Coriolanus Vanishes by David Leddy – Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

The first thing you notice about Coriolanus Vanishes, is the way it looks. A woman in a suit sits at a desk against a background that is a shifting field of colour. When she opens the desk drawer, a strange light emerges. Her glass glows from the inside. She illuminates herself and the audience with a fluorescence tube and lamps with shaped beams of light. The lighting, by Nich Smith, in combination with Becky Minto’s deceptively simply set, is distinctive and fascinating. However, it does not dominate, but complements Irene Allan’s one-woman performance as Chris, in prison for reasons that only eventually become apparent, after three people close to her have died.

When it premiered last year Coriolanus Vanishes was performed by its author, David Leddy. The switch to a woman is such a success that it is hard to imagine a different version, and it creates an unusual lead role in which the character’s bisexuality is not the focus. Irene Allan tells us a story, scene-by-scene, which encompasses personal and political moral conflict, the theme of private versus public examined in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The play neatly incorporates quotes from its antecedent, but the story belongs to Irene Allan. Her character has a sweet Scottish charm which, increasingly disintegrates as she reveals her grim background and the things she has done. The writing is pin-sharp, dealing with grief, anger, addiction and death in ways that are  entirely believable and, as a result, all the more terrifying. The play links Chris’s personal turmoil with her politically toxic job selling arms to the Saudis. Leddy works hard to integrate the elements of home and work that we, in the West, have the luxury of keeping separate. The production is visually stunning and driven by Irene Allan’s powerful performance. It ends with a feat of physical theatre which takes the audience completely by surprise, and leaves them open-mouthed.

Everything Not Saved by Malaprop Theatre – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Malaprop Theatre’s new show is about the unreliability of memory in a time of relentless recording. Although the digitised world generates endless versions of ourselves, we have come to realise they only serve to obscure any idea of truth. We will exist after we have gone, but Everything Not Saved aims to show that any version of the self we recognise will be long gone.

The show questions our ability to distinguish reality in any meaningful way at all. While the subject has potential, Malaprop’s approach seems underdeveloped and lacking focus. Three performers act out tangentially related scenes, on a set with stage manager who continually intrudes. They skip from the recreation of Princess Elizabeth’s first broadcast, to an training interview for officers interviewing children about abuse to an audition to play Rasputin. This eclecticism, while entertaining, reveals the fundamental problem behind the show, that it cannot decide what it wants to say. A range of semi-related subjects, including competing versions of history, conflicting memories of experience events, the nature of digital memory and the playing of roles. Too much ground is covered for any clarity to emerge, and the dancing Rasputin finale does not provide enough distraction to make up for this.

Lights Over Tesco Car Park by Poltergeist Theatre – Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh

The four young performers behind this show are enthusiastic, but their attempts to inject energy cannot disguise the fact that their material is extremely weak. Based on emails and then meetings with a man claiming to have seen strange lights over the Tesco car park in Magdalen Street, Oxford, the central narrative leads nowhere. The space is filled with self-consciously wacky costumes, anything and everything ‘space’ related, and the relation of randomly selected historical accounts of UFO encounters. Relentless audience participation seems to have no purpose except to fill out scenes. The show lacks purpose, direction and self-awareness, and the result is a production that is studenty for the wrong reasons.

Spaces – Sweet Grassmarket, Edinburgh

Spaces is a four-hander about the multiple stresses and pressures of being young and female. It is staged with a certain  imagination, and the four women who perform it are engaging and committed. However, their material has a level of earnestness that quickly becomes patronising. Playing university students, each struggles with personal difficulties (anxiety, divorcing parents, sexuality, religion, race) but learn that supporting one other is essential to tackle their problems. Lacking nuance beyond the bright-eyed message that we all need to listen to one another and that it is ok to be different, the show provides explanation rather than insight. The effect is close to watching a public information film.

Another One by Lobke Leirens and Maxim Storms – Summerhall, Edinburgh

On the evidence of their Edinburgh show, Another One, Maxim Storms and Lobke Leirens are geniuses. They spend an hour performing, mostly without  words, as an elderly couple in fur hats, who appear to live in a teepee. They may be Russian, but there is no way of knowing as they are entirely focused on one another. They act out sequences of mutual dependence, both affectionate and violent, moving in a style that makes them seem like poorly-wired marionettes. The two nameless characters live through a series of  baffling and fascinating ritual. They play a high-speed, aggressive card game. Storms slaps Leirens in the face repeatedly, harder than the audience is comfortable with. Later, she slams him into a plywood wall thirty times in a row. The climactic scene, if such an unconventional production could be said to have one, involves Leirens dressed in shamanic furs, eating a dead something – bird, weasel or both – raw. The action is entirely unpredictable, and formalised to the point of being surreal. It is also funny and upsetting in equal measure.

The two performers inhabit their strange roles with complete physical commitment, and a degree of startling originality that marks them out as theatre makers to follow. Big in Belgium, always responsible for some of the strangest and best Summerhall productions, has brought Storms and Leirens to the Fringe and their show is exactly what Edinburgh needs to unsettle, confuse and provoke. It may be an acquired taste, but Another One is absolutely unlike anything else at the Fringe, or indeed anything else at all, and that is some achievement.

Void by V/DA and MHZ – Summerhall, Edinburgh

J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island is a classic critique of the car-dominated city. A driver crashes on a traffic island in West London, and finds himself as marooned as on a desert island. Dancer Mele Broomes has taken on a text that is both white and male, and reclaimed it as a black, female performer. Against a chainlink fence, she tells the story through an intense, physical and confrontational dance piece. She works in collaboration with MHz (Bex Anderson and Dav Bernard). Their digital projections dominated by flickering analogue-style interference, are an alienating and beautiful backdrop that switches from blue seas to glaring yellow sun and off-channel tv. Car lights flash by and tires squeal on a pounding, electronic soundtrack. As it becomes clear that Angela (Broomes’ character) will not be rescued, she stops her frantic attempts to escape (climbing the fence, using her high heels) and looks within herself as her dancing becomes more fluid and confident.

Choreographed, as well as performed, by Broomes, Void is a highly original piece which slams into the audience like a vehicle leaving the motorway at speed. Broomes’ dancing is magnetic, and the show is unforgettable and uncompromising, cleverly bringing a work from a different time careering into the 21st century.

Square Go by Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Writers Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair have strong Edinburgh records, and they join together at Summerhall for a play which generates serious late night energy. The round auditorium becomes a wrestling ring, as Max (Scott Fletcher) and Stevie (Gavin Jon Wright) prepare for a school fight. Playing teenagers with a love of 1980s wrestling stars, the two wear singlets but the opponent Max is preparing to face (in a ‘square go’) is school bully Danny, who he has accidentally upset.

The writing is very tight, effortlessly recreating the ’80s Scottish school experience, rich in dialect. We are immersed in a world where nothing is more terrifying or more important than facing up to Danny in the right way. The performers relish the area-like space, bringing the audience onside and demonstrating how easily the mob mentality can be triggered. The Roundabout’s mini-lighting rig is at full stretch, and the soundtrack pounds. However, the play has no illusions about the damage caused by macho posturing. Its compassionate clear understanding of the family background that leads to a boy becoming a bully leads to an inevitable conclusion, that the ‘square go’ is not the sacred school ritual it seems, but a pointless spectacle that must be overcome.

Margo: Half Woman, Half Beast – Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh

Margo Lion was a singer and cabaret performer in Weimar Berlin, who loved Marlene Dietrich and Marcellus Schiffer, her partner whose songs she sang. Cabaret was the symbol of the era, dark but liberated performance in a city sliding unstoppably into fascism. As the Nazis took power, Margo took refuge in booze and cocaine, but her song offered up a continuing resistance.

A little known figure, her story is expertly performed by singer Melinda Hughes, as a cabaret show. From the relative safety of her apartment, Margo observes unrest on the streets and sings the songs that once made her famous. Margo is essentially a cabaret show,  and the story is a vehicle for Hughes’ dark-hued voice, accompanied by pianist Michael Roulston. Songs include new material alongside songs of the time, by Schiffer and Kurt Weill. It is a classy, if polite, evening that deservedly revives the story of a woman whose appeal to be “Sincere and queer in Berlin” is, sadly, more suited to the 21st century than the notorious era when she was in her prime.

Chase Scenes by Ming Hon – King’s Hall, Edinburgh

Three women spend an hour recreating, with barely a pause, sixty separate movie chase scenarios. They dash from one set-up to the next, scattering costumes and scenery, while filming each other on mobile phones, the footage projected on screens behind. Each scene is announced with a title – such as ‘Axe’ or ‘Nightmare’ – but removed from its context. The production literally cuts to the chase again and again, focusing on the physical process not only of being chased – in terror, determination, play, or transgression – but also on the process of filming each scene.

While the ambience is home-made and, on the surface, amateurish, it soon become clear that the show is a miracle of timing and coordination. Intensely choreographed, Chase Scenes is more than just a piece of fun. The low budget aesthetic is often very funny, from toy police car chases to the strategic use of plastic fronds to simulate a jungle. The centrepiece of the show is ‘Parkour’, a very silly attempt at simulating parkour that spills off stage onto the balcony and then out into the foyer.

The inherent misogyny of cinema is also played out for the audience, as the nature of a chase is inevitably examined. A substantial proportion of the scenes involve a woman being chased, with violent intent. Devised by Ming Ho and performed by her with Hilary Crist and Alexandra Elliott, Chase Scenes is conceptually brilliant and ingeniously performed. It succeeds simultaneously as entertainment and critique, like a piece of installation art.