US Beef, Pleasance Dome

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Fest Magazine.

Ever wondered how your burger got from cow to cardboard container? It’s certainly not the first time the ethically dubious practices of fast food corporations have been on the agenda, but Missing String Theatre Company manages to broach such issues with fresh laughter in this satirical take on America’s fiercely consumerist obsession with cheap meat.

Central character Buck, our narrator of sorts, starts at the bottom of the fat-oiled corporate ladder as a door to door meat salesman for the oddly unsavoury sounding Meatbox, a corporate monster promising a pseudo-democratic vision of meat for the masses. Through his personal story of grubby corporate climbing, Missing String deploys its satirical barbs using a wacky blend of comedy, drama and country music. From soulless marketing speak to the hypocrisy of the supposedly ethical consumer, little emerges unscathed.

This is also a satire in which the consumer, and therefore the audience, is deeply implicated. As one fast food outlet employee accusatorily tells us, we are “the cog that turns this machine,” the demand that drives the increasingly unethical supply.

This dirty complicity, however, is not taken as far as it could be. By making only half-hearted attempts at addressing spectators, Missing String neglects an opportunity to make the audience squirm and, as a result of that discomfort, think. It might make you pause before tearing off that next chunk of meat, but this is unlikely to create many vegetarians.

It’s Not You, It’s Me

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

Six days, countless cups of tea and two free mojitos into my first fringe, it might be a tad early to start making any valuable observations about the small phenomenon that gobbles up Edinburgh for a few weeks every summer. One thing that is difficult to ignore, however, is the small army of reviewers who colonise the place, stamping our presence with ratings and pull-quotes as fast as they can be frantically stapled onto flyers. An exploded version of the national theatre ecosystem, the fringe is a beast that is fed and bloated by the star system.

So it feels strange to be sitting in a room, in Edinburgh, questioning what this is all in aid of. I’m at St Stephen’s, the theatrical haven crafted by Northern Stage within the stonework of the old church, participating in something of an experiment. This is the first excursion of Dialogue, Maddy Costa and Jake Orr’s project to cultivate and curate discussions between critics and theatremakers. Making a change from the endless tapping at my laptop keyboard, I’m here not to write but to talk.

The loose theme of the morning is the things that we, as critics or as theatremakers, don’t tell one another. While the discussions open in a fairly free-form structure, with individuals posing questions about preparation, objectivity and expertise, this later moves into a series of provocations. In a striking display of honesty, Maddy and Unfolding Theatre’s artistic director Annie Rigby each write down and then read aloud the statements that they don’t talk about, statements that I’m forced to hastily read before running off early to get to a show, but that stick to me like barbs.

Despite emerging from the artist’s perspective, many of Annie’s points strike potently at my own concerns about how I approach and write about theatre. They speak not of anger or antagonism, but of an aching disappointment that we don’t do this better.

“How long do you spend writing a review? How soon after a show do you write it? Are you happy with this?”

“Can we make some space to talk about what you got right and wrong? Like, if you could rewrite one review, what would it be?”

“I’m giving your review 3 stars. Don’t be disheartened. 3 stars is a good review.”

“I know you’ve got a word limit, but now we’re together it would be great to talk about that sentence you wrote.”

But the statement that lodged itself most firmly in my mind was Maddy’s: “it’s not you, it’s me”. Much as it made me laugh, this also seemed to me like a bold and stark unveiling of a widely accepted lie within criticism, an extension of the fallacy of objectivity that I found myself speaking about earlier in the morning. Because sometimes, amongst all the other unacknowledged baggage that finds its way into the auditorium, a critic just isn’t in the right frame of mind to productively respond to a certain piece of theatre.

In Edinburgh this, as with everything else, is heightened. Schedules are tighter, word limits are shorter, synapses are more impaired. With perhaps as little as an hour to wrench out a review and slap on a star-rating, carefully considered analysis begins to lose its foothold. More and more superfluous stuff finds its way into the performance space: fatigue, an awareness of where to rush off to next, a creeping dread of the mounting backlog. It’s not a popular admission to make, despite the evidence of the voluminous bags under our eyes, but sometimes we’re just tired. It’s not the fault of the work, it’s a simple fact.

One of the few certainties that I do have at this early interlude in my fringe experience is a hopeless, head-over-heels, bad-poetry-writing love for the intense, bubble-like intimacy of Edinburgh at this time of the year. I love bumping into people I know, having the conversations about theatre that we usually put off, stumbling into real-life, in-depth discussions with people who I usually only engage with in bite-sized snippets of electronic communication. All of this I adore. It is only the writing, or rather my own writing and its occasional rushed inadequacy, that I am in danger of falling a little out of love with.

So there we are. It’s not you, it’s me. But I’m not ready to give up on this particular relationship just yet. Perhaps we can take a break, or maybe we can still be friends. Perhaps, as I felt in that room at St Stephen’s smashing down barriers and facing difficult truths, we can even start over.

The Hand-Me-Down People, C nova

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Fest Magazine.

There’s something suspiciously familiar about New Theatre’s tale of growing old and awaiting the inevitable. On a dusty shelf in a children’s playroom, a collection of discarded figurines immerse themselves in memories and stories, gloomily waiting for the day when they will either be rescued or thrown away. Already there’s a whiff of Toy Story about it.

This new piece by Adam H Wells essentially covers much of the same ground. His forlorn toy characters feast on nostalgia, a delicacy that the piece seems to protest is no longer tasted. The children who once adored them are now fixated on video games, leaving the abandoned toys to bicker among themselves and contemplate the end.

There is something quietly mournful about the replacing of the old with the shiny, computerised new, but Wells’ writing lacks the nuance to unpack any new insight. Instead, cliché is given a few amusing facelifts and metaphorical resonances are glaringly signposted. Committed performances from the cast pick up some of the script’s slack, but their efforts are not enough to produce more than a few weak laughs.

While there are a couple of potentially powerful truths in the toys’ purgatorial state, it is hard to shake the feeling that we have been here before. As one weary character recognises, “you can’t play the same tunes all the time; they get old.” It’s an observation this piece might have done well to heed.

The Darkroom, C nova

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Fest Magazine.

To pass on your memories is to achieve immortality. This, at least, is the fascinating premise of this new piece by Ellen Carr and Witness Theatre, an interrogation of the way we remember. Asking questions about the memories we leave behind us and how they add up to a life, we are presented with a shed, scraps of paper, a pair of slippers, a photograph: clues to be assembled.

But these various different jigsaw pieces don’t quite slot together. There is, at the work’s core, an intriguing idea to be pulled apart around the way that memories work and how they survive us, but this potential is never quite grasped by the production. Instead, the company’s creative curiosity has led it down too many different avenues, playing with a range of aesthetics that are interesting in isolation but fail to fully mesh.

There are some striking moments that emerge from the experimentation. Tightly choreographed movement conveys the jolting monotony of remembered routine, while the fragmentary nature of memory is hinted at through snippets of film projected inventively onto a range of surfaces: a box, a tablecloth, a folder. The execution, however, is uneven.

At one point, Carr’s script delves into psychology, describing the vast unexplored terrain that still exists in the human mind. Is this a gap or a possibility? Carr has certainly seized on a captivating possibility, but it feels like a regrettably wasted one.

I Heart Hamas: And Other Things I’m Afraid to Tell You, The Point Hotel

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for Fest Magazine.

There is something about nationality that makes us distinctly uncomfortable. American Palestinian Jennifer Jajeh has noticed this discomfort more than most, having spent her life trying to set people at ease about a national identity that many refuse to even recognise. One baffling question keeps recurring: “what are you?”

This intimate solo show is an attempt by Jajeh to define just what and who she is, a definition refracted through where she is from. Charting her heritage and returning to her family’s hometown, she is searching for a place in which she makes sense, a search that takes her right to the core of the conflict that characterises how people see her.

Jajeh, a naturally warm and candid performer, communicates this search through sketches, projections and direct address, engaging with humour to make her points. The result is at times messy, and relies a little too heavily on a recurring visual gimmick created by Jajeh to fill the gaps in her scenes, but it is impossible not to become wrapped up in this pursuit of selfhood.

While Jajeh’s experiences in Palestine have made her a deeply political individual, the very personal piece she has crafted is as much about identity and origins as it is about the specific afflictions faced by her nation. Like the piece, her sense of identity is fractured by her dual national identity and the repeated assaults on her roots. In the right conditions, Jajeh is arguing, anybody can snap.