come out but there is beauty and pain, and there are jazz phrases and buzzing lips. The live performance-movement-opera-concert, Century Song ends with this intimate scene, which provides a reflective moment at the end of a great piece.Canadian soprano Neema Bickersteth is our point of focus. She moves around the stage at ZOO Southside with focus and intensity, her body and voice working in harmony to explore the complexity of the act's themes. Century Song arose out of a critical look at her relationship with the classical singing world: "I started to wonder how I, as a black person singing white European roles from another era, connect personally to this art form." She takes us on a journey through time, a century of Black women's history in Canada, from an early black settler community in 1916 Alberta, through jazz in the 30s, factory work in the 40s, and second wave feminism in the 70s, to the present day. Her wordless song evokes the human sounds of each period, and her body expresses everything else that her mouth cannot. The music is superb, spanning Rachmaninoff, Messiaen, John Cage, and Georges Aperghis, with additional composition and improvisational themes by Reza Jacobs. The two percussionists, Gregory Oh on piano and Benjamin Grossman on various percussion and digital instruments, complement Bickersteth's performance delightfully. There is a playful intensity to their playing as they lean into the piano to pluck the strings directly, or catch the final note of a sung phrase and repeat it on a loop pedal.Kate Alton's choreography and Ross Manson's directing are excellent, with a good use of space and clear progression in the narrative from the hard-working settlers to the harried city dwellers. I thought second half of the choreography was stronger than the first, especially the sequence with the orange dress.The projected visuals were the only element that didn't really work for me. I found the shiny CG and green screen elements detracted from the spectacle instead of immersing me further in it. The projection on the floor and back wall were more effective the simpler they were, whether showing simple images of human faces or cubist masterpieces. Despite this criticism Century Song is a beautiful piece of work, eight years in the making. It is well worth your time and money, and I'd recommend you do a little research before going in if you're not familiar with the specifics of Black Canadian history.

Our eyes locked. I opened my mouth in anticipation. A pink shrimp sweet came sailing through the air and bounced off my lip. "My fault, totally my fault!" said Chiara Goldsmith, as she scurried cheekily off in her white boiler suit and oversized sunglasses. Before the sold-out show had even started, as the audience squeezed themselves into the basement room of Boteco, we were already deep in Róisín and Chiara's mad, mad world.What's Back to Back about? They cover the whole bloody spectrum - from love and hate to goats and wolves, comedy duos and their melodramatic aspirations, UK Garage and the Fun Lovin' Criminals. 90s kids will feel very at home in this lunacy, with references to Crazy Town's Butterfly and an exploration of the ridiculous existential questions that The Matrix posed.I loved Back to Back. There's a charm and silliness and ease in their partnership that makes them a delight to watch. From start to finish, it's hard to take your eyes off this joyous nonsense as they prowl around the stage flicking between character sketches, rap freestyles and audience interactions. Two years ago in Henry's Cellar Bar I was subject to one of Róisín O'Mahoney's legendary encounters. She had me in tears then, oscillating between terrified and tickled. And it was much the same this year, when a young man called Rufus became the object of her pathological desires.Clearly the Edinburgh audiences are into these folks, and rightly so. Boteco must have turned 20 people away at the door because there physically wasn't enough space in the room. If my review so far hasn't already convinced you to go, then go! Grab a ticket in advance though, so you don't risk being turned away like those poor chaps.I'm curious to see how Róisín and Chiara develop over the next couple of years. It's a style of performance that does well in intimate spaces, but their growing audience numbers might require them to adapt their vibe accordingly. I would also have loved to see some more new material in there. It's all absolute gold, but there was quite a lot of material from when I'd seen them two years ago. However, they still find freshness in it all, and Róisín losing her shit whilst stuffing marshmallows into her mouth was a testament to that.

At the centre of its big, warm heart, The Sea Is Big Enough to Take It is a story about a non-activist boy and his activist mother, and by extension a story about all of us and our relationships with our parents. I left asking myself: how do we become the people we become, do we make our parents proud and does that matter? In this solo debut Robin Clyfan has created a show that is as heartwarming as it is thought-provoking as it is funny.As half of the (now disbanded) comedy duo Robin and Partridge, he is clearly a talented writer and performer and is incredibly comfortable in front of an audience. The years of experience show as the performance whips along with a fluidity and pace and narrative thread that many similar stand-ups strive for but fail to reach. From the cramped interior of the top floor of Bob's Blundabus, Clyfan takes us from the dizzying highs of a billionaire's birthday party to the melancholic lows of his mother's illness and his coming to terms with her death. It's the more surreal set-pieces where Clyfan seems most comfortable: from a tragic gig at T in the Park, to a moment of cowardice at a political rally, via a demeaning image of a fat Tweetie Pie being shot at with paintballs by Britain's billionaires. He whips himself up into a frenzy and before we know it, the audience has been whipped up with him. The writing is strong too, especially in the more poignant moments with choice background music and Radio 4 clips providing a tonal counterpoint to the frenzy and partial nudity. He definitely has a way with words: "crescendo of fuckery" and "I squeeze tightly onto a battered haddock" being two of my favourite lines.This is Clyfan's debut solo show and it sometimes shows. There's nowhere to hide when you're one man with a microphone, and the transition from comedy duo and corporate MC to stand-up comedian / storyteller is a tough one. He doesn't yet seem entirely comfortable up there alone, sometimes rushing sections, sometimes stumbling over his words and not always nailing the delivery of the punchlines or emotional peaks. But this stuff comes with time, and Clyfan can certainly write. I'm curious to see how he evolves as a solo performer over the next few years, especially after this year's intensely personal show. Where do you go next?

Go and see this show right now. I just wanted to get that out before wasting any more time. Now to the review.As we walked up the winding staircase to Underbelly's Big Belly space the walls were dripping with what felt like the sweat of a thousand performers and audience members. We ducked into the venue and the air was thick. The scene was set for an intense 75 mins of possibly the best physical theatre you'll see in this year's Fringe. The Lecoq-trained company Rhum & Clay present Dario Fo's 1969 comical mystery play, Mistero Buffo, with a furious energy and technical skill that was absolutely deserving of the standing ovation it received.Julian Spooner is the Jongleur. An itinerant performer from the middle ages who is given the freedom to speak truth to power by Jesus. He roams from city to city, performing to the assembled crowds (that evening, we were his crowd), telling versions of stories from the Bible that attack the powerful in favour of the people.Fo's play, translated by Ed Emery and tweaked by Rhum & Clay, is the foundation on which a formidable performance by Spooner is built. It's the solo performance at the centre of Mistero Buffo that's remarkable here. It's the way he shapes and transforms the space as the stories and scenes unfold. It's the 100+ characters he flickers between with ever-increasing rapidity, climaxing at the resurrection of Lazarus where he conjures up an entire crowd out of thin air. As a mime he is flawless, as a storyteller he is utterly compelling. But Mistero Buffo isn't merely a technical marvel. Fo's text is subtly spun through the lens of modern itinerant and gig-economy workers, sliding this 50-year-old spectacle gently into contemporary relevance. There's nothing heavy-handed about the way that Rhum & Clay present it though: it deftly dances between the timeless and the modern.After the standing ovation had died down, Spooner did a customary 'thank you' to the audience, and mentioned the workers rights organisation (organise.org.uk) they have partnered with. The story of the Jongleur and the downtrodden people he speaks for is insanely relevant today. In fact I would have loved to see a little more of that in the piece. More relation to the "corporate-dominated post-truth world" that they talk about in the blurb. But it's a minor criticism, and the opening scene sets this up nicely.Whether you go for the political allusions and biblical deconstruction, or the spectacle of a performer at the absolute top of his game, Mistero Buffo demands your time. Buy a ticket now, before they sell out.

There are going to be two kinds of people who read this review: fans of Paul Foot, and people who are curious about Paul Foot. If you're a fan of Paul Foot then you can stop reading after the next paragraph. If you're curious about Paul Foot, you might want to hang in until the end.Image Conscious is absolute textbook Paul Foot stand-up comedy gold. His delivery is so completely perfectly 'him', and his delicately constructed rants are such a joy to experience, that all you Paul Foot fans will be delighted and should book tickets right now.For those of you who don't know Paul Foot yet, allow me to explain the levels of lunacy you can expect from this year's show. He steps out onto the stage, his trademark mullet looking magnificent, a padlock swinging from a belt loop, his neck adorned with beads, and a jacket with shoulder pieces that Grace Jones would be jealous of. He grabs the mic and the insane journey begins: from randy marmosets all the way to a reconstruction of the Oscar Pistorious trial, via suburban orgies, 1990s snooker rivalries, the Falkland Islands and Garry Lineker. It'd be too easy to dismiss Paul Foot as a ranting, rambling madman when his comedy craft is of the highest order, and I suspect that every minute of this new show has been meticulously written and refined. It's simply too intricate to be chaotic. Foot knows exactly what he's doing as he hops around the stage accusing the audience of "trying to trick" him as he lectures us on the link between put-upon fathers and soft shell crabs.There is a method to Foot's madness that you might only realise after the show is over. The callbacks come thick and fast, and he drags us down long, frustrated tangents only to pull us back out onto the narrative thread that we'd forgotten we were on. He's incredibly silly and really very sweet, often finishing a bit with a cheeky sideways grin to the audience. There was also very little to find offence with in the whole set. A few passing comments about "kids these days" and the menopause were inoffensive in Foot's hands.He's pretty surreal and frenzied, so if you don't like that sort of thing then Image Conscious probably isn't for you. If you do, then it probably is, and you should prepare yourself for some weird stuff at the Underbelly.

Great theatre often takes deeply personal experiences and weaves them together into stories and sequences that tap into a universality and profundity that the experiences alone wouldn't have been able to. That's exactly what Nouveau Riché have managed to do with Queens of Sheba, playing every day at Underbelly. In a nutshell, Rachel Clarke, Jacoba Williams, Koko Kwaku and Veronica Beatrice Lewis explore the racism and sexism that black women experience as they make their way through the world. Through spoken word and song and movement they bring the stage to life, going deep into the realities and consequences of 'misogynoir' (misogyny directed towards black women where race and gender both play roles in bias). The play is built around three everyday experiences: a job interview and subsequent job; a Tinder date with a white man called Charlie; and a night out at a club. Everywhere they encounter the same questions and the same ignorance. "Where are you from...? No, where are you FROM from?" They repeat. Their white colleagues are as clueless as their white date and the black men who try to pick them up in the club.The most powerful sequence comes towards the end when they tackle the subject of misogyny in hip-hop. "I love my abuser," they say in unison. They're caught between loving the form and the sound and the vibe of hip-hop, but hating its lyrics and the image it shows the world of them as sexual objects. And the final sequence is remarkable in its rawness.Jessica Hagan's writing (adapted by Ryan Calais Cameron) is excellent. It strikes the balance between funny, furious and emotional. The four performers play it well, moving around the stage with a fluidity and playfulness that had me completely engaged. At points I found the spoken word got in the way of the sentiment, and the singing sections would have benefitted from some harmonies instead of always being in unison. But these are minor points and don't detract from Queens of Sheba being a powerful and important piece of theatre.

Stuart Bowden has been doing this for a long time. Since his 2011 breakout collaboration with the now-legendary Doctor Brown, Dr Brown Brown Brown Brown Brown and His Singing Tiger, he has consistently produced odd little pieces of theatre that combine comedy, music, storytelling and clowning. He's been to the Fringe many times before and has toured internationally, so it was a joy to catch him at the Underbelly in Bristo Square this year.Our Molecules is a gentle little piece about an alien called Natalie. After chasing his partner, Yimka, across the universe for seven years in a spaceship controlled by his toes, he's arrived on Earth, with the express desire to kill all humans. The story is gentle and sweet, with endless tangents, asides and non-sequiturs as Bowden stumbles (intentionally) over his words, just about keeping a lid on Natalie's frustration and naive bafflement with the universe. But the story almost isn't the point here, it's Bowden's engaging performance and the scenes he builds on stage with minimal props, low-key mime and subtle lighting cues. He fills the room with his melodious voice, plucked banjos and 80s Casio keyboards, and by the end has us all singing too.At the core of the piece is a simmering disappointment (almost anger) at mankind for being so selfish, so harmful to the planet and so wrapped up in our own shit that we fail to even look at those around us. Society moulds and shapes us to be uncaring and cold, and it sometimes takes a funny little alien with a sheepskin rug and flappy little hat to help us realise that. "When you are born they tell you who is your enemy and who is your friend," goes one of Bowden's songs. The opening and closing songs about all matter and all objects just being "atoms pretending to be things" had me thinking the most. There was a beautiful dance between the profound and the trivial in Our Molecules that made for a gently enjoyable hour.

"If there are any reviewers in tonight, gimme four stars. Nah I'm only joking, it's a three star show." To be honest that's what I thought for much of the hour. It was clear that Maddix wasn't giving his all, and he even flippantly said "I'm giving 70%" as he leaned against the back wall of Monkey Barrel and took a long drag on his vape. But it was the last third of the show and his final, raw and unplanned monologue at the end that left me with goosebumps and made this so much more than just a tired performance from a great comedian.If you've seen Maddix before then you know what to expect. Most of the show is a platform for his misanthropic and entertaining rants on racism, class and sex. He talks about how the Vice show Hate Thy Neighbour (that he hosted) is ruining his career, and the effect that diving into some of the most racist communities in the world had on him. He talks about his conflicting allegiances, having grown up in working class Ilford and now living somewhere in the hipsterised heartland of London: "I want to be angry about gentrification, but at the same time it's delicious!" He talks about how easily offended liberal white people get, especially when he calls them "ham sandwich-eating devils." It's all good and funny stuff.Maddix is also well known for his aggressive and hilarious crowd work. He (pretty much always) manages to walk on the right side of the line, attacking an old white guy in the fourth row for having "'I want slave', eyes" and getting real with a dad who brought his sixteen-year-old daughter along to an eighteen-plus show: "shit's about to get fucked up." I loved these bits. Everyone seemed game, and his anger was just tempered enough to retain an edge of charm that let him get away with some pretty hairy stuff.So far, so good, but the final third was quite remarkable. He moved into some material about "white feminism versus black people" that touched on some incredibly nuanced and complex social issues. Then talked again about his Vice show, about an experience he had in the mosh pit at a white power music festival. It was here that Maddix broke from his planned material (I checked with the sound man afterwards, and he said that he'd never done that before). What followed was a dark, heartfelt monologue about his experience as a black man living in a country that feels increasingly hostile towards him and people like him. "I feel like a stranger in my own country" he said. As he took a bow and eschewed the standard bucket speech there was a palpable tension in the air. We'd seen a stand-up comedy show but we'd also seen something else: a man genuinely exploring his thoughts and feelings on stage, in front of us, in a way that was more real than most of the shows I've seen at the Fringe. In that moment I witnessed something profound, and saw a glimmer of the awesome comedian that Maddix might become. His righteous anger reminds me of a young Bill Hicks, and I reckon his job now (if he decides to continue performing) is to harness that realness and channel it into his performance. He's really good now, but he could be great.

The jig is up! Paul Williams is a quadruple threat – song, dance, comedy and opinion. The self proclaimed “most opinionated comedian in New Zealand” does it all in his show Santa Fe.Brimming with that classic laid back Kiwi charm, Williams is able to let us into his mind and transport us to the Wild West. 1882 Santa Fe to be exact, complete with cowboy hats, tumble weed, shoot-outs and a love story fit for a cheesy John Wayne western.What starts off as a standard comedy show really starts to pop off when Williams storms backstage to have a sibling inferiority-fuelled existential crisis. The show goes off on a strange tangent, turning into a search for the perfect heckle comeback. It’s no longer about setups and punchlines, instead it diverges to inner monologues, time travel and arguing with shadowy depictions of more successful brothers. But the gunslinger slips out from under his brother’s shadow before our eyes, using a projector and clicker as his main weapon.Though it sounds confusing and perhaps too much for an audience to follow, on stage, it really isn’t. Williams is supremely talented in dragging the audience along for a meta-cognitive ride without any of the irony being lost on them. He deftly combines several elements from different disciplines and mediums without missing a beat.The only thing that lets the performance down (and perhaps it’s part of Williams’ schtick), is that he seemed a bit restless to start. The performance takes a little bit too long to settle and feels a bit scattered. In saying that, the way the show comes together is hugely impressive and it’s one that will keep you smiling throughout the day.With Santa Fe, Paul Williams has established himself as one to watch out for, especially if you’re his older brother.

The back room at Dragonfly is unassuming. Rows of chairs extend backwards from an archway through which the performers do their thing. Yesterday I saw a man transform that room into a magical, ridiculous, confusing, joyful space. That man is Johannes Dullin, and he's really very very good at what he does.Come Along and Bring a Friend! is billed as a show in which "the profane plays ping-pong with the profound while reason lies chained under the table." That should give you an inkling of a beginning of the kind of thing you can expect. I don't want to give too much away, because the hour is such an unexpected brain-twisting delight that I'd prefer you went into it with few expectations. But, review it I must. It's a five star show because Dullin constantly subverts our expectations and undermines even himself. He's playing with the idea of performance and comedy, of what's real and fake and sad and funny. That's what elevates his show above the hundreds of other standard stand-ups at the Fringe. His masterful use of space, props, music and crowd work is always dancing between the profound and the ridiculous. He flicks between musings on death, nonsense verse and silly walks, all with the confidence of a man who has spent the last fourteen years working in some of the most progressive theatre and performance spaces in Europe. It's the layers of meaning and non-meaning that are remarkable here. As an audience member you're never sure what's next or what just happened. At one point in the show we closed our eyes and Dullin said: "you are everywhere and you are nowhere." I really felt like that was true! The phrase 'on acid' is much overused in reviews, but there was a real sense of that tumbling illogic that psychadelics (and profound art) can unlock in our brains.He recently performed this show at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, the birthplace of Dadaism in the early 20th century, and it's clear Dullin owes a lot to that tradition. Dadaists rebelled against logic, reason and bourgeois thinking, and Dullin does Dada for the 21st century. He's playing with the space in between comedy, theatre, clowning and performance art, and it's bloody brilliant.

Luke Rollason is a silly man who made me cry with laughter today. From the opening angler fish routine to the closing end-of-the-world sequence, I was grinning with joy throughout his Planet Earth. A couple of years in the making, this is a "low-budget, one-man nature documentary" set all the way in the terrifying future of 2019, where animals and the BBC have gone extinct. If we want to see animals, then Rollason as a "plucky (and unpaid) intern" is all we have left, aided expertly by his David Attenborough impersonator on the mic and a rack of dubious-quality office equipment. Over a chaotic hour this cheeky clown takes us on a makeshift journey through the animal kingdom. We meet Shakespearean jellyfish floating around in an imagined ocean (thanks to some beautiful mime work); horny sloths creeping around the forest; and - in the show I saw - black widow spiders confronting tree-dwelling tortoises. Sounds silly? It is, and that's the point. Rollason is a cracking clown, all wide-eyed and full of baffled energy and physical inventiveness. The nature documentary is a great frame for clown comedy. Even the well-known Planet Earth theme tune makes an appearence on a classic Casio SA-8 mini keyboard. There are some serious notes in here too, with our clown gently highlighting the mass extinctions perpetrated by mankind on the animal kingdom, and the grim inevitability of catastrophic climate change.It's often the attention to detail that elevates a great show to an amazing one, and that's what I'd love to have seen more of here. The makeshift, low-budget vibe of the desperate BBC intern was a little on the messy side, and at times it felt like Rollason was battling against his props instead of playing with them. And whilst the animal impressions were inventive, our central character of the BBC intern got a little lost in the chaos.Rollason is a great performer, and in a few years he'll be an awesome one. Check out Luke Rollason's Planet Earth at the Monkey Barrel, every day until the 26th August.

Familie Flöz are back with another beautiful, gentle and poignant piece of physical theatre. It's a delightful way to spend 90 mins. From the gorgeous opening image of a masked woman playing cello alone on a bench, to the final scene where a quartet of cheeky old men tap, slap and backflip their way into the afterlife.The shuffling shadows projected onto the stage wall that bookend Infinita are a poignant reminder of its central theme: the cyclical nature of life. In this Edinburgh Fringe premiere, the Berlin-based, world-renowned physical theatre company Familie Flöz have the perfect show to ease you into an afternoon of theatre-hopping.On walking into The Grand @ The Pleasance you're immediately plunged into Familie Flöz's world. The stage is flanked by giant tombstones and a huge chair. You already feel like a child in an adults' world. Or a mourner shuffling through a quiet graveyard. Infinita flips between these two worlds. The tumbling world of four knee-high children, exploring their environment, their boundaries and each other; and the tottering world of four crunchy old men in a retirement home, stealing pills from the nurse, playing piano and spilling their bed pans.Most of the scenes are an absolute delight to watch. The physicality of the four performers (Bjorn Leese, Benjamin Reber, Hajo Schuler, Michael Vogel) is masterful, and they absolutely nail most of the gentle set pieces: from a wrestling scene in a cot, to twiddling knobs on a radio.That's the beauty of Infinita, and of mask work in general: the ability to do so much with so little. Their faces are alive, emotions change with a flick of the head and twist of the body. It's quiet too. Really quiet. Apart from the recorded music during the projected sections, and the live music from an on-stage piano and cello, the only sounds you hear are the performers moving around the stage.In a frenetic, word-obsessed world, it's nice to sit in relative silence for a while and watch these masters at work. The show lost its way around two-thirds through with a messy scene involving some kind of rectal pump and chaos in the retirement home. And, despite a beautiful moment of physical prowess in front of a graveside and an entertaining final scene, I was left with a feeling of incompleteness. But, perhaps that's what they wanted. The show is called Infinita after all.Familie Flöz are relentless tourers, and Infinita is two years old now. There's a slight sense of weariness behind the physical beauty. A lack of edge and energy that their Teatro Delusio (at the Fringe in 2016) had in spades. But don't let that put you off. It's a gorgeous show that is well worth 90 mins of your time and £14.50 of your money. Also, if you find someone who has already been, you can grab a 10%-off voucher.

Dangerous Giant Animals is a one-person show about growing up with a disabled sibling, based on writer/performer Christina Murdock's real life experiences. As she says at the end of the show, this kind of 'everyday tragedy' is rare to see portrayed on the stage or screen. As audiences, we're trained to be moved by deaths and fights, war and heartbreak. This is a play that definitely gets you thinking and promotes plenty of discussion afterwards, and it's clearly a piece that resonated with some of the parents and children in the audience. I found it interesting, but it ultimately failed to move me, lacking the finesse and energy that could have made it greater.Claire is a middle child, sandwiched between her older sister who is about to go off to college, and her younger sister, Kayla, who has cerebral palsy and epilepsy and seems destined to remain in a child-like state for most of her life. Kayla loves dinosaurs, lions and the colour purple. She likes squirty cream and struggles to express herself with a limited vocabulary. Over the hour, Murdock takes us on a time-hopping journey from tantrums at dinner to college opera recitals. As Claire and Kayla age, their relationship twists and turns, until, for a brief moment, they end up becoming dangerous giant animals themselves.The script is engaging, if a little overwritten, and Murdock builds her world on stage pretty convincingly. But I left feeling like there were missed opportunities here. This is a play about intense pain and love and tragedy in the everyday, but Murdock didn't commit fully enough to any of those emotions to take her audience through them with her. The performance is billed as a 'darkly comedic show' but wasn't particularly funny or dark. There are a lot of strong themes touched on in her story that I'd have loved to see further explored. How did this all change her as an individual or as a performer? What profound impacts did Kayla have on what I assume (I could be wrong) to be a relatively 'normal' white, middle class North American upbringing? For me, the character of Claire needs more depth, more light and shade, more questioning of her place in the world and more exploration of the impact that Kayla has had on her. Murdock ends the play with a question: "why are certain tragedies deemed to be satisfying?" Whilst Dangerous Giant Animals is definitely worth a watch for the fresh subject matter alone, I think this question is really pertinent. The challenge with a piece like this is to find the universal and transcendent in the everyday, and I don't think Murdock quite found it here.

I was transfixed. Before this theatre, music and spoken word mashup had even started the actors were milling around, testing the monitors, sound checking, chatting with people they recognised in the audience. The space felt alive, as if something exciting and different and real was about to emerge.Then Jessie (Olivia Sweeney) started twirling around the stage set deep in the round of the Queen Dome. She's bouncing around in her Nike trainers and Adidas jacket like Alex Turner's little sister, getting pumped up for a big night out in Leeds with her best pals. "I need to lose myself in something else", she says. "Something dirty. Vodka in hand, coke up my nose." I was in. I'd been dragged into Jessie's chaotic world and there wasn't a moment in the subsequent 70 minutes when I wasn't completely captivated.Electrolyte is so much more than a hedonistic, energetic piece of gig theatre. As I wiped the tears from my eyes and joined the immediate standing ovation (literally everyone in the audience stood up as soon as it finished) I really felt like I'd been on a journey with Jessie. From the Leeds apartment party with singer-songwriter Allie Touch, to a marriage proposal in a maths classroom, to the London squat with Jim the DJ, we were with her every step of the way. She bounced from drug and adrenaline-fuelled highs to confused and tragic lows, perfectly capturing the confused, reactive visceral existence of youth.Sweeney is absolutely fucking phenomenal as Jessie. She so totally inhabits this broken and beautiful character that at times I forgot I was watching a play. I've not seen a performance this epic in a long time. With total commitment to every second she held the space and the audience completely. The rest of the cast were also superb as Jessie's friends, family and enemies. They weren't just a backing band or supporting characters, they were real and sincere and alive in the space too, giving each other little winks and nods, playing with the space in between the action. You could be forgiven for feeling a little nervous about seeing this one: a play about one woman's struggle with psychosis, with a live band on stage, short rave scenes, all performed in verse with basically no set. But it was beautiful, largely thanks to James Meteyard's sensitive and intense writing; Maimuna Memon's lyrics and music; and Donnacadh O'Briain's awesome directing.This is exciting theatre! This is what it must have felt like when audiences first watched Shakespeare. The verse tumbles out of their mouths as they build an entire world on stage, tackling massive, timeless and contemporary issues with bravery and tenderness.As the play draws to a close Jessie implores us, the audience, to look after the ones we love. To invite someone round for a cuppa when they're feeling down. To tell someone they look good today. To be there when people need us. At the core of Electrolyte is a true story of pain and healing, and it shows. Just make sure you don't book anything immediately afterwards, as you're going to need some time to recover.

I was excited about Flies. An award-winning theatre company. A sold-out show. An eager looking crowd. A delicious cheese toastie in preparation. I was ready to be swept away on an absurdist wave. Sadly, Les Enfants Terribles and Pins & Needles didn't quite deliver on their promises of leaving my "skin crawling with fear and mind buzzing with excitement." It was definitely absurdist. Definitely energetic. But it never quite managed to draw me into its world as much as I'd hoped.Flies is billed as an absurdist tale. You can expect moral ambiguity, a non-traditional plot structure, and plenty of odd human (and fly) behaviour. The plot focuses upon Dennis (George Readshaw), who is terrified of flies. Dennis is so terrified of the titular insect, that he's sealed himself in his house, taping up the cracks in the walls and doors. A suave fly (Piers Hampton) in a tuxedo delights in telling the audience how he "took a sh*t on your food", all because he doesn't like you. Flies is about a bored psychiatrist (also Piers Hampton) who may or may not be a figment of Dennis's crazed imagination. It features three blokes on a stage running around for an hour, making music, playing different characters, and narrating action as they go.The tuxedoed fly bookends the play with effective and creepy monologues about Old Mother Hubbard, starving children in Africa, and crawling into your ear to lay maggots in your brain. The live-mixed music (by Kid Carpet) and foley work (by Harry Humberstone) is excellent, and punctuates the narration and action with heck-tons of energy. The energy remains high throughout the whole piece, which is also one of the things I struggled with. For a show with so much inventiveness it often fell flat. The frantic scenes failed to reach into the realms of the truly absurd. The space felt messy, instead of wilfully chaotic.I needed a bit more from Flies. The fat-shaming gags, mildly sexist vibes, poverty references and mental-health tropes were a little heavy-handed. This kind of commentary can alienate rather than entertain, and I don't want to just laugh at cheap gags. I need more nuance, even, especially when looking through the lens of the absurd.