The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with nearly 3,500 shows. This year, Playbill is in Edinburgh for the entire month in August for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!
As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we're sharing which ones you absolutely must see if you're only at the Fringe for a short amount of time. Consider these Playbill Picks a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.
The seating of the Pleasance Dome’s QueenDome space is reminiscent of an amphitheater—which is appropriate for Beautiful Evil Things. Deb Pugh enters the round space of the stage in a black suit, white tank underneath, while a series of microphones on stands are fanned out behind her. She is Medusa, one of the famous Gorgons of Greek mythology. Her gaze can turn people to stone, her hair a writhing mess of snakes, her teeth are fangs. And this modern version embraces that Medusa not as a monster, but as a figure of feminist power.
Beautiful Evil Things was co-created by Pugh and George Mann of Theatre Ad Infinitum. The company had previously adapted The Odyssey into a solo show which starred Mann. Pugh jokingly shares that Beautiful Evil Things began because she was jealous of that show. “It's a really lovely challenge to take that huge space and then condense it down, just channel it through one performer. It makes it, hopefully, very potent and very juicy.”
But when Pugh began looking into the women of Greek mythology, she became frustrated by what was immediately available. “It was just either you get to be a wife, a victim, or some angry wild, rage-filled monster reacting to the interesting thing that the man did. It was all just a little bit unsatisfactory.”
So they researched and began work on a modern feminist re-telling. For fans of the bestselling novel Madeline Miller’s Circe, this show is a must-see. Pugh and Mann questioned how Medusa was framed in English translations by Victorian men, and their re-examination of her story led them to other women of the Trojan War who have been forgotten in the shadows of its overly worshipped male heroes.
Beautiful Evil Things is a visceral piece of storytelling. Pugh performs Medusa’s story with wit and such texture that the energy of the room rises and falls with her through every intentional flick of a hand or pause for a breath. Aided by such clever uses of simple props, Beautiful Evil Things unfolds in a way that reminds us why we keep telling these stories—and why we must keep re-visiting how we tell them.
There’s backstory to this, but the quick summary is that Medusa was beheaded and her head strapped to the shield of the goddess Athena. But, as Medusa was immortal, she remained alive. Medusa saw firsthand the atrocities of the Trojan War. Beautiful Evil Things recounts the stories of three other women integral to the Trojan War through her eyes: Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons; Clytemnestra, who takes revenge for the murder of her family; and Cassandra, a woman cursed to see the future only to never be believed. Each of their motives, their stories, is re-investigated and re-framed. (Beautiful Evil Things is the second piece Playbill has covered this Fringe that dealt with evaluating Greek mythology from a feminist perspective.)
Part of making the piece itself feminist was how Beautiful Evil Things tackles the ever-present problem of sexual assault in Greek myths. “A big problem that I have with Greek mythology is the amount of sexual assault. I do not need to go to a theatre to watch that. Too often it was not only a big part, but the center of their story. And I just thought, let's take all of that out and see what's left in the story,” Pugh explains. “And actually, far more interesting things bubbled to the surface.”
The show does portray the rape of Cassandra, which it couldn't ignore—but Beautiful Evil Things refused to have it define the character of Cassandra. At the moment before the assault in the story, when it is clear to the audience what will follow, Medusa tells the audience that it will not give the perpetrator and his act any more attention. That Cassandra is not defined by him and his offense. It was a refreshing way of not sweeping assault under the rug while not re-traumatizing audience members.
It's a decision that made clear that feminist re-tellings aren’t only about how we treat the characters; it’s about how we also treat the readers, the listeners, the audience members.
“Why do we keep going back to these myths?” is a question that Pugh has thought much about in creating this work.
As Pugh explains it: “I think where these myths sit is that they give us our place in not just the wider world, but where we are in the universe, stretching way back for generation after generation. The people who've been telling us those myths have been one set of people."
That is why to Pugh, it has been important for women to finally be giving their perspectives on these long-held stories. "It’s the power of the narrator—the power of the eyes that are on your story, on where that places you in the entirety of history. Each generation, we have to redefine where we are, so we need to keep them alive and present in storytelling."
It’s quite a task that she has set before herself. And wow, does she rise to it.
Beautiful Evil Things is playing Pleasance Dome’s QueenDome through August 27 at 3:40 PM. See what else Playbill recommended in this space here.
