Muck, puppets, live tattoos, politics, turkey basters, loss, violence and mud. I’ve spent the last week stuffing my days with theatre, comedy, clowning and shows that defy categorization at the Edinburgh fringe. We all know the massive financial issues with the fringe, but there is nowhere else - particularly now that the Vault Festival has shutdown - that I get a chance to see so much, so widely, so fast.
I was mainly there to review for the Guardian (and I did my first panel event!), but I wanted to share a handful of LGBTQ+ shows that are very much worth your time and protective plastic ponchos. Here’s part one: sweet songs in gay bars, flying pigs, hot vampires and a political tale drenched in mud.
Part two, coming soon: urinated gloop, gay Catholics, a rage against the Arts Council, freakishly strong ventriloquists and queer parents. Subscribe to get the next email, so you can imagine I’m hand-delivering them to your sofa with a coffee and asking you what you make of all these shows too.
I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar
For one shining hour each day, Holly Redford Jones transforms this dark sweaty cavern into a lesbian bar - the only one, she tells us, in Edinburgh. This stand-up-with-songs is a gentle pleasure, with the intimate feel of a friend telling you a funny story at the pub, interspersed with entertaining the whole room with a song, her lyrics sharp and vocals sultry.
Immediately welcoming, Redford Jones’ laid-back performance deviates from her script whenever anything in the room delights or distracts her. At one point she’s building up to a song and one of her friends in the front row starts laughing before she’s said anything. “Sorry,” the friend whispers, shoulders shaking, “I know what’s coming.”
Redford Jones’ storytelling deftly blends her own experience of growing up gay with her romanticization of lesbian bars, while acknowledging the ways they have been exclusionary too. These days, the word ‘lesbian’ often feels like it’s being torn away by TERFS, so let’s be clear: there’s no space for that nonsense here. In fact, there’s a song about that too.
I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar, 19.25, Belly Laugh at Underbelly, Cowgate, until August 24
“This is the fucking weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” a man behind me whispers. You can see his point. With sunburnt faces and silver eyes, Lou Doyle and Trevor White, stand before us to welcome us onto a plane. Pointing out the exits, they warn that this demented performance is for “big boy audiences” only.
Our hosts are two little pigs who dream of flying. Dressed as flight attendants with layers of PVC beneath, they remove their plastic pig noses to pose as humans, tricking their way onto a budget flight. What they unleash onboard is a messy collision of clowning, dance, Beckettian dialogue and pissed, horny adults sneaking onto a bouncy castle after dark.
A scene at the end just about ties together the preceding hour, but for the most part, this is a tornado of feral energy let loose and slathered with baby oil. Nonstop’s Untapped Award will be drawing audiences who have never seen anything like this before. What a wild way to have their horizons broadened.
Pigs Fly Easy Ryan, 20.10, Iron Belly at Underbelly, Cowgate, until 24 August
Count Dykula is as gloriously silly as it sounds. With fake boobs, quick changes and a mischievous sense of humor, this camp musical comedy had me cackling the whole way through. I would have happily stayed seated and watched it all over again, immediately.
All butch loner Count Dykula wants is to be allowed to be herself, without having to fit the human image of female vampires with long hair and big tits. But when her latest conquest in the woods fails to recognise what and who she is, she decides to enroll at Scare University, run by her nemesis, the femme vampire Scarlett Fang.
No one’s in this for the plot. Racing across the stage, Rosanna Suppa, Eleanor Colville and Robbie Taylor Hunt conjure a host of outrageous characters that toy with tropes of high school horrors. There are moping ghosts, zombie cheerleaders and a heartbreaking goblin who just wants to be involved. With a grumpy huff and belting vocals, Suppa’s Count Dykula sweats charisma.
The laughs are loud and consistent, and after all that talk of being a lone wolf, the show turns out the be about the friends we made along the way. I’m gutted I didn’t have a chance to see the other show Airlock Theatre has at the fringe, Lesbian Space Crime. This trio have clearly created a winning formula.
Count Dykula, 17.30, Ace Dome at Pleasance Dome, until 25 August
“Your little brother. It’s delicate.”
Francis is rough with Tom from the first touch. He clasps him by the neck with a spat-out threat, their muscular bodies silhouetted sharply in the dusty orange light.
Tom (Armando Babaioff, also the show’s adaptor and translator) has come to Francis’ farm to grieve his boyfriend, Francis’ brother. Their relationship was a secret, but Francis knew some man would come along some day. Posing as a friend, Tom is allowed to stay because he makes the boys’ mum (Denise Del Vecchio) happier.
Throughout this extraordinary, savage show, Francis (an imposing, intolerant Iano Salomão) has a hold over Tom, hurling him around and repeatedly caking him in the red mud that slathers Aurora dos Campos’ large, flat stage. But with each push away, the unlikely pair are drawn back together.
Both men are ferocious to watch, as repressed attraction explodes through violence. When Francis walks across the stage towards Tom, it is impossible to know if he plans to kiss or hit him. The wide expanse of the set is empty of everything but farmyard buckets and a heavy metal pulley-swing. The dust rises with every fall, thump and embrace.
Not allowed to grieve openly, it cracked me open to see Tom giving his words to his love’s imaginary girlfriend, to watch him holding himself back, and for it to never be enough. There’s always a glimmer of his queerness that risks seeping through. Director Rodrigo Portella’s brutal, blazing production was made in the context of Brazil having the highest number of LGBTQ+ murders in the world. Originally a Canadian play by Michel Marc Bouchard, then a film, Babaioff adapted it in 2017 so that we now watch the story in Portuguese with English surtitles.
When Camila Nhary comes in, assuming the role of the girlfriend to the dead man, she brings with her a slice of the outside world. We see how Tom has been transformed, with Francis’ coarse cruelty starting to rub off on him like the sticky red mud that covers his skin.
Almost more bruising than the febrile violence is the diminishment of hope in this world, this country, this time. On the farm, this life becomes all Tom is able to hope for. This is the extent of the love he is offered, wrapped up as it is in constant punishment, rejection and pain. This is what he is allowed. This is the proximity he can have to the family that he would, in another life, be handed without such bloody sacrifice.
Tom at the Farm, 15.30, Lennox Theatre at Pleasance at EICC, until 24 August
Part two of my LGBTQ+ fringe recommendations coming soon. Sign up to get them straight to your email.