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.
Most of us have had that experience of, years later, accidentally bumping into someone who used to be our greatest friend. Childhood friends, high school friends, college friends—those people who became our most intimate companions through times in life when the sand under our feet are constantly shifting. The people we loved even as it became harder to untangle how you define and see yourself from how you define and see yourself in relation to them. This is part of what The Way Way Deep explores.
Patrick McPherson returns to Fringe in the solo show after receiving critical recognition last year for Colossal. He plays Ben, a 25-year-old who runs into his childhood friend Jack that he hasn’t spoken to in seven years. They grab some drinks. They grab some more drinks as Ben tries to revive an old dream of theirs of having that once-in-a-lifetime, absolutely epic, night out. The audience journeys with them from bar to bar. And then the night takes a turn that knocks the breath right out of you.
There is power in The Way Way Deep’s dive into the messiness of friendship, of nostalgia, of how we open and close the chapters of our lives. In an incredibly effective bit of production design, McPherson is the only person on the stage—with bar lights hanging in a rough-semi-circle around him. At times, those lights set the atmosphere (working beautifully to do so with the show’s soundtrack).
But the lights also take the place on stage of other characters. They flash in synchronicity with voiceovers from other people, stand-ins that McPherson can react to. At times, they become how we learn the backstory of Ben and Jack as voices of their childhood selves slip in and out of the sound design—much like how the memories come and go from Ben’s mind, random recollections that infiltrate the night out. The precision with which the lights and sound move between these responsibilities is exact. In this show, the past and present collide in an evocative manner.
And in the same precise way, McPherson delivers his lines in the lyrical cadence structures of a spoken word performance. The performance and the design both build this raw portrait with layers of subtle implication and high-tech storytelling. There were times in the set-up where The Way Way Deep repeats itself, sometimes without much pay-off. Those moments tempered the pace of Ben’s story—that felt like tapping the brakes a little too hard for a one-hour show. They slowed down the audiences' descent with McPherson into the heady space of nostalgia and adrenaline that the Ben’s story goes.
But we do dive in the end. And by that point, what a rewarding journey The Way Way Deep is.
The Way Way Deep is playing Underbelly Cowgate in the Belly Button through August 27. Learn about other Playbill-recommended shows at this venue.
