FEELING AFRAID AS IF SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS GOING TO HAPPEN at Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★★★★★
“exciting, original and very funny”
Samuel Barnett plays a stand-up comedian in his Edinburgh debut performance of Marcelo Dos Santos’s new play. He’s thirty-six, which he reassures us is fine in a tone of voice which suggests it’s maybe not. He’s incredibly neurotic, hopelessly single, spending his days scrolling through headless torsos on Grindr and working on his stand-up routines. Every so often we’re treated to a new gag, which range from jokes about Wetherspoons to feeling like you’re going to die if there’s blood in your cum to having the urge to crush a kitten to death with your bare hands. I think Barnett proves that any joke can be funny if the delivery is done right. At one point he even deconstructs the delivery of a perfect joke: the rule of three, alliteration, words which suddenly become funny when juxtaposed with something unexpected. I’m a bit of a nerd for writing theory so loved this bit. As the play plays with form itself, in a stand-up routine which becomes theatre (or vice-versa), it’s very interested in the masking of one form with the other, just as the character masks his underlying anxieties with his jokes.
But when he meets a new man known only as the ‘American’, his jokes just aren’t going to cut it. The American has an uncommon medical conditions where laughing could literally kill him. So he can’t laugh at any of his jokes, even though he reassures him he really does find them funny. Barnett’s character – who doesn’t seem to be given a name – ends up jeopardising the relationship, the first proper relationship of his thirty-six years, and the story ends on a brilliant punchline, which we realise it’s been working towards from quite early on. It’s great.
Barnett’s timing, of both the comedy and the desperation, is impeccable. He’s on full speed from the moment the lights go up and it feels like he hardly stops from breath. And then the moments he does, the moments when he drops the mic and lets us really hear him, we cling on to, hoping we might find some truths, hoping we might be trusted enough to let him be vulnerable for a moment. Matthew Xia’s direction astutely sets the pace of Santos’s text, and works brilliantly to ensure Barnett connects with each and every person in the audience as he whizzes around the stage. It very much feels like we’re at a comedy gig in the way Barnett forms his rapport with us. He rolls his eyes and we feel like rolling ours with him. Each expression and tiny gesture is carefully timed and delivered. We’re totally there with him and his frustrations at the American for not getting slapstick, and other British cultural references. The whole performance is totally captivating.
At the heart of the story, of the jokes, is a comedian, a man in his mid-thirties, living in London and feeling incredibly lonely. And when someone sees this for what it is, he struggles to decide whether or not he can let himself open up. We don’t really find out what happens in the end, but the final gag we’re left with suggests there probably is quite a bit of hope for this character. It’s an exciting, original and very funny new play, with a magnificent, five-star performance from Barnett at the helm.
Reviewed 12th August 2022
by Joseph Winer
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“a beautifully constructed show, full of heart and heartbreak”
Haley McGee performs her new show, Age is a Feeling, a delicate, poignant, and ultimately – I think – uplifting piece of work about life, death and those moments in between; the one’s others remember us for, and the one’s no one ever really even knew about. McGee began developing the piece during the UK’s first national lockdown in 2020, and was inspired by interviews with hospice workers, as well as visits to cemeteries.
Zoë Hurwitz’s set is made of twelve tall, thin flowers, spread out in a circle, like the numbers on a clockface. Each one sits in a small plant pot. On each of the plants is a postcard, representing different stories from McGee’s life. (I should flag at this point that the show has a sort of autobiographical feel, but it’s not clear if any of this is actually from McGee’s life.) Throughout the performance, the audience chooses which of the six stories we get to hear, and which of the six will be left unheard. Some of the stories we hear tonight include ‘oyster’, ‘hospital’ and ‘crabtree’. We don’t tonight get to hear, for example, ‘fist’, ‘bus’, or ‘dog’. In the middle of the circle of plants and postcards is a tall, white lifeguard’s chair, which McGee spends a fair amount of time sat upon, narrating memories of her life which surround her. They’ve all already happened now, so she gets to look down on them as she narrates to us.
The stories begin at age twenty-five and journey through the human life until the point of death. Among them, we hear about broken hearts, relationships, family, grey hairs, backache and skincare. There is an emphasis on trying to live a life which goes against convention and, without ever becoming particularly sad about it, regrets or references to things we may have done differently. But also here is the feeling of inevitability. That it doesn’t matter if you know at aged twenty-five you should be eating more vegetables, drinking more water, exercising more frequently; it’s hard to make these changes when you’re young. You’ll make these changes ‘for a while’ and then move back to your old ways. The reception of ‘for a while’ at increasing ages makes us laugh at first; then it’s sad; and then it’s sort of funny again.
The show has a little bit of a slow start, but this plays to its benefit as McGee is able to gently and delicately build these layers upon layers of stories and memories, until before you know it she’s old, her friends and family are dying, as is inevitable, and we watch the life she’s built slowly decompose. Her performance of these stories is what makes them so extraordinary. Her voice is deeply controlled, soft, meditative, as it gently echos through the lecture theatre. Her eyes begin welling up, as she connects deeply with the audience, making it seem like these stories could belong to any one of us.
We spend so many years feeling anxious about what others think of us, and we make so many decisions or lose out to so many opportunities because of this; because we want to be popular or non-confrontational, and so much of this show is about grabbing life’s opportunities and jumping at them, being less afraid of what people will think of you because you only have one life. And once it’s gone, it’s just memories, stories told by other people. And ultimately, eventually, they’ll all be lost forever anyway. We take most our stories with us to the grave, so we might as well write them the best we can, when we can.
It’s a beautifully constructed show, full of heart and heartbreak and regrets, but ultimately hope and love and opportunity.
Reviewed 12th August 2022
by Joseph Winer
Photography by Thea Courtney
For dates and venues for all Fringe shows, click on the image below
