THE ME // Sun Apparatus Theatre Company

On Saturday the 27th of August 2016, it was confirmed that Mbah Gotho was the oldest person in the world, after he produced documentation that proved he was born on the 31st of December 1870. When Gotho was born (145 years ago) Ulysses S. Grant was the President of the United States, Italy was being unified, and Charles Dickens had just died. Indonesia, the country of his birth, was a Dutch colony. He would have been 74 when World War 2 ended, and is still living now.
 
The ME is about ageing, and the quest for longevity. It’s about the very human desire to resist death and the value of the one life you’ll get to lead before it’s snuffed out. Its protagonists are chasing immortality and the promise of experiencing the span of history Gotho has. It’s a gentle satire of wellness and pseudo-science, of new-age fixation and hollow self-improvement. Melody, the insufferable character at the centre of the story abuses her maid Lita as she joylessly swigs kombucha, seaweed health drinks or whatever else, before an absurd sequence of events introduces her to an unhinged researcher of how-to-cheat-death. This scientist of dubious ethics makes vague references to planarian worms, a sci-fi trope found in everything from Star Trek to Swamp Thing to denote unknowable potential for regeneration. Her crazed experiments are vaguely reminiscent of Serge Voronoff’s monkey-testicle grafts, the Russian scientist whose placebo experiments later inspired the vicious revolutionary critique of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. Like many other plays, films and books, The ME suggests a denial of mortality is the dark underside of medical science.
 
The world will change and leave us behind. By the time death comes it might be greeted without fear, as the world we find ourselves in has changed beyond all recognition. A long life is not the same as a good one, as the characters in The ME discover. Who knows how the world will develop as we age? Might it end, or continue to change? During the still continuing life of Mbah Gotho the telephone went from a new invention to a ubiquitous tool. He was alive before the first petrol engine was created. None of us know how long we have, or what we might see.

- Lewis Church

The ME ran at ZOO until August 28th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/me

The Sun Apparatus Theatre Company: http://www.thesunapparatus.com
 
Oldest Person in the World - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/worlds-oldest-person-man-mbah-gotho-indonesia-145-years-old-a7213191.html
 
Planarian Worms: https://www.exploratorium.edu/imaging_station/research/planaria/story_planaria.pdf
 
Regrowing Heads and Keeping Memories: http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/16/decapitated-worms-regrow-heads-keep-old-memories/
 
Serge Voronoff: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-true-story-of-dr-voronoffs-plan-to-use-monkey-testicles-to-make-us-immortal
 
What the World Might Look Like in 100 Years: http://www.realclearlife.com/2016/09/01/this-is-what-the-world-might-look-like-in-100-years/

HIP // Kriya Arts

Hip is an hour drifting through the Jungian collective unconsciousness; during the performance, Jolie Booth explores the serendipity of finding uncanny parallels with past lives. Based around found objects, Hip is a semi-autobiographical one woman show that starts by introducing us to a location caught between two timelines and personalities: the home of Anne Clarke during 60s bohemian Brighton, and a squat established by Jolie in 2002.

In homage to Aboriginal songlines which suggests location designates family, the audience is transported, in this extra live performance, to a cosy living room with cushions and cheese and pineapple nibbles. Acting as an aid to suspend disbelief, these props along with real love letters and transparencies of Annie’s eccentrically erotic art, are accompanied by Jolie’s soothing and passionate storytelling.

The title Hip comes from a Hip bone found amongst Annie’s possessions, eludes to a posthumous physical memory and is used to initiate a séance, in which the audience hold hands to connect with the presence of Annie. No longer spectators, they are now a tribe connected and enthralled by the memories of Jolie and Annie. Maffesoli (1996) describes tribes as a collective form of identity which is based on sentiment rather than rationality.

The hypnotic environment of light from an overhead projector used to display letters and poems from lovers and friends of Annie these are interwoven with vestiges from Jolie’s own life and there is an immediate and clear association. In later life Annie was consumed by alcoholism and died alone estranged from her family but Jolie suggests her funeral was well attended, if only by the patrons of her local drinking establishment. At the end of the play, Jolie explains that the hip bone isn’t human and is surely a memento from the Occult bookshop where she worked and frequented: just one of the glimpses into the community of 60s bohemian Brighton.

In respect for the dead, before we leave we join Jolie in a toast (with free tequila shots) to Annie’s life. This closes the circle of memory, love and loss. In a somnambulistic trance the audience leaves; Jolie has provided an authentic and human exploration of inherently unstable modern tribalism.

(LO)

Hip is on at 16.30 at ZOO (Venue 124) ntil August 27th. Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets, Relaxed Performance - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/hip

E15-mothers: https://en.squat.net/tag/e15-mothers/

Advisory Service for Squatters: http://www.squatter.org.uk/for-new-squatters/squatting-made-less-simple/

The lethality of loneliness - John Cacioppo at TEDxDesMoines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0hxl03JoA0

One-woman show Hip charting the times of Anne Clarke, who helped set up Infinity Foods: http://www.theargus.co.uk/leisure/stage/14483157.One_woman_show_Hip_charting_the_times_of_Anne_Clarke__who_helped_set_up_Infinity_Foods/

Dissecting and Detecting Stories in Found Objects and Remnants: http://hyperallergic.com/223735/dissecting-and-detecting-stories-in-found-objects-and-remnants/

What are song lines?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVOG-RKTFIo

I'VE SNAPPED MY BANJO STRING, LET'S JUST TALK // Scott Agnew

Before he gets going, Scott Agnew checks that everyone in the room knows what he really means when he talks about snapping a banjo string. Because anyone who thinks they're in for an hour of innocuous anecdotes from a homespun folk player might be in for a shock. The incident during which – to use the medical term – the frenulum beneath the foreskin of his penis tore and “showered the walls with blood” is one of the more viscous but by no means most explicit of stories in this brief survey of the activities that might have led to him contracting HIV. Cantering from sauna to nightclub to drug-fuelled house parties, he admits that sometimes he wasn't in total control of his actions.

Long before his HIV diagnosis, Agnew needed another for his mental health, but the GP he saw wrote him off successively as an alcoholic, a food addict, a gambler, a sex addict and more, without recognising the symptoms of bipolar disorder. Agnew now manages both conditions, but there's an equivocal tone in his text that suggests he's still overwhelmed by this. For instance, he makes a specific point of saying that not understanding his mental health doesn't absolve his responsibility for his virus, as though HIV is a shameful thing. The words that repeat as a refrain in his show are: “It's not ideal – a downbeat phrase in search of a bright side.

Yet he does recognise positive aspects to his HIV diagnosis: for instance, he jokes, his medication has raised his life expectancy above the average for Glasgow, his home. And with the virus now undetectable in his blood count, he's a safer date than most – although, he points out lugubriously, “that's a hard sell on the dancefloor”. His politicking is bolder when directed outside himself: why is it, he asks, that gays on the telly have to be sexually neutered to be acceptable for a mainstream audience? Camp is fine, he argues, but there needs to be a wider spectrum of queer personality in public life. Elsewhere he gets exercised by the widespread use of date-rape drugs among gay men, who have been “hiding for so long” that they have no way of expressing their emotions. Undoubtedly the two are connected.

For all the comedic banter, it's a poignant show, one that raises a number of questions about Agnew's relationship with his diagnoses and with his Catholic family. Within those questions is a sharp impression of of how far the LGBT+ community still needs to travel towards visibility and feeling accepted within society at large. (MC)

Scott Agnew: I've Snapped My Banjo String, Let's Just Talk is at 22.00 at Gilded Balloon at the Counting House until 29 August. See venue for accessibility information - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/scott-agnew-i-ve-snapped-my-banjo-string-let-s-just-talk

On living with frenulum breve: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2002/feb/28/healthandwellbeing.health2

On HIV stigma and homophobia: http://www.thebody.com/content/art54913.html

A look at the language of HIV stigma: http://www.thebody.com/content/75496/when-words-work-against-us-the-language-of-hiv-sti.html

Information on bipolar disorder: http://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/bipolar-disorder/

ZERO DOWN // Angel On The Corner TC

Among the 17 women interviewed or writing first-person about their experience of political activism in Helena Earnshaw and Angharad Penrhyn Jones' invigorating book Here We Stand is Eileen Chubb, founder of the charity and campaign Compassion in Care. She became, much to her own surprise, an activist after working for years in care homes run by Bupa, and discovering widespread abuse of the elderly inhabitants. At the bottom of the homepage of the CiC website is a melancholy dedication to Pat Gifford that reads: “After witnessing the abuse of a loved one in a care home, Pat Gifford was so affected by this experience that she became increasingly afraid of growing older and needing care herself that she took her own life.”

Zero Down is set in a small-town care home in which abuse of the elderly patients is carried out on a daily basis: not by staff but by management, who allow the store cupboard to run out of wet wipes and humans to sit in their own faeces for hours before bothering to send a nurse to them. These are all typical of the routine cost-cutting carried out by an organisation run in the service of profitability and not in accord with basic humanity. Working on zero-hour contracts, the nurses are expected to pass their shift not at bedsides but in a staff room, waiting to be summoned by electronic buzzer to a specific patient, clocking in only as and when they are called. Unsurprisingly, this raises the women's own stress levels and sets them at odds with each other.

Writer Sarah Hehir tells two stories here: the visible one of the working women on stage, and the invisible one of the disintegrating humans trapped in their beds. One of the nurses, Benni, is a single mother of three at the mercy of a neoliberal economy, failing to keep her head above water because the system is constructed for her to drown: sympathy for her contracts each time she spews a racist slur, then expands as she reveals her detailed knowledge of individual patients' tastes, habits and frailties. That kindness is contrasted with the exploitative purpose of Erin, an aspiring journalist reading up on female war reporters as she attempts to make her mark by following the example of Eileen Chubb. The distance between conniving Erin and compassionate Eileen becomes clear, however, when the young woman confesses that changing the soiled nappy of a patient makes her think that euthanasia is a good idea. Her tone creates an ambiguity as to whether she means self-elective.

The picture of decrepitude that Hehir presents has almost nothing appealing about it. It's not just a dramatic construct that Benni is the mother of small children: whether at home or at work, her life is one of changing nappies. But she also describes carrying a male patient to the toilet to spare his feelings of mortification at being so infantilised: an act of generosity that helps him continue to value his life. But that generosity also requires the energy of the young: in Michael Haneke's acutely observed film Amour, an elderly man grows unable to care for his declining wife, and when money can no longer buy what she needs, he, like Erin, begins to see euthanasia as their only option. The question woven through both strands of Zero Down is one of value: how shall we value human existence, and what happens when power and profit are the margins or expression of that value?

- MC

Zero Down is on at 13.00 at Pleasance Courtyard until August 29th (not 18th). Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Hearing Loop - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/zero-down

Publisher page for Here We Stand: http://www.honno.co.uk/dangos.php?ISBN=9781909983021

Compassion in Care: http://www.compassionincare.com/

What exactly is neoliberalism?: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/booked-3-what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-wendy-brown-undoing-the-demos

Alexander Zeldin discussing Beyond Caring, his play about workers on zero-hours contracts: http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/the-director-as-god-is-bullshit/

Diary of a woman who chose euthanasia: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/23/euthanasia.cancer

Two views on Haneke's Amour: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/feb/28/amour-advert-for-euthanasia and http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/surviving-amour

TEAM VIKING // James Rowland

James Rowland’s monologue, Team Viking, is a natural second act to Liz Rothschild’s Outside The Box, which I had just watched. Both shows highlight the importance and the challenges of giving a loved one the burial they want, but tackle this sensitive subject in completely different ways.
 
Drawing on a (mostly) true story, the tale starts with his father’s funeral. It’s a huge but slightly soulless affair at which Rowland has given a moving eulogy. We then flash back to the childhood origins of Team Viking – Rowland and his friends Tom and Sarah – who are bound together by their shared love of re-enacting scenes from Kirk Douglas’ 1958 film The Vikings, full of “fighting, quaffing and wenching”. They grow up and continue much along these lines, supporting each other through the ups and downs of life: Tom the fun-loving Lothario, Sarah the organised engineer and James, who plays all the other parts.
 
Suddenly everything changes when Tom is diagnosed with a rare, aggressive and totally incurable cancer. Primary cardiac angiosarcoma is cancer of the heart muscle – a condition affecting around 0.001 per cent of the population. He’s not quite one in a million, but it’s close. The disease is a death sentence, claiming Tom’s life in a matter of months, and Rowland takes us through the heart-breaking process of watching his best friend slowly fade away knowing there is nothing that can be done.
 
For his part, Tom is adamant that he wants the kind of funeral they’d play-acted as kids, cast adrift on a burning boat. He achieves it through some fairly spectacular emotional manipulation, leaving Rowland and Sarah to figure out how to actually make it happen. The technicalities of delivering Tom’s big finale are described in fraught, hilarious detail, far removed from Liz Rothschild’s calm explanations of organising a funeral of your choosing and the legal aspects of obtaining a dead body for burial. It’s not an orthodox ending, and some parts of it were technically illegal, but Team Viking is a moving story of friendship, loss, and the importance of giving someone you love the send-off they desire and deserve.

- KA

 
Team Viking is on at 14:55 at Just The Tonic at the Community Project until August 28th (not 15th). Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Relaxed Performance - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/team-viking

Dead right – who does a body belong to?: http://www.goodfuneralguide.co.uk/2009/07/dead-right/

Cardiac sarcoma: http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/277297-overview

Macmillan cancer support - at the end of life: http://www.macmillan.org.uk/information-and-support/coping/at-the-end-of-life

Diagnosis of Liz Rothschild’s Fringe show Outside the Box: http://thesickofthefringe.com/week-two/outside-the-box

Death on the Fringe: https://deathonthefringe.wordpress.com/

OUTSIDE THE BOX - A LIVE SHOW ABOUT DEATH / Liz Rothschild

“Talking about sex doesn’t make you pregnant, talking about death doesn’t make you die.” This quote from Jane Duncan Rogers appears on the flyer for Liz Rothschild’s thought-provoking and unexpectedly jolly show about death. Although the subject matter is literally morbid and Rothschild’s description of washing the body of her dead mother moved me to tears, it’s hard not to smile while watching someone weave their own wicker coffin to the strains of Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life – apparently the UK’s top choice of funeral song.
 
Rothschild is a funeral celebrant who runs a ‘green’ burial ground and is full of lively passion about death. Through personal stories she exposes the taboos in our society, explaining how death has become disconnected from family, community and wider society in our modern age.  She points out that every town will have NCT childbirth groups, but where are the death groups? After all, we’re all born, but we all die too. Most of the audience had heard of Braxton Hicks – the ‘practice’ contractions that start towards the end of pregnancy – yet only two people were familiar with Cheyne-Stokes, the changed pattern of breathing that can signify the end is near.
 
She also highlights the shocking fact that around 70 per cent of us will die without leaving a will or a less formal letter of wishes. This can mean that people end up without the burial they would have wanted, and even leave funeral costs unplanned for and unpaid. At the same time, we’re warned about the ‘death industry’, with some unscrupulous souls willing to exploit a lucrative and reliable customer base plagued with grief and guilt. The show certainly prompted me to think about the plans for my own demise (or rather, the current total lack of them) and realise that it’s a subject I’ve never broached with any of my family.
 
Medical science still cannot heal those who are finally dying, and at some point it will be our time to go. Although funerals are for the living rather than the dead, out of respect for human dignity and agency, we should be starting conversations about death right now. (KA)
 
Outside The Box - A Live Show About Death is on at 11.50 at Summerhall until August 21st. Relaxed Performances - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/outside-the-box-a-live-show-about-death

More on the Death on the Fringe series: https://deathonthefringe.wordpress.com/

Compassion in Dying: http://compassionindying.org.uk/

The DeathCafe movement, running events aiming to encourage public conversations about death: http://deathcafe.com/

The Good Funeral Guide: http://www.goodfuneralguide.co.uk/

Final Fling – advice on life and death decisions as well as planning tools: https://www.finalfling.com/

Hospice UK, for information about hospice care at the end of life: https://www.hospiceuk.org/

Living Well Dying Well train doulas (companions) for the dying and run public and professional courses http://www.lwdwtraining.uk/

Natural Death Centre, providing free advice about death and burial: http://naturaldeath.org.uk/

Research paper on public attitudes to death, dying and bereavement from Nottingham University: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/srcc/documents/projects/srcc-project-summary-public-attitudes.pdf

Cheyne-Stokes breathing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyne%E2%80%93Stokes_respiration

THE INEVITABLE HEARTBREAK OF GAVIN PLIMSOLE // SharkLegs

Few body parts are more engaged with (both literally and metaphorically), in theatre and literature, as the heart, and The Inevitable Heartbreak of Gavin Plimsole joins a healthy tradition of artwork in which heartbreak informs a medical heart condition, and in which a medical heart condition informs the story of a heartbreak. In TIHOGP, the audience follows Plimsole’s diagnosis of a serious heart condition caused from malformation, and follows him through informing friends and family, confronting the big questions of ‘Why Me?’ and confronting the uncomfortable reality that no one (not even a young man) is invincible.

The innovation with SharkLegs’ production however, expands both the metaphoric and literal questions of fate and our beating hearts, done by asking audience members to don a heart monitor, the readings of which are projected in the performance space, and which affect – Choose Your Own Adventure-like – the choices of the central character. While Plimsole’s central purpose is to ask audiences to confront their own mortality and their own sense of carpe diem (understood as both a point of inspiration and exasperation), he also thoughtfully shares his reality as a man with a chronic heart condition needing to make constant potentially-life-altering decisions about foods to eat/avoid and activities to do/avoid. For those who develop chronic conditions, the transition from an invincible body to one negotiating limitations can be challenging, as evidenced by Plimsole’s quite legitimate anger/conversations with God/attempts to reconcile past relationship. Reflecting on my own experience of writing about my illness many years ago, which I did in a series called BALL & Other Funny Stories About Cancer, I am quite moved by Plimsole’s honest anger and frustration on display.

By inviting the ever-changing heartbeats of the audience into the space as an essential set piece, The Inevitable Heartbreak of Gavin Plimsole asks audiences to reflect on the diversity of life and experience and how, despite us drinking energizing Redbulls or calming chamomile, our hearts and brains are still quite unpredictable – and this is a reality as horrifyingly frightening as it might be deliriously freeing. (BL)

The Inevitable Heartbreak of Gavin Plimsole is on at 13.40 at Pleasance Dome until August 29th (not 16th). Venue is wheelchair accessible, hearing loop available - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/inevitable-heartbreak-of-gavin-plimsole

A few other projects on hearts, heartbeats and heartbreak:

Sheila Ghelani’s Covet Me Care for Me: http://www.sheilaghelani.co.uk/covet-me-care-for-me/

Ira Brand’s Keine Angst: http://www.irabrand.co.uk/?works=keine-angst

Marina Tsartsara and Miriam King’s work: http://marinatsartsara.weebly.com/blog

On Hubbub – A Wellcome Trust funded project, run by an interdisciplinary team looking at work, rest, noise, tumult: https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-release/exploration-rest-and-busyness-announced-first-project-hub-wellcome-collection

On Waiting for Diagnosis – Fuel’s While You Wait Series: http://www.fueltheatre.com/projects/while-you-wait

ADLER & GIBB // Tim Crouch and the Royal Court Theatre

Tim Crouch’s play Adler & Gibb looks centrally at society’s obsession with the story behind the story, showing something between an artist’s journey to understand her character and an invasive, even violent, emotional grave robbery. An actor, Louise, and her acting coach have come to the Grey-Gardens-inspired home of famed and reclusive artists Adler and Gibb, only to find the circumstances of their reclusion to be different then suspected. Louise is relentless – reminiscent of the portrayal of Capote in Miller’s 2006 film, waiting impatiently for his subject’s death to finish In Cold Blood – and a clear archetype for our obsession with celebrities (even hip, arty, off-kilter celebrities) and the expectations for all people to fully explain their comings and goings to just about everyone.

In his classic essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), Barthes wrote about the problems inherent in allowing a writer’s autobiography to dictate how a piece of work is received by its audience. Such a practice exists today – we retrospectively diagnose Vincent Van Gogh or Chopin with any sort of mental health disorder, see Abraham Lincoln’s homosexuality in his policy decisions, we reread all of David Bowie’s final album as, exclusively, an extended pre-death ritual. Although such a practice might normalize different experiences through history – thus making new role models for us – there is also a danger in the disempowering idea that certain illnesses, lives, problems and struggles automatically lead to any number of specific outcomes. This is put into sharp relief in Adler & Gibb when Louise’s presumptions about the lives of her role models are discovered as wildly inaccurate.

 *Spoiler Alert. The following contains a spoiler for those yet to see the show, but the following is The Sick of the Fringe part*

When Louise realizes that her hero was not in fact in an abusive, reclusive relationship and, instead, someone slowly dying (perhaps of early-onset dementia, it’s not quite clear), the play resonates with the recent – and unexpected – deaths of David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Victoria Wood. But it is not only celebrities who sometimes crave privacy after the diagnosis of an illness; society’s inability to deal with bereavement, disability and difference in public space may make the withdrawal from public life by those dealing with illness themselves even more justified. The view that illness is something that one should be ashamed of, or the view that illness is something which burdens others, is individualistic and, in fact, ableist in its construction. While we don’t need to force Adler to share her illness with the public, we wish she would have known that we would support her however she needed. But then, of course, society has to do that work of not being ableist dicks…. And this might be a long time coming.  (BL)

Adler & Gibb, by Tim Crouch, 3-27 August (not 8, 15, 22), Summerhall, BSL interpreted shows available - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/adler-gibb

In Theory – ‘The Death of the Author’ - https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/jan/13/death-of-the-author

Dr. Richard Kogan – Rachmaninoff and His Psychiatry - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM097N2lNEI

On Capote and In Cold Blood - http://ocbookshoppe.com/blog/the-legacy-of-truman-capote/

David Bowie’s Death Is A Reminder of the Sanctity of a Private Life - http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/01/david-bowies-dignified-death-is-a-reminder-of-the-sanctity-of-private-life/

RSA Animates: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo