Optimistic: Elizabeth Holmes
Aug 12-16, 18-27 - Zoo Southside Elizabeth Holmes claims her biotechnology will revolutionise medicine – and people believe her. A single drop of blood, she claims, can be used for up to 800 blood tests. As she defrauds investors of hundreds of millions of dollars and uses her disastrous technology to test real patients, does she think she's doing anything wrong? This devised verbatim play, based on interviews, newly released trial exhibits, text messages, and Holmes's personal notes, asks questions about the gap between appearance and reality as it delves into the mind of the fraudster once considered guaranteed to change the world. .At the height of her success as an ambitious entrepreneur, Elizabeth Holmes was celebrated as a charismatic and impressive storyteller, but those words belong to Sarah Deller in her incredible one-woman show where she takes on the role of the disgraced biotech CEO. Over these past few years, people have been captivated by Elizabeth Holmes and her story due to her audacious vision of transforming medical testing overnight, her age and gender for such a successful entrepreneur, and her bizarre public speaking voice which Desser has nailed. Holmes is now serving time for a massive fraud which duped investors like Rupert Murdoch, major corporations, and health agencies with her claims of having developed revolutionary blood testing technology through her company, Theranos, which claimed could perform a wide range of tests using just a few drops of blood, while in reality, the technology was useless. Since the story broke there have been in-depth podcasts, articles, documentaries and an award-winning television show exploring Holmes and the rise and fall of Theranos. However, I have always been curious about what it would have been like to be in those labs, offices and stages with Holmes as she tried to keep a ten billion house of sand from collapsing. To spend an hour in the presence of Sarah Deller on stage was the closest insight you could ever possibly hope to get as she adopts a verbatim approach using Holmes and the individuals involved words and testimony exclusively to brilliant effect. On a performance level alone, it is incredible to watch Deller deliver the most detailed of text in a way that could be compared to watching a character in Star Trek explain how the Enterprise operates. Whereas podcasts and television shows drag out the information and chart the journey of Holmes from superstar to prisoner, this condensed approach truly allows you to experience the frantic and chaotic nature of Holmes' downfall. Deller is a vessel for Holmes as all of her research and preparation allows her to be a host for an hour, and it's not just a case of her quoting Holmes as this becomes a physically demanding role as the anxiety and stress surge through her body. The show becomes immersive as you see every bead of sweat on her head, and you can feel what those moments would be like as Wall Street Journal closed in would've been like for Holmes in her office. This is the closest you will ever get to being in the room where it happened. What the public and investors saw when Holmes was using the power of her words, Deller can reveal to the audience the true Holmes using her own words and fears. To go and deliver a public presentation on a dud piece of technology or give a TED talk and fool so many people would have been incredibly draining and to get an insight into those private messages and how she was struggling after in the green rooms and offices after is a brilliant counterbalance to all the public footage out there of Holmes in these settings. Deller's show is a tribute to her incredible research and performance and will leave you with one of the greatest final lines you will hear at any fringe show this year. 5/5 Book your tickets here > https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/optimistic-elizabeth-holmes Lee Hutchison Dough
Aug 11-13, 15-20, 22-28 - Pleasance Dome A darkly comic drama from internationally acclaimed Molière award-winner, David Lescot. Explore a lifetime through one person's daily interactions with money, and the transactions we engage in to build a life – from the Tooth Fairy to negotiating with the funeral director. Landing in Edinburgh direct from New York, this fast-paced play sees three actors bring over forty characters to life in one hour. Based on the largely millennial and older audience attending a mid-afternoon performance of Dough as part of the Fringe I suspect the lyrics 'You're a slave to the money then you die' from The Verve were being evoked in their memories. Perhaps even more so during the suffocating cost of living crisis, it was a brutal reminder of the world outside this darkened and warm room. At times a very bleak and tragic tale of Me (Zach Lusk) who is like nearly all of us who grew up comfortable but was never far away from money troubles or the victim of bad decisions within and outside our control. It is difficult to escape the pull of spending and for over six decades Me never escapes it. There is a shared feeling with this room of older Fringe patrons who have tipped over into the second half or later years of their lives and realise how much our capitalist society has a grip on our lives and will until the bitter end. However, the play is not completely a graveyard to our society and dreams but there is great humour, and not all just gallows too which largely comes from Hannah Mitchell and Matthew Brown who in one hour play over forty unique characters from undertakers, spoiled children to downtrodden parents. It's easy to be conditioned and see a title like Dough and as you watch the early moments of the play as the young Me twists his parents around his finger to squeeze more money out of them expecting this to be the Making of a Banker and be about to watch a play in the ilk of The Lehman Brothers and the rise of another banking bastard instead we see ourselves and our fate unfolding. There's not a message of optimism at the end and the play rightfully embraces the nihilism and universality of capitalism's pull on Me and us all. 4/5 Book your tickets here > https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/dough Lee Hutchison Certain Death and Other Considerations
Aug 10-13, 15-20, 22-27 - Zoo Playground The world will end in exactly 80 years – just enough time to have a baby! This devised dark comedy follows two couples (and a surrogate) as they prepare to welcome new life into a dying world. With doomsday just outside of their natural lifespan, certain death is close enough to inform every decision, but far enough away to ignore in a pinch. What would you do if the world was going to end in eighty years? The reality is that your life is likely going to end in 80 years, yet you carry on living it, starting families, falling in love, and going to work. However, for an unknown reason, in eighty years, the world within this play will end, and everyone is aware of the ticking clock. Evoking the best of something like Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men, where mankind could no longer have children and we saw how society fell apart, Certain Death... focuses on the macro of the type of conversations regular people would have when the end of the world is far enough on the horizon that you are unlikely to see the end but your next generation might. The play is labelled as a drama and dark comedy, but it reminds me of the best science fiction in the type of conversations it provokes in you as an audience when you walk out of the safe space of a theatre. The reality of our own world is damning already, with many debating if they should be having children in a world of global boiling, rampant inequality, and bringing children into a world where they're going to be even worse off than the current generation, and that's a sorry state too. What makes the play work so well is these conversations among friends, partners, and a surrogate parent, focusing on their day-to-day lives and personal drama that many can relate to and wouldn't look out of place in countless other festival shows, except that these are heightened by the impending doom that their world will end. The anxiety that looming doomsday brings, which manifests itself on stage as a dominating digital clock, adds to the sense of urgency in every conversation, choice, and fear felt by our characters. The ticking clock already applies to us all, and perhaps we too should learn to embrace those awkward conversations, swallow those bitter pills, and take those big swings that could bring us happiness too. Don't let your time run out by missing this show. 4/5 Book your tickets here > https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/certain-death-and-other-considerations Lee Hutchison Vote Macbeth
Aug 11, 15, 17, 19 - theSpace @ Surgeons Hall Captain Macbeth is Vice-President. He and Lady Macbeth want more. Standing in their way are three all-knowing newsreaders, President Duncan, press secretary Macduff, Hecate the diva queen of all media, and Macbeth’s dashing comrade, Banquo. In this tale of ambition, guilt, murder, power, vengeance, and press manipulation, with an original pop-musical-theatre score, it’s up to you to decide if they get their way. I have seen Shakespeare plays on stage many times over the years and the accessibility of the text has always been something from school I have struggled with. It helps when there's been a celebrity on stage in the form of Patrick Stewart to Benedict Cumberbatch to entertain me as I just marvel at their performances all the while the text becomes trying to tune my ear to a fast-moving foreign language and I follow the play by years of osmosis. However, I found Vote Macbeth with its approach of tackling the text as a piece of musical theatre with an impressive eighteen catchy songs one of the best ways for someone like me to experience Macbeth. Macbeth's themes of power, ambition, manipulation, and political intrigue have meant for every generation there has been a reason to bring the text to the modern age. Experiencing Vote Macbeth felt very fresh even in this era of long worn-out Trump parallels as Macbeth a populist politician with a red tie aims for the top and will say and do whatever to get there. Vote Macbeth's big theatrical numbers have you excited at the prospect of seeing this production in a larger venue in the future as it reminds you of your experience of watching Hamilton as you enjoy the whiplash of a subject most people will associate with stuffy classrooms into something much more high energy where you just find yourself going with the flow of the music in an incredibly tight 65 minutes long performance. Produced by the Glasgow-based Clydebuilt Theatre Company it was great to hear the famous Scottish play complete with Scot's tongues once again. In the role of Macbeth, writer, director and composer John Paul Liddle leads a fantastic troop of talent. The leads all deliver to make the show engaging but I wanted to highlight Michael O'Hare as the short-lived Duncan King who has a brilliant stage presence for such a new theatre actor but his background and charisma performing in band shines through. The chorus of witches now taking on the guise of newscasters was an inspired creative decision and Molly Cowie as the lead newscaster was someone you couldn't take your eyes off as she tapped into the over-the-top and performative reactions we get from so many political commentators like Tucker Carlson on television to everything going around them and enabling drama and viral coverage in the process. There are nearly sixty different Shakespeare musicals, performances and readings taking place at this year's Fringe competing for attention but this one left me smiling and with many of the strong eighteen songs still playing in my head the next day. 4/5 Book your tickets here > https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/vote-macbeth Lee Hutchison Why Am I Like This?
Aug 4-12, 14-19 - theSpace @ Surgeons Hall Do you misplace your glasses so often that you now have six pairs so you aren't trapped inside and half-blind? How often do you have the brilliant idea to paint your nails five minutes before leaving the house? How frequently do you shame spiral into oblivion while asking yourself, yet again, Why Am I Like This? Follow Nicole on her 30-year journey as she discovers the four-letter diagnosis that answers the biggest question in her life, and what that will mean for the next 30. Spoiler alert – she has ADHD. It feels impossible to review Why Am I Like This? in a bubble because the message and importance of the play extend beyond the excellence of this 40 minutes one-woman show from Fringe debutant Nicole Nadler. Nicole shares her personal experience of how she came to discover she had ADHD in her early 30s and to explain the challenges a condition like this can present but equally the historical and societal barriers it brings especially for women. This play arrives within a period of history where our understanding and awareness of neurodivergent conditions like ADHD has never been higher thanks to individuals like Nicole sharing their story and with many taking to social media to talk about their own experiences. However, on the other side, it brings out ignorant voices online, in the media and within family circles implying the significant uptick in people with ADHD is due to social media, being wildly misdiagnosed or wanting to be part of the latest trend. Nicole’s play is about how she could live her life for thirty years and not be picked up in school or society having ADHD is something that so many out there with a diagnosis, who have to self-diagnose, struggle in silence can relate to but for others watching they might be completely unaware that a label and community is waiting for them because they simply don’t know they have ADHD or aware of the traits. Nicole cleverly goes beyond just the personal story and comes with the receipts about how society is letting down people when it comes to diagnosing in particular women, growing waiting lists for support within NHS, the price of a private diagnosis and how even when a diagnosis arrives the system continues to fail people with extremely high costs of medication or underfunded support. There has been a massive injustice when it comes to autism and ADHD in particular for women in the medical world as history has looked at this condition through unsurprisingly the lens of boys and men resulting in a lack of recognition of how the traits appeared in girls and women. The statistic of 3-1 male to female for ADHD diagnoses in the UK is damning as so many women go unseen, unsupported or are forced to mask in schools, workplace and society which has a hugely damaging impact on their mental health. Nicole shows sexism within the medical world because she didn’t showcase the traits that were associated with boys with ADHD such as hyperactive and impulsive behaviours which went unnoticed. Nicole breaks those myths that many will have allowed themselves to be told are universal truths about how ADHD presents by explaining how it shows in women as she takes us through examples from her life where she had inattention, disorganisation, and emotional dysregulation, which to others would be mistaken for anxiety or mental health issues and not the signs of ADHD. This has led to generations of women facing delays in diagnosis, support and treatment which has contributed to experiencing barriers and challenges in education, work, and relationships. Nicole joins a range of plays looking at neurodivergent conditions this year and this trend can only be viewed as a positive for those who think it is bandwagon jumping in their ignorance one only needs to look at why we are seeing this rise in talent sharing their stories this year especially women like Nicole. For Nicole’s generation did they ever stand a chance of being diagnosed in the 1990s or even early 2000s? Not likely! Research on ADHD began in the 1960s and 1970s when more substantial research on ADHD started to emerge. During this period, researchers began to focus on the behavioural and cognitive aspects of the condition. During the 80s ADHD as a term was adopted and while the studies at the time looked at boys and girls, the symptomatology in boys was often more pronounced and more likely to be identified. As a result, boys were diagnosed with ADHD at a higher rate than girls, leading to a skewed perception that has lasted decades. For older generations and millennial women like Nicole research into ADHD in women didn’t even gain more serious attention and recognition in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It would take until the 1990s for researchers to recognise that ADHD symptoms could present differently in women. One of the key moments that Nicole highlights is in 2002 when the National Institutes of Health organised a landmark conference on "ADHD Across the Lifespan," which aimed to explore the gender differences in ADHD. The conference highlighted the importance of recognising ADHD in females and addressing the gender-specific challenges they face. Since then, there has been a gradual increase in research focusing on ADHD in women, leading to a better understanding of how the disorder manifests in different genders and the need for tailored approaches to diagnosis and treatment. With 15% of the UK population having a neurodivergent condition which is 1 in 7 then it is highly likely that you will have a family member, co-worker, or friend or be part of a community where someone is neurodivergent and that is just those with a diagnosis and not taking into account that the reality will be higher with so many on waiting lists or not having been picked up. If you don’t already then you need to improve your awareness and understanding to best understand, communicate and support those around you and shows like this are essential. This makes shows like Nicole’s highly important with the perfect mix of personal stories and myth-busting. During our show what at first might have seemed like a heckler was someone who was connecting with Nicole’s messages and the importance of this show by sharing her lived experience and feeling seen by this and recognising their challenges in life too and lived experience is always the best way to learn. This is a show for everyone. For those who society hasn’t seen or failed, for those who want to see themselves represented on the festival line up but essentially for those too with their ignorance who will leave hopefully being able to put their hands on how wrong they have got things. It’s not just research and awareness that are necessary to ensure that women receive the diagnoses, support and resources they need to thrive but shows like this too. 5/5 Book tickets or access online performances here > Why Am I Like This? | Theatre | Edinburgh Festival Fringe (edfringe.com) Lee Hutchison |