adam hess

Top 3 of Edinburgh Festival 2017

Writing about Edinburgh is making me wistful, knowing it’s going on right now makes me both happy and sad. The festival really is the most wonderful bug and it’s a given that i’ll be heading back to Scotland next year for more. Here are my top three shows I saw, in order of totally subjective feelings.

Joseph Morpurgo – Hammerhead. (Pleasance Courtyard, 8pm)

Multimedia comedy is something Jospeh Morpurgo has turned into an art form, and this is the third show I’ve seen from him. Hammerhead is an unhinged masterpiece of stage craft and audience participation. His first show, Odessa, saw him weave a story about a Texan town out of a few minutes of old video footage. His second, Soothing Sounds for Baby, was his take on Desert Island Discs, with an increasingly drunk Kirsty Young. It didn’t win the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2015, which is either a terrible oversight or an indication of how good the competition was. Hammerhead is something of a change in direction as we are invited to a post-show Q&A where Morpurgo plays a monstrous, flailing actor who has just played all the parts in a 9 hour version of Frankenstein, including “the concept of wet”. As audience members are picked out to read questions, the actor’s ego grows at first as adoring fans congratulate him, then rapidly collapses when the questions turn nasty. His fictional Frankenstein production is an unmitigated disaster, and Morpurgo demonstrates this with some painfully funny projections and video pieces, questions from sources as varied as the dark web and defunct messaging services. His explanation of why his flyers were made on Microsoft Excel pushed me over the edge and, having failed to hear some jokes through laughing too much at the previous one, Hammerhead is something I will be seeing again.

In short, Morpurgo is one of the funniest and freshest performers around. Hammerhead is an exquisitely crafted hour of brilliance, where he toys with comedic conventions as easily as a cat would play with a ball of string.

Adam Hess – Cactus. (Heroes at the Hive, 6pm)

Sara Pascoe and John Robins dated, then broke up. This year their shows delve deeply into their breakups, making the most of their misery for all to see. Adam Hess wrote a show loosely about his own breakup, but doesn’t come close to the level of intimacy, choosing to focus the comedy around his own reactions to breaking up. It’s a brilliant hour of one-liners one after the other and a reminder that comics draw energy from the darker edges of life. There’s a tinge of tragedy in how Hess drinks to forget from a “world’s best nephew” mug when we discover the mug was from a charity shop. In this show, he turns every situation into something funny, with a greatly likeable stage presence.

Jon Pointing – Act Natural. (Pleasance Courtyard, 7.15pm)

Another comic monster is born! Pointing plays an hour as the ghastly Kayden Hunter in a drama workshop where his ego is the main star. It’s a brilliant take down of those self-satisfied presenters we’ve surely all seen, reminding me of an inspirational speaker I once saw reduce two woman to tears and piss off an entire room with his bizarre declarations like “I’m an outstanding teacher but none of you here seem to see it” and the like. Excellent stuff.

Edinburgh Festival 2017 part 2

As you slowly sink into the rhythm of the Fringe, you’ll realise that you can’t do everything, but it’s still worth a try. For me, I can manage about four shows a day as the maximum. I like to give myself time to check out the listings, see what’s getting good reviews and importantly, make time to visit Brew Lab for the best coffee in town.

On our third day, we kicked off with Javaad Alipoor’s Believers are but Brothers (Northern Stage at Summerhall, 12.45pm) a play that tackles the online radicalisation of men, which Alipoor argues, is the only perspective he can truthfully try and explore. The show starts with the audience being asked to join a Whatsapp group so we can communicate via an encrypted message service. At points in the show, we are asked questions by message about the number of Muslims in Britain and then the number that have joined ISIS; we are called out for being a liberal arts audience when we underestimate the number that have been radicalised, yet we’re still way out. Out of three million Muslims in Britain around 300 have gone to explore what ISIS can offer them. Online and in real life, it’s a vile world of men thinking they should have more money, more sex, more influence. We are shown examples of the ISIS media machinery, showing themselves to be constant victors in a war against the West. These lonely men are able to use the web to talk in a way they would never dare to in real life and those that join ISIS are quickly swept up into their world of hyper-violence.

What Alipoor is trying to get across here is the depth of hate and confusion these men have and how easy it can be to fall down the rabbit hole, though it’s also somehow reassuring that when he tried to connect with these people, they could tell he wasn’t one of them straight away and rebuffed his attempts to talk, sometimes using crude Sunni v Shia imagery to make him back off. If the storytelling is at times a bit frantic, it’s understandable when the show is trying to cover so much ground, but at its core, this is a show that is trying to make sense of something we see in the news often, but rarely try to understand and for that it must be applauded. Islamic extremist and the alt-right – fast becoming a cover phrase for Neo-Nazism, are threats of our era that are compared in this show as being very similar. Alipoor is a gifted storyteller, with a sly sense of humour that comes out when things look bleak.

In the afternoon, my friend and I went to a Free Fringe show, Bitchelors (Voodoo Rooms, 3.10pm) by Anna Morris. A good idea that feels spread thin by the hour’s end, Morris plays a former bride of the year and four women competing to be woman of the year. While the ideas are strong and the jokes keep coming, aided by some slick video, the show never quite moved past enjoyable and into memorable, perhaps because Morris failed to make these women as hideous as they could be. Naturally, every one of them had a fatal flaw which unravelled as their presentation wore on, but that feels so obvious as to be fully expected. Despite this, Morris is a skilled performer and can engage with the room well, but at the Fringe, almost everyone can do this. As my friend noted, filling an hour with consistently funny material must be extraordinarily hard and the characters in this show would be a great match for comedy nights across the UK where each act gets 15 minutes to do their sketch, but an hour seems a tad too much.

Adam Hess (Heroes at the Hive, 6pm) on the other hand crams two hours of funny material into one by talking at a speed just short of sound. His performance style is perfectly crafted, allowing each joke to crash into the next, keeping the audience laughing from start to go in a Mexican wave of haha’s. In-between jokes will come lines like “It’s sad that we’ll never know how many chameleons snuck onto the Ark” and stories that push the limits of plausibility but always have enough in them to sound real. His family sound brilliantly twisted and Hess manages to not only keep us laughing but shows us his passion for taking notes, writing jokes always and keeping the burning restlessness of his youth alive. A marvellous comedian.

Staying on at the stinky Hive, we saw Paul Currie (Heroes at the Hive, 6.30PM) for the first time and while he described as it Monty Pythonesque when handing out flyers, I was still left a little dumbstruck by his show. He has the audience in the palm of his hand throughout and drew from the energy and good atmosphere, making us pretend to be horses, ride the dragon from Never Ending Story, act out a song as cats… that’s the sort of thing he does to get us warmed up. Audience participation is a big part of this show and Currie doesn’t just drag people from the front row but actively roams the room looking for participants. As with the best comics, he might put people through ridiculous tasks, but he’s willing to put himself through just as much. Go along with the ride, in short.