Edinburgh Fringe 2024 reviews: Òran / This Town

Òran, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ 

Glasgow-based theatre company Wonder Fools are having a particularly busy Fringe. Alongside a revival of their excellent football drama Same Team at the Traverse Theatre, their far smaller, more intimate show Òran has company co-artistic director Robbie Gordon deliver a blistering solo performance inside a shipping container at the back of the Pleasance Courtyard. It’s far better than that probably sounds.

And while Òran might open with smiles and camaraderie – with audience members greeted and assigned micro-roles, for example – things quickly get far darker. Our eponymous hero is a schoolboy whose best friend has been lost to him. It’s Òran’s duty to bring him back from the hellish pit that now confines him – but to do so means confronting some of his own worst fears and insecurities, and his moments of most appalling shame.

Writer Owen Sutcliffe has transformed the Orpheus and Eurydice myth into a story of loss, love and salvation entirely of our own times, in which online exploitation can destroy a person, in which parental love is never a given, and in which brotherly loss is transformed into love and admiration for a friend. His language straddles prose, poetry and rap, and Gordon delivers it with an appropriately grip-your-lapels intensity, triggering his own beat-heavy, syrup-thick soundtrack (composed by Glasgow duo VanIves) via a desktop pad. It’s a remarkable performance that goes far beyond storytelling, but similarly, Sutcliffe’s writing finds mythic, monumental themes in apparently mundane details from the teenagers’ lives. The results are hugely powerful and ultimately very moving, made all the more so by the utter conviction of Gordon’s towering performance, and Wonder Fools’ co-founder Jack Nurse’s assured, vivid direction. If the ending feels rather abrupt, that’s surely in keeping with a show whose propulsive energy seems uncontainable. Òran is a provocative, immersive creation that provides ancient perspectives on some very contemporary concerns.

• Until 25 August

This Town, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ 

Just next door to Òran’s shipping container, Derby-born, Manchester-based writer and performer Rory Aaron (pictured above) delivers another solo show straddling poetry, storytelling and theatre. This Town might be a far quieter creation, but it’s no less powerful for that.

We’re in an anonymous Midlands town, where old friends Joe and Dean meet again after years apart. Dean has a degree and now lives in Hackney, while Joe – well, he hasn’t moved on much from their school days. But there are reasons for that. Over the course of his wide-ranging monologue, Aaron fills in the backstories of Joe’s war-damaged brother, his bereaved mother, even the two lads’ long-suffering drama teacher. The result is a tender but still hard-edged portrait of male friendship, one that negotiates questions of class, privilege, even sexuality with a light touch, but nonetheless remains rooted in the vividly evoked specifics of these two young men’s lives.

Aaron has derived This Town from his own narrative poem And Within These Cobbled Streets. And its origins in poetry show: his writing blends the commonplace with the literary to arresting effect, and his delivery slides between chatty colloquialisms and declamation. It’s a thoughtful, assured performance – directed with simple effectiveness by Kao Hove – but one whose understatement sometimes threatens to undersell Aaron’s material. In the end, however, it’s the ringing authenticity of his characters and the quiet but profound insights he offers that really carry his debut Fringe offering. 

• Until 26 August 

• The Edinburgh Fringe runs until 26 August 
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