The Independent from London, Greater London, England • 39

38 39THE INDEPENDENT Tuesday 11 augusT 2015Tuesday 11 augusT 2015 THE INDEPENDENT Edinburgh Festival Saving face: Bryony Kimmings and Tim Grayburn in It You Make corbus Heartfelt tale of depression set to a mambo beat Bryony Kimmings is, in her own words, a loudmouth, slightly pregnant, feminist performance artist whose work usually explores some kind of social stigma. In Sex Idiot, she laid bare her sexual history and STIs; in Seven Day Drunk, she got drunk for a week to investigate effect on art; and for Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model she enlisted the help of her 11-year-old niece to talk about girlhood, sexualisation and modern heroines. For this latest work, she has roped in her Tim Grayburn, 31, a former advertising executive who has thrown in his career to perform, in his underwear, this eccentric, harrowing and important theatre piece about male clinical depression. It was six months into their whirlwind romance Extraordinary opera is worth checking out A man, his wife and his mistress meet up in an abandoned hotel to plan a suicide. a two-star joint with one room and one floor.

And a caretaker (Mikel Murfi, enigmatic and hilarious), who is trying to clean up the place for a sale and a big dance night out. The caretaker sing, but the others do, gloriously, and strangely, in this extraordinary new Irish opera by composer Donnacha Dennehy and playwright Enda Walsh. Walsh broke through on the Edinburgh Fringe in 1997, the same year as Dennehy founded his Crash Ensemble, and the 12 of them, conducted by Andre de Ridder, are in the Lyceum pit to release the score in a tumult of wheezy surges an accordion), melodic serial sequences and crashing thumps and carnivalesque effusions. a thrilling sound. And just as well that the two sopranos Katherine Manley as the wife and Claudia Boyle as the mistress, or woman, as called sing thrillingly well above it, in great curlicues of vocal anguish.

To 11 August (0131 473 2000) On song: Katherine Manley and Claudia Boyle in Last PaTrIck rEDmoND Nervy love story has a bit of byte This is a show, says James Veitch, for anyone who has ever had a broken heart, or a broken iPhone. It has wide appeal, then, and it continues with the zeitgeisty themes of his debut last year, in which he took on email scammers at their own game. This time the subject is old job, at the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York. He delivers it in the manner of a Steve Jobs- style keynote, complete with slides, face mic and less predictably piano. topic is not how to fix smashed screens and frazzled motherboards but rather more fundamental issues.

When the love of his life left him, he set about applying the principles he once used to fix iPhones and iPods to fix his relationship. a neat premise, structured around the stages of tech troubleshooting reboot, diagnostics, stress test and so on. At this stage the constituent parts still feel a little disjointed, leaping around from the lessons of Super Mario to forays into online dating. His guileless replies to phishing emails reappear too and provide the bulk of the laughs. Veitch has found a nerdy niche with his comic lectures about modern technology and he brings his hour to a clever close.

If his delivery is nervy and relies too heavily on his screen-notes, these are early glitches that will surely be ironed out in time. To 30 August (0131 556 6550) when Kimmings found antidepressants hidden in a rucksack. was the day the love story changed. It become worse, but it become He had never told anyone that he suffered from chronic depression and acute anxiety; the revelation set off a chain of events, and, as Kimmings admits drily, planted the idea for a new show. Fake It charts battle with his mental health from the first morning he woke up depressed, and just fell out of my to his weaning off citalopram.

It outlines his breakdowns sometimes in recorded segments, sometimes through song and dance and it probes his suicidal thoughts. This being a Kimmings show, there are plenty of distractions amid the darkness: a sexy bossa nova outlining mental health statistics, performed in skimpy underwear, and a checklist of the symptoms of depression set to a mambo beat. Mime and dance are also used, though less effectively, to convey the storm of a breakdown. Kimmings is as vivacious as ever as a performer, and Grayburn, shy and awkward, proves her perfect foil. At its root, this is an old-fashioned love story an unconventional one, but no less lovely or heart- squeezing for that.

To 30 August (0131 228 1404) Fake It You Make It Traverse Theatre i By a i The Last Hotel Royal Lyceum Theatre i By i a cov James Veitch Pleasance Courtyard review By alice jones oPEra comEDy THEaTrE Off the wall: the cast of Ladies of Perpetual (above); Vicky Featherstone and Lee Hall (top) PETEr DIbDIN contest, determined that drink, shop and have fun when they get there. Against this sense of freedom together, each is struggling with their own issues: serious illness; their sexuality. got this innate gift, but their own lives are in chaos and says Hall, this marvellous tension between the purity of what they can do musically and this roughness outside of that. The play is about this moment, which is possibly their best and most transgressive until now, but we have a feeling that their lives are closing in on them and their opportunities to express themselves are about to be taken away. a very common place to be when in that delicate moment between finding yourself and wanting to express your- self, and the reality of being an adult and leaving school and getting a Music is integral to the play.

Not just the classical works by Handel and Bach, which the girls perform, but also the cover songs they play by artists like ELO. Both Featherstone and Hall enthuse about the six unknown young performers, who were chosen for their spread of abilities to act and play instruments. The work of musical supervisor Martin Lowe, who also worked on Once director John Tiffany, is integral to the piece. play their record laughs Hall. as if putting on a gig and telling us about their day while they do it.

I come from a traditional place where I imagine a show for the theatre without music in it. Music was at the very root of all forms of theatre, from people round the campfire in Africa to all the Greek tragedies. always on the lookout to make shows that have music, and I think in this play it really makes That girls is crucial to the substance of the play, and that Catholic heightens the sense of expectation upon them, but the class of these characters is in keeping with regular themes as well. last week I thought, this is very similar to Billy he says, that these women are artists in much the same way. ordinary people who have art as part of their life, but nothing sentimentalised about that.

very much a celebration of working-class life and culture, and working-class feelings, and I think what attracted me to the book. a world I understand, even though I was brought up in he continues. girls are my sister, my mates from school. A lot of the London media pour scorn on working-class people for being themselves and having a good time, but I want to celebrate the energy of that hedonism because a culture of resistance. Writing drama about ordinary lives is much more rare on the ground now, and now back to Downton Abbey and all that.

worrying, because there are more people like these girls in the country than there are people who go and see theatre. I think that hopefully redressing the Ladies of Perpetual is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, from 18 to 30 August, then touring the UK (www.nationaltheatrescotland.com) Drink, pray, love A new Edinburgh Fringe play about a group of Catholic choir girls behaving badly has a creative team including Vicky Featherstone, head of the Royal Court, and writer Lee Hall. dav i lo asks them if this is a blockbuster in the making walks into a oh you get it, an inn Darren Walsh: Punderbolt, Pleasance Courtyard, 8.30pm jokE of THE Day got a great says director Vicky Featherstone of the project that drew her back to Scotland for a summer and away from the artis- tic directorship of the Royal Court in London. school choir goes to the city for the day, gets drunk, gets into lots of scrapes and then goes home in time for the last dance at the local a fun she claims. This new show from the National Theatre of Scotland also has a creative cast to suggest there might be some blockbuster potential in there.

As well as Featherstone who joined the Royal Court in 2013 after a six-year period as the National Theatre of founding artistic director, where she oversaw hits including Black Watch and Alan one-man adaptation of Macbeth Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour is a retitled version of Alan 1998 third novel The Sopranos, adapted for the stage by Lee Hall, the screenwriter of Billy Elliot and War Horse and playwright of The Pitmen Painters. Although her contract allows her to do one freelance project a year, Featherstone would normally rather get on with the business of run- ning the Royal Court: not there but still getting the she jokes during rehearsals for Our in Glasgow. Yet with this play there was a sense of unfinished business. She had set it in motion herself while at the head of the NTS, Hall remembering that they first discussed their mutual love for book outside the toilets at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards when he won for The Pitmen Painters in 2008. When her replacement at the NTS Laurie Sansom took over, he told her still like to see it produced.

feel very lucky about that, it was very generous of says Featherstone, who has worked on this show in the background for the last two years. great being back in Glasgow, it feels like home Part of the point of desire to see this play produced was her belief that it represents something far more than just a fun story. that headline is a beautiful, profound story about youth, about girls, about the power of girls together as a she says. the adulthood they will have to face at some point, but not today. And that feels very provocative to me.

We live in a world where we so demonise youngsters, and young women par- ticularly, and I really wanted to put characters on stage who are sexual but not sexualised, and allowed to be powerful and in control of their own story. And not in a titillating way, which is the way we normally look at teenage girls, I think. you look at years and years of theatre and she continues, statistics are there that so many more male characters are given the right to tell a story. It just feels like if I do nothing else, I should do something that begins to redress that balance. It be an unusual thing that there are six female characters on stage in a female band, but even when I look at it it feels unusual.

It actually shocks me that it feels unusual to me. It really be in Set across a period of 24 hours, the play fol- lows six girls from a Catholic school in Oban who travel to Edinburgh for the finals of a choir got this innate gift, but their own lives are in disarray.