Before the pandemic, I would typically go to the Fringe anything between four and eight times during August. Since its return in 2021, I’ve just made one visit per year to avoid losing touch with it completely. I had thought about maybe pushing the boat out by going twice this year, but the recent resurgence in Covid cases deterred me. Even going once felt like a significant risk given that it’s next to impossible (unlike in 2021) to find outdoor performances that go beyond the traditional street theatre. But as with the Eurovision in May, I put on my FFP3 mask, restricted the number of indoor shows I was seeing, and hoped for the best.
I wasn’t going to bother with the mini-reviews I used to do on this blog, because with only two or three days left of the Fringe I didn’t think they’d be much use to anyone. But one of the two shows I saw specifically asked people at the end to post reviews online, so I thought I might as well.
The Brief Life & Mysterious Death of Boris III, King of Bulgaria (My rating: 4 stars ****)
I was intrigued to go and see this, because it’s about the Second World War, but a corner of the war that most people know nothing about, namely the Bulgarian Tsar’s half-hearted involvement on the Axis side, and his bureaucratic obstructionism that ultimately prevented several thousand Bulgarian Jews from being murdered in the Nazi extermination camps. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, although one or two noted the performance was “camp”. I had interpreted that as meaning a serious production in which one or two characters are portrayed in a slightly camp way, but in fact the campness is far, far more overarching than that – it’s essentially an adult pantomime that never takes itself seriously for longer than twenty seconds. That means there’s no depth at all to the story or the characterisations, but the play works on the level of a ‘painless history lesson’ – you come out feeling you know something you previously didn’t, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only member of the audience who later did a Google search to find out more about the real events.
The music is probably the strongest element – it sounds like they used authentic Bulgarian folk songs and even learned the lyrics in Bulgarian (although I’d be interested to know from real Bulgarians how accurate the use of the language was). There’s also a very funny outing for a stereotypical evangelical Christian ditty sung in English.
The most confusing aspect of the play is a male Nazi officer played by a woman. You constantly have to remind yourself that she’s supposed to be a man because the general effect of her uniform and innuendo-laden dialogue is somewhat reminiscent of Helga in Allo Allo.
1984 (My Rating: 5 stars *****)
I think I’m right in saying the official name of Orwell’s novel is “Nineteen Eighty-Four” rather than “1984”, so presumably the use of the numerical title is supposed to emphasise that this is a modern retelling. It’s possible that I’m ‘marking this upwards’, because I’ve seen so little live theatre over the last four years, and I’m therefore a touch more easily impressed than I used to be. But I do think this is a really impressive production. My concern about seeing it was that I’ve read the novel two or three times, I’ve seen the John Hurt/Suzanna Hamilton film adaptation a couple of times, and I’ve also seen the legendary BBC TV adaptation from the 50s that was thought to be lost for many decades. There are some sequences that I feel I could almost recite backwards, so I was worried that sitting through the play would be like watching the same old film for the umpteenth time. But I was actually struck by how fresh it felt throughout. The sequences of Winston and Julia rebelling against the Party by meeting in secret are acted very naturalistically and with conviction. Perhaps being invited to suspend disbelief in the face of a Winston with a strong Irish accent and a Julia with some sort of continental European accent (I initially thought she was eastern European but judging from the name in the credits she might be French) helps the scenes to feel completely novel even if the words are familiar and you already know how it all ends.
I wondered in advance how such a complex story could be satisfactorily condensed into an hour or whatever it was, but in fact it never feels rushed or hyper-edited. Only a modest proportion of the narrative in the novel is covered, and yet what is selected feels exactly enough to support the version of the story that is actually being told. If you were going to be picky, you could maybe complain that a large proportion of the play is pre-filmed and presented on a screen (I wasn’t keeping track, but it felt like it could have been anything between 25% and 50%), so at times you feel like you’re in a small cinema rather than watching a live performance. However, presumably that’s done to create the effect that you’re Big Brother and you’re spying on people’s most intimate moments through a telescreen when they have no idea there are surveillance cameras present. Julia only ever appears on screen, which is such a consistent pattern that I assumed the actress wasn’t even in the building, but in fact she appeared afterwards to take the applause. I think they may have missed a trick there – it would have had real impact if she had turned up fleetingly on stage before Winston’s death. But perhaps the actress was doubling up with a backstage role and thus wasn’t free to do that.
In terms of the Covid risk, the venue for 1984 (Assembly Roxy) felt like the safer of the two. The air seemed to be relatively fresh, although I was relieved to find at the King of Bulgaria play that I wasn’t the only mask-wearer – I counted three others. Incidentally, in Waverley Station afterwards I thought for a second that I was under some sort of aerial bombing attack – I discovered today on Twitter that it was a low-flying military aircraft. Absolute madness to allow that sort of thing over a heavily populated area at that time of night (it was well after 9pm).
