Top Five Misery Shows

Today, I am in a bad mood. It has come about because I am trying to write as many top five recommendations as I can before the Fringe, each with an idiosyncratic theme. I just did WAR, have eight more in draft form, as I try to mine my inbox for appropriate content. The one on the 1960s is getting desperate. 


So, pop-pickers, here's a selection from the Fringe for the bitter and twisted.

In at number five, it's the Fringe favourite funny man, Dusty Limits. I've been shouting about Dusty for years - when he did a solo show at the Spiegeltent a few years ago, it was like an object lesson in New Cabaret's potential to be spiteful, soulful and sharp. Limits himself can sing and barb his punchlines like  Lucifer's own MC: that there is a fierce morality behind his assaults on civilisation and puritanism only adds to his precision. 


Interestingly, this show is on the free Fringe. While I am reluctant to call Dusty either a legend or a veteran - he's too young to be either - it's telling that he is heading over to the Laughing Horse. He's going to be at the Bongo Club, too, for the first fortnight, and I'd recommend seeing how he hosts: few artists can be so scathing and so generous at the same time.


Post-Mortem is rumoured to be his final Fringe show, so the usual wicked jollity might be tinged with melancholy. It's based around Dusty's (fictional) death, too. On those days when I mourn cabaret's failed potential, I'll get out my picture of Dusty and sing along to his bleak ballads. 


Counting House Ballroom, 2 – 19 August (not 6, 13), 8.15pm


The subject of an article in the August Skinny, Amy Lame is having an Unhappy Birthday. Frankly, it's her own fault for being born in January in the first place, and then becoming a fan of The Smiths. Directed by Scottee (another one of the cabaret gang who gets that Live Art savagery can be a good addition to vaudeville) and starring Lame, who runs the cult night Duckie in London, the show pretty much hopes that Morrissey is going to turn up, and fills in the time with party games and tales from Lame's life to date.


Last time she did a solo show, she pretended that she's be abducted by Mama Cass, so I am not sure I am going to believe a word she says: luckily, she is charismatic, funny and smart, so the truth can be ignored.


That suggests that Lame ought to go into politics: a disregard for truth hidden by style. Well, she'd be better than Boris and her parties are a lot more wholesome than the ones attended by some Scottish Socialists. 


Assembly 3, George Square,2-26 August. Previews 2 & 3 August @18:40 




I know that I am cheating. These shows won't leave me unhappy. Lame tends to be life-affirming and even Limits is awesome, especially when he gets nasty. However, number three ought to do it...

Caesarian Section - Essays on Suicide by Teatr Zar: proper Polish physical theatre, Polyphonic Corsican songs with fragments from Bulgaria, Romania, Chechen tunes and Icelandic laments. I saw Zar a few years back and they performed in the dark - my highlight was when they switched out all the lights and dug a grave in the floor, while reading out bits of Gnostic texts. 


I've been told that the company rehearses from dawn each day, and they are intense in a way that is rare, even in my beloved world of Live Art. It's disappointing that Caesarian Section does go into the will to survive - the tome will probably be more melancholic beauty than crushing despair. 


I am probably not selling this, but the truth is that Zar are the company I am most excited to see at the Fringe. Enjoying theatre is all well and good, but these guys gave me memories and made me think that there is a God. 






Summerhall, 9- 20 August @ 7pm




Here's the thing: much as I want to believe that theatre can express every mood, I don't think it can do misery. Take King Lear, three hours of parental abuse, eye-popping and killing, topped off with Shakespeare's most trenchant meditations on life and corruption. Or Waiting for Godot. They are supposed to be about the pain, but we end up walking out, commending a performance or the cleverness of the direction. For real anguish, it would be better to watch the Skeptic's events on the Free Fringe, where they pretend that all Christians have absurd beliefs about creation, or Robert Ince showing off that he read a book about science in a comedy venue somewhere. These guys know how to ramp up the cosmic terror, picturing a world without the divine.


Better yet, go and see a failing production by students in Week Three of the Fringe. That gives a taste of pain, what with each cast member probably three grand in the hole, crying over the one star reviews from Three Weeks and entering the late stages of scurvy, having eaten nothing but bacon rolls for the month.




And in at number two, it's a contemporary horror story. The Economist examines the personal psychology and public portrayal of far-right Norwegian terrorist and mass murderer Anders Breivik. The trailer on their website is the stuff of nightmares.

Writer Tobias Manderson-Galvin says that the show "cuts open the head of a cold, violent, politically-motivated mass killer – it doesn’t give answers to why this happened, but it asks questions of those who pushed Breivik to the edge." And on the question of the timing of the show - the incident is pretty fresh - he is circumspect. "I agree with the Adorno argument that “to make poetry in the face of atrocity is barbaric” but at the same time, I think it only holds true of people making art that is either supports the atrocity or serves to distract from it."


Rightfully, he points out that the media didn't wait to comment, and that art has no obligation to let the dust settle. "There is no “too soon” to make art that confronts and exposes the atrocity head on. We are making art that endeavours to understand how Breivik’s horrific acts occurred, so we can prevent their repeat."


Then again, there is a quotation on their press release that calls the play "guiltily entertaining," which serves my contention that theatre struggles to represent the unpleasant. Or possibly suggests that theatre critics are pricks. But Manderson-Galvin has a clear vision of theatre's potential and how The Economist fits in.


"The story continues today as Norway continues to live this tragedy through the imprisonment of Breivik and the complexities of his trial," he explains. "The play takes the position that he’s not a crazy person – he’s a terrorist, with terrorist beliefs, and trying to write him off as a lone psycho ignores the ideological circumstances that created him and can create more white, Western terrorists in his place."


"Theatre is a place where all the wonderful and all the terrible parts of existence can exist without any of us having to fear the results of the actual event taking us to death. Theatre is a place where “Breiviks” can talk to the audience; we can play computer games with Norse Gods; we can get plastic surgery to look more Aryan; we can live as Breivik did… and ask ourselves what is different – if anything’s different – and just what might lead someone like us to do something like this."

C Venue, 2 -27 August @ 1.30pm

At number one, I almost feel obliged to select a mainstream show - maybe a musical, maybe a popular comedian - but that's a cheap trick and would involve thinking. Instead, I am going to suggest listening in to my podcasts from the Fringe. If my voice doesn't bring home all the anguish in the world, I don't think you are listening closely enough: the tone of this piece might suggest a theatre critic losing faith in the possibility of his favourite art form to express certain emotions.

Then again, if theatre really could communicate misery, it would just be a bit shit. I am strangely consoled.