PLEASE, FEEL FREE TO SHARE at Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★★★★
“Róisín Bevan commands the stage right from the start”
Please, Feel Free to Share is Rachel Causer’s latest script — a one woman show about social media, addiction to group therapy, and compulsive lying. If this sounds downbeat, heavy stuff, it’s not. It’s a funny, insightful look into how easy it is to become hooked on the things that don’t matter, while ignoring the things (and people) that do. Playing at the intimate Attic space at the Pleasance Courtyard, Please, Feel Free to Share is sixty minutes of watching the outwardly successful Alex (played by Róisín Bevan) take apart her self sabotaging strategies at work, and in her personal life. It’s often hilarious, and oddly heartwarming.
Causer’s plays often feature wry observations about the work world. She sees things we either miss, or fail to take as seriously as we should, as we go about our busy lives. Causer also sees how our professional lives bleed into our personal lives in ways that can injure both. In Please, Feel Free to Share, Alex’s life begins to spiral out of control as she adapts successful social media strategies at work for managing her personal life. But adapting a professional strategy designed for advertising purposes — to promote a product — somehow doesn’t seem quite right when the “product” is you. Causer strips away the false importance of maintaining a social media presence for what it is: a way of plastering over shortcomings that would be obvious if we didn’t spend so much time covering them up. As a successful social media consultant, Alex racks up the new Instagram followers at work, while posting pictures to boost a carefully tailored online personal profile. In the meantime, she hasn’t taken the time to grieve the loss of her father, and she keeps getting messages about her estranged mother from a hospital she doesn’t call back. Finally her boss suggests she takes some time off, and suggests a group therapy session to help with grieving. Alex takes her boss’ advice—and her carefully curated life starts to unravel. Desperate to find approval any way that she can, Alex builds a completely false story around the recent death of her father at the group therapy session. And once she starts lying, of course she can’t stop.
Please, Feel Free to Share is a timely play, and performer Róisín Bevan commands the stage right from the start. Dressed in eye-catching pink and orange, and in a small space decorated only with matching chairs, she takes immediate charge of the performance space, and the audience. Bevan begins by showing exactly how convincingly Alex can lie. Then in a breathtaking switcheroo, Bevan exposes Alex the liar. And having established that Alex is an unreliable narrator, and is in many ways, quite an unlikeable character, Bevan, as Alex, still manages to maintain the audience’s sympathy. This is very competent work, and does Causer’s script credit. Please, Feel Free to Share also confirms that Rachel Causer is a playwright to watch. Recommended.
Reviewed 5th August 2022
by Dominica Plummer
Photography courtesy Chloe Nelkin Consulting
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“All the necessary components are there … I could just do with a little more amazement and a little less explanation”
Shotgun Carousel’s reputation for outlandish and stunningly executed immersive events far precedes their current show, Red Palace. After last year’s outrageously decadent Divine Proportions, I was fully prepared for an evening of hedonistic debauchery, expertly implemented to lavish excess.
he concept (Laura Drake Chambers) is strong from the start, and all-encompassing: There is a prophesy known across the land that after a thousand days on the throne, the tyrant prince will come to a bloody end. But the prince has no intention of giving up his rule and instead he’s throwing a party on the very day this prophecy should come to pass. Dress code is “your best ball attire and a mask to match” ( don’t worry, you can borrow a mask at the box office). It really is very effective to walk in to a dimly lit room full of masked faces, even if you know most of those are your fellow audience members.
For those who decide to indulge, dinner is served before the main event in a gallery overlooking the hoi polloi. MasterChef semi-finalist Annie McKenzie has whipped up a true feast – I’ll be thinking about that sticky honey soda bread with whipped rosemary butter for days to come, and I only wish I’d snuck in some tupperware for a little more of that rich, crispy shallot tarte tatin.
Performances are promised throughout dinner, but instead we’re occasionally introduced to a character from the main show’s narrative who we’ll no doubt encounter again later in the evening. This is a little disappointing: A performance suggests something of a spectacle and instead we have a preview of a show we’re already signed up to see. The cast themselves are magnificently adorned (Maeve Black) in gothic glamour, and they each play their parts with impressive commitment, even when hassled by substandard audience banter.
The show itself, directed by Celine Lowenthal, takes over the majority of The Vaults, sending the audience sprawling across various nooks and crannies throughout the venue. Initially there’s a sense that we might wander casually from room to room, making discoveries for ourselves, but after the first, we’re shepherded from one spot to the other to observe various necessary parts of the evening’s main plot.
The aesthetics don’t disappoint. Every space has been lovingly crafted to create vastly different atmospheres in each: Snow (White), styled as Barbie Madonna, is throwing a very sad birthday party in her sickly pink boudoir; Gretel (of the famous brother and sister duo) hosts an illegal cabaret with bathtub gin to boot; Red (Riding Hood) hides in the dark, dank forest, plotting her revenge against the prince. But concepts aren’t quite taken to their fabulous potential so within reach. Instead there’s a slight amateur fiddliness to it all, causing a lag between the evening’s tent-pole performances, and slightly sapping the fun out of it as the audience shuffles from one room to the next.
All the necessary components are there: stunning designs, exquisite food, engrossing performances and a well thought out concept. I could just do with a little more amazement and a little less explanation. No need to continuously force feed us the plot, we just want to have a radically decadent unicorn of an evening. Whilst for most that would be too much to ask, it’s what we’ve come to expect from Shotgun Carousel, and on this occasion they’ve just missed the mark.
