Edinburgh snippets

I saw a few car crashes at Edinburgh but I’ll mention only one. Hells Bells (Pleasance, Courtyard) by the excellent Lynne Truss is a peculiar experiment. Truss sets her play in a TV studio and she spends the first 40 minutes explaining the storyline. The show lasts 45 minutes. So when we finally learn what the action is about, the action is about to cease. The nub of the drama concerns a TV show that was cancelled suddenly in 1995. So the play’s conflicts are rooted in the distant past and involve characters who aren’t on stage. The play culminates, weirdly, in a fight involving the destruction of some elaborately ugly hats. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that this closing scene is Truss’s comment on her own work. Strange, pointless and a bit desperate.

Coalition (Pleasance, Queen Dome) by Robert Kahn and Tom Salinsky is a flawed but often very funny political satire.