PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

★★★★

“It’s a thrill to watch, genuinely hilarious at times”

A key memory of In Bed With My Brother’s last Fringe show, Tricky Second Album in 2019, was the rumour that they had failed their risk assessment and had to cancel the first three performances. Naturally, this only made it one of the hottest tickets of the festival, and it lived up to the hype. Loud, chaotic, and dangerous, their work gleefully dismantles both dramaturgical and health-and-safety rule books.

After a few years away, they return with what they tell us is going to be a more traditional show, a biographical take on “the best worst band of all time” The Shaggs, and their 1969 album Philosophy of the World (we just can’t mention this to Tom Cruise who owns the rights). We’re told to expect a classic three-act structure, with the trio playing the Wiggin sisters and hired actor Nigel Barrett as their father and stage manager. But tradition doesn’t last long, and predictably, chaos sets in.

The first act covers the story: Dorothy, Betty, and Helen Wiggin (Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory AKA “In Bed With My Brother”) are pushed into forming a band after their father is told by a fortune teller they will become famous. They work relentlessly, eventually producing an album mocked on release. We as the audience boo and jeer on cue, some of us cast as various townsfolk.

But then Austin dies. What follows is an attempt to escape. Barrett as Austin returns again and again as a ghost, trying to get control of things, but each time he’s killed in varying levels of bloody and violent ways; on one occasion beaten to death, on another impaled by a microphone stand, blood dripping from his mouth.

Part of the show’s brilliance is its ability to make the violence seem so real. And part of that is because much of it is: Drums really are thrown forcefully onto the stage; a can of cola really does explode in the audience. And it’s the chaos and seeming spontaneity of these moments that makes some of the deaths seem themselves genuinely violent. It’s frankly a relief to see the brilliant Ruth Cooper-Brown credited as fight director to know that they were in fact all safe. At one point a cigarette is nearly lit on stage (which is an absolute no-no in Scotland thanks to the 2005 Health and Social Care Act). It’s genuinely hard to tell how far they’ll go though, with the finale of their last show seeing them threaten to burn the night’s ticket income.

Beneath the mayhem lies a pointed question about making art under imposed structures, whether patriarchal or otherwise, and how those in power dictate the work we’re “allowed” to make. It also feels like they’ve been working through some stuff as a company; trying to figure out what their next move is and what sort of work they want to make next.

It’s a thrill to watch, genuinely hilarious at times, though it feels, ironically, a little too safe. Tricky Second Album was terrifying; here, moments of sincerity, even tenderness, creep in before being shattered by gunfire. Are they chasing something they can’t quite reach? Or has this very show been shaped by restrictions they could not rebel against? Still, few companies match their brand of anarchic theatre, and it’s going to be interesting to see where their next phase of evolution takes them.