Two Summers Full

As inevitably as the moment of doom towards the end of a Russian opera, my first day at the Fringe was spent agonising about technical details. On the positive side, there is now a functioning studio for podcasts in Summerhall, and this week will see the beginning of my idiosyncratic broadcasts from the heart of the hot art action.
I did manage to cover a few shows: both at Summerhall and both championing the idiosyncratic genre mash-ups that make me value the Fringe as my annual summer school. Remember Me is a twenty minute slice of slow death, and The Pain of Desire is cabaret song unafraid of sincerity and surrealism.

Teatro Sineglossa's Remember Me begins with a tortured version of Dido's Lament out of Purcell's operetta Dido and Aeneas. It's the startling tune that Dido sings to Aeneas when he decided to dump her and fulfil his destiny. It is melancholic enough - Dido ends up making a mess of her suicide, dies in agony while cursing her errant lover (and causing a big war between Rome and Carthage) - but adding a slow, unerotic striptease behind mirrors adds a broader reflection on death: by the end, one male and one female body, grey and distorted, merge and metamorphose into twitching cadavers before disappearing into refracted light. It's stunning, distressing and ambiguous.

Temper Temper, the band behind Wendy Bevan, the woman behind The Pain of Desire have already been working London's cabaret scene: Bevan appears like a classic chanteuse, all low notes and brave despair, until she picks up her violin and the piano lets loose on thumping, shrill rhythms. Projections above, the intense presence of some bald guy obsessively obsessed with Bevan, the descents into ambient interludes, the dark hints of Weimar cabaret in Bevan's voice: the promised influence of David Lynch is present, lifting Bevan out of Camille's shadow and her vocal range adds fresh anguish to familiar emotional aches.


The Pain of Desire, Summerhall, 9.45pm
Remember Me, Summerhall, various times