David Greig has written the international festival’s flagship drama, Midsummer. This farcical romance is performed as a party piece by four actors supported by a plinky-plonky band playing satirical ballads. We meet two boozy drifters, Bob and Helena, who enjoy a night of rampant sex aftera chance encounter in an Edinburgh pub. Will their affair live or die? Well, since the show starts with two older actors reminiscing about the characters’ past we knowin advance how it all ends. An odd way to kill suspense.
The lovers have little in common apart from alcoholism and the madcap plot sends them hurtling through a set of mishaps and scrapes as their romance develops. They get tied up in a bondage club. They bump into each other by accident outside Helena’s sister’s wedding. Bob gets chased by a thug who suffers a heart attack and leaves Bob in possession of £15,000 which Helena encourages him to donate to random strangers.
These whimsical plot twists are marred by the dialogue, which relies on Greig’s schoolboy enthusiasms for vomit, urine and swearing. Selected aphorisms include ‘35 is a shit age’ and ‘life isn’t a game of poker, it’s a game of patience’. When not reading Dostoevsky, Bob likes to hold metaphysical conversations with his penis. He muses that because existence is a journey through measurable chronological phases it follows that life itself is ‘time travel’. His overexcitement at this trifling pun brought him close to an erotic detonation. The local crowd endured the company of these foul-mouthed gasbags with so much forbearance and good humour that I began to feel sorry for it. If Edinburgh thinks this tomfoolery is drama, the city is being swindled.
Every year Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky bring a political satire to the fringe and every year it disappoints.
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