Recent and Not-So-Recent Tragedies, Recalled

Greek tragedies were the sturdy roots of Western drama, and those serious beginnings continue to spread here in Scotland, albeit rather altered. Three new productions have arrived at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival taking radically different approaches to dramatising well-known historical events that ended very badly. One uses a mining-related disaster as background setting for a fictional story, another sticks to the facts as it explores the reasons for a woman’s murder at a protest rally, and the third is a whimsical deconstruction of a wildly popular film about the sinking of a certain ocean liner.

Mr. Jones

In its long opening scene Mr. Jones feels like the set-up for a Welsh romantic comedy. Stephen Jones, a teenage footballer, is enjoying a flirtatious gabfest with Angharad Price, a nurse and friend of Stephen’s family who became the occasional needed feminine presence in Stephen’s household once his mother passed. The two share gossip about the locals (a character named Diabetic Jenny “loves the thrill of an insulin spike”), and Stephen, trying to impress Angharad, performs a dramatic reenactment of the recent winning kick he made to get his team into the Cup Final. Angharad’s response: “Your father gave a slightly more mellow account.”

Then a tremendous jolt jars them out of their conversation. They think it’s thunder.

It isn’t. But not knowing that yet, they make a promise to each other and Stephen suggests that “Maybe we should kiss to lock it in.”

That smooch never happens, but you wonder later if it should have. For Stephen and Angharad live in Aberfan, it’s 1966, and though they don’t yet know it, their lives are about to be changed forever by the catastrophic collapse of a coal tip that killed 144 people, including 116 children at a junior school.

Pulling double duty as playwright and actor, Liam Holmes is more interested in the painful aftermath of the disaster and the damage it inflicted on the community than the details of the tragic event itself. Sadness and anger permeate everyone’s life thereafter; no one remains unscathed. It turns out that trauma has no timeline.

Mr. Jones is the first play by Holmes, and what an impressive accomplishment it is, lyrical and moving. Holmes’ performance as Stephen is first-rate, giving off a Barry Keoghan vibe that plays delectably off Mabli Gwynne, who imbues Angharad with equal parts loveliness and gravitas. With strong direction by Michael Neri, Holmes and Gwynne capture your heart, then break it.

#Charlottesville

At the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, 32-year-old protestor Heather Heyer was killed in a car attack by a white supremacist. Priyanka Shetty was an acting graduate student at the University of Virginia in the Charlottesville at the time and was able to personally interview witnesses and participants at the rally. The resulting piece of verbatim theatre she created, #Charlottesville, is powerful and damning.

Like Anna Deavere Smith did with landmark works Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Shetty tackles a major event in recent American history fueled by racial injustice in order to help said event be better understood and remembered. Shetty and director Yury Urnov create and maintain a sense of urgency as Shetty portrays her interviewees (including a musician, a conservative talk show host, a Peace Corps recruiter, and a waitress at the local brewery) as well as notable figures from the trial, including lead lawyers from both sides, the judge and select witnesses. One witness, Christopher Cantwell, known and ridiculed publicly as “The Crying Nazi” after posting a video of himself bawling when a warrant is put out for this arrest post-rally, gets particularly wicked treatment; Shetty performs his testimony as a Fosse- esque jazz number.

The entire play is gripping, tight from start to finish. Shetty ends with a haunting final thought from Heather Heyer’s mother: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” #Charlottesville insists that attention continue to be paid.

Leo Still Dies in the End

Approximately 1,500 people died when the Titanic sunk on her maiden voyage in 1912. Eighty- five years after that sinking, James Cameron’s Titanic exploded in cinemas, breaking box-office records, winning a record 11 Academy Awards and leaving us the still oft-quoted “I’m the king of the world!” Now comedian Alice Fishbein is here to remind us why the film still matters in the magnificently titled Leo Still Dies in the End.

Fishbein has watched Titanic several hundred times and knows the film inside and out, top to bottom. Her deconstructions come from a love of the movie as deep as Jack’s corpse has sunk in the ocean. In the first part of her show, she spins a wheel and lets the wheel decide which scene from the first half of the film she’ll perform, and in the second she recreates the major moments she deems most worthy of revisiting.

Right now Leo Still Dies in the End is charming and charmingly low-tech, but the moments the charismatic Fishbein hits gold (the Titanic story was “seemingly written by a child”) are a sign that much more of the material could be sharper and wittier. Questions inevitably float to the surface: Why not tie the odds of the wheel to the chances of various passengers surviving the sinking? Why does Titanic resonate so much with Fishbein? And finally, why does James Cameron have a thing for hands?