Edinburgh Fringe 2024 reviews: REVENGE: After the Levoyah / Puddles and Amazons

REVENGE: After the Levoyah, Summerhall ★★★★★ 

The Jews have had enough. After decades – centuries, in fact – of suspicion, name-calling, finger-pointing and violent persecution, they can’t even leave their Gants Hill or Barkingside flats, where London smears into Essex, any more. In 2019, though, things have really come to a head thanks to one figure: Jeremy Corbyn. Something needs to be done.

Step in twins Dan and Lauren, plus dodgy ex-gangster Malcolm Spivak, who steals the show with his wide-boy pronouncements at their granddad’s funeral. Have the unlikely siblings got the balls to act, to fight for their beliefs, to do something that will mean they’re forever remembered in Jewish history?

Nick Cassenbaum’s breathless, brutal farce pulls no punches in its savage – and savagely funny – depictions of Jewish characters and beliefs, as he slowly unveils his twins’ huge supporting cast of fussing aunties and preening ex-boyfriends, gnarled Holocaust survivors and bent rabbis, each skewered with vicious wit and no little affection either. His story is as audacious and far-fetched as his motley character creations – to say much more would spoil the are-they-really-going-to fun (and yes, they really do). As events spiral deliriously out of control, and as motives become ever murkier, what began as a thriller turns its spotlight of investigation on itself, plunging its hands into the dirty mess of Zionism, anti-Semitism, prejudice, discrimination, retribution and more – though even a pat moral ending gets a merciless take-down.

If Cassenbaum’s creation is breathtaking in its audacity, his duo of actors give equally astonishing performances, switching nimbly between sharply etched characters and throwing themselves around the tiny stage of Summerhall’s Anatomy Lecture Theatre (a strangely appropriate venue for this furious dissection of suburban Jewish mores). Dylan Corbett-Bader has snarling humour as Malcolm and a nicely wide-eyed innocence as Dan, while Gemma Barnett crackles with menace as nonagenarian Belsen survivor Moishe, and provides a foil to Dan as likeable but conflicted twin Lauren. Cassenbaum’s pacing feels a bit inconsistent – while certain events are lingered over in excrutiating detail, other zip by with the briefest of descriptions – though director Emma Jude Harris delivers a slick, relentlessly funny and increasingly over-the-top hour of sizzling comedy and drama. Revenge: After the Levoyah is a brilliantly perceptive but brutally unforgiving show that dares to tackle pitch-black subjects with fiery humour. 

• Until 26 August

Puddles and Amazons, Summerhall ★★★ 

Simon is just 11 when he loses his mother. He’s barely able to understand the event, though the trauma – and an unfortunate incident with an ice lolly – make a remarkable physical impact on him. Apparently overnight, the boy becomes icy cold, chilling fellow bathers in the school swimming pool, and earning cruel taunts from his classmates. It’s only by breaking with home and finding new love in the arms of another that Simon is able to rediscover his warmth.

Writer and performer Guy Woods’s (pictured above, by Amy Urqugart) tender, magic-realist tale wears its fairly straightforward conceit proudly, and Woods splashes around in an on-stage blow-up swimming pool to hammer home his overarching metaphor. Puddles and Amazons, though, is a perplexing mix of several different elements – narration, audience interactions, looped sound and foley work – that, while lovingly crafted and delivered individually, don’t quite gel into a seamless whole. Which is a shame, because a lot of craft has evidently gone into the show in its potent recurring images and its slowly unfolding plot. At heart, it’s a simple story of assimilating trauma and sexual coming-of-age, but Woods’s layers of meaning and reference transform his simple story into something rich and strange, and beguilingly whimsical – if not always entirely convincing. 

• Until 26 August 

• The Edinburgh Fringe runs until 26 August 
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