Five Star Shows

Once upon a time, the quest was to find that Five Star Fringe show. Yesterday, an overheard conversation:

"It's a five star show... please take a flyer."
"Everything has five stars this year. That doesn't mean anything."

Be clear: it's over. The fascination with stars is the product of a community caught in a bubble. Star ratings only have meaning to performers and critics. Audiences no longer care.

The joy of this blog is that I never worked out a way of giving star ratings. I am going to introduce "the vile rating", which will be on an arbitrary scale, or the Fibonacci Sequence. Until I do, I am going to offer opinions and creative responses. I am going to assume that readers of this blog, if they are smart enough to be interested in the work I write about (I mean, there's not much observational comedy here), are smart enough to be able to understand how a review works and go some way towards figuring out whether they's agree with me.

In the meantime, here are five shows with a tangential relationship to the word, concept or object "star".

Miriam Margoyles is a TV star, but also a brilliant actor. She stole the show at The Citizens Theatre last year in Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and her Dickens' Women has had The Skinny reaching for superlatives. Now she is getting on, she has become a National Treasure (as The Skinny's writer Lorna Irvine suggested), and that allows her to carry on how she pleases. This is a one person show, and she switches characters, rescues Dickens from my memories of A Level English and reinvigorates his image as a writer who could capture a character in a few deft strokes, even before he gave them a silly, all-so-meaningful name.

Dickens' Women can be enjoyed as either a contemplation on the great novelist and his gender politics, or a show case for one of Britain's great talents.

Pleasance Courtyard, 8 -25 August

Translunar Paradise is more about the moon than the stars, but this is its third year at the Fringe and it has been instrumental in the growth of the  Lecoq style's popularity in Edinburgh. They use masks like they were puppets and director George Mann was inspired by both his personal experiences with grief and more literary sources.

"It was reading WB Yeats’ The Tower that hardened my resolve to actually write this play," he says. "‘That being dead, we rise, dream and so create, Translunar Paradise’. Yeats’ character, an old man embittered by loss, was the man I wanted to put on stage. I wanted to take this character (and in a way, myself) on a journey that would help him to look positively at life after death." After my fascination with suicide earlier this month, it's probably a good idea for me to see this.

Pleasance Dome, 4 -27 August

George Formby was once the highest paid film star in the UK: his cheeky chappie persona took the magic of the musical hall to the magic of the movies. All players of the tiny little four string special, from Tricity Vogue to that Ukulele Orchestra which turns up on the BBC Culture Show every six months owe Formby, although they pretend not to care. Luckily, his fans have a big gathering in Blackpool every year, and that comedian who likes football did a documentary about him.

This Formby is a one man star by a former star of Matthew Bourne's very important dance company: it's no surprise that when he does a tap dance half way through (he's enacting Formby's courtship of his future wife), he's spectacular. He's got the Formby strumming syncopation off pat, too - it's surprising how jazzy the northern japester could get. There is a lovely scene where his wife teaches him how to play off the beats, and Formby's sweetness is stamped through the middle of the performance, rather like the words in... oh, sorry... a piece of Blackpool rock.

Assembly, 3- 27 August

The company are called Drawn to Stars, so they win the next place on this list. In fact, their press release turned up as I was writing this. So, good work by somebody at their office.

The release starts off badly, because it mentions star ratings, but warms me up by the end when actor Aimee Corbett admits that she is a performance artist and went to Dartington, the sadly amalgamated college which was an English nursery for all sorts of interesting characters - Scottish Live Art Super Group Fish and Game began their careers as students there.

It gets even better when they explain that Now.Here is all about the two hundred mile hobby horse ride made by Corbett and Vanessa Hammick. They picked up a bunch of stories on the way and trained them into a theatrical celebration of "boundaries and borders, long time lovers, gun owners, grannies and angry young men." 

It gets to grips with the English character - appropriately enough in this year when patriotism has made a bit of a comeback. The press release claims it is "the British character" but, frankly, they need to watch their use of that word in Scotland.

Three Sisters, 3 -26 August

My final choice has the potential to be a five star show, at least to the Vile way of thing. LAN-T003 have come from Japan, Jishin uses choreography to explore the 2011 Japanese earthquake: an ephemeral art form to examine a natural force that embodies the Buddhist idea of impermanence in a physical, immersive and immense burst? I think I'll go and see that tonight, just before I take the stage as Criticulous at Summerhall...

Zoo Southside, 3 -27 August