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.
Charly (Alexa Davies) wakes up with a start, in a coughing fit. In the half-light, her shirt looks stained with sweat, or is it sick? As the coughing subsides, Charly seems to realize she has an audience. She straightens, brightens, and the grainy print of her shirt begins to come into focus. It’s the nose, and parted lips, of a young woman. Lights up, Beastie Boys blaring, Charly is fine, isn’t she?
Lady Dealer, a one-hour poem by Martha Watson Allpress, moves at breakneck speed as “ethical-ish” weed dealer Charly takes the audience through another of her mundane days. A day that, she promises us, will be the exact same day as the day before. The comfort she finds in the whirlwind of her routine—waking sometime after noon, bouncing between two cell phones, relishing a cup of instant coffee—turns to panic at a power outage. Her phones are dead. They’ve stopped ringing. The three huge speakers that outfit the set turn to metal monuments of past noise that blocked out the silence. Charly is alone.
Performed in the round, it feels as if Charly is making a frantic appeal to her audience. If she can convince us, surely she can convince herself, which makes for heartbreak for those of us bearing witness to Charly’s sadness. Could the beginnings of her breakdown be an invitation to intervention? After introducing herself, Charly encourages applause and a chorus of, “Hi, Charly,” ringing eerily of a 12-step program. Though you feel for Charly immediately—sympathy, kinship, even feel your arms almost involuntarily aching to embrace her—Charly seemingly wants or needs none of it. “I’m fine,” she interjects repeatedly between memories of rejection.
First, and maybe where it all went wrong for our “icon,” there was Teagan, the wealthy teenage princess of every high school party who, with her flock of brunette followers, left Charly behind in a bathroom to show their disapproval. Then, it was the Oxbridge classmate who, judging by her accent alone, assumed she was only in attendance at a party to deal. Most recently, it was Clo, Charly’s ex-girlfriend, tender as a strand of fairy lights, who might as well have been everything.
This is a show about “things that break." Electrical connectivity. The attention and acceptance of a group of teenage girls. The meter and rhyme scheme of a poem. Glasses. Hearts.
There are ways to mend them. A mother’s invitation, however seemingly sinister, to come away on holiday. A neighbor’s clarification that two people can simply pass time together, “hang.” An ailing poet’s call to a love lost.
Maybe, just maybe, if we can allow ourselves to be wrapped in the comforts of these kindnesses, we can truly be “fine.”
Lady Dealer performs in ROUNDABOUT @ Summerhall through August 27. For tickets, click here.
