Six Fringe shows for when the real world could use a little rearranging

Edinburgh rain is extremely good at making reality look overrated.

Fortunately, the Fringe has alternatives.

Walk through one door and an entire city fits on a table. Through another, Vincent van Gogh can meet John Lennon. Somewhere else flamenco wanders into jazz, soldiers begin to sing and twelve strangers discover that the evening has unexpectedly turned into an experiment in truth.

This is the Fringe’s magnificently unreasonable proposition: give us a room and we’ll give you another world.

Sometimes we don’t even need much of a room.

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: A Toy Theater Atlas takes Calvino’s impossible cities and makes them gloriously, deliberately small. Paper mechanisms, miniature objects, puppetry, cameras and live projection allow Marco Polo’s descriptions to appear before Kublai Khan while an empire is disappearing around him.

There is something deeply Fringe about creating immensity from tabletop materials. Big theatre can give us a helicopter. Fringe theatre gives us a piece of cardboard and, if it’s done properly, makes us see the Himalayas.

Perhaps imagination has always liked a restriction.

Then somebody performs the rather more substantial feat of putting Vincent van Gogh and John Lennon in the same room.

When Vincent Met John ignores the minor inconvenience of history and imagines an encounter between two artists separated by generations but connected by creativity, fame, mortality and the question of what remains after the artist has gone.

It’s a beautifully theatrical cheat.

Nobody goes to the theatre because they want history to obey the seating plan. We go partly because it can place two impossible people opposite one another and ask: well, what if?

Flamencodanza builds its alternative world without needing fictional time travel. Dancer Aylin Bayaz and guitarist Raul Mannola bring flamenco into conversation with Brazilian music and jazz. Different traditions meet not because one needs to defeat the other, but because artists are incurably nosy about what might happen if they put two things beside each other.

That may be one of creativity’s most useful habits.

What happens if this meets that?

A guitar meets a body.
An old form meets a new rhythm.
A memory meets a stage.

In Warriors: A Scottish Musical, lived military experience enters musical theatre. Four soldiers move through training, Afghanistan and what follows afterwards, bringing war home not simply as an event that happened somewhere else, but as something carried into families, relationships and ordinary life.

Making another world, then, isn’t necessarily escapism.

Sometimes you construct an artificial world because the real one is too complicated to look at directly.

Theatre has always known this trick. Give something music, character, metaphor or an impossible meeting and suddenly we can stand close enough to examine it.

Which brings us to Dogberry & Verges Are Scared, where Shakespeare’s famously muddled watchmen step forward into territory of their own. The joy of characters such as Dogberry and Verges is that they already occupy that wonderful theatrical border between authority and complete chaos. Put frightened people in charge of keeping order and you have, depending on the evening, either Shakespearean comedy or the six o’clock news.

And then there is Truthmachine, which doesn’t so much offer an escape from reality as quietly remove the floorboards underneath it.

Audience members encounter biometric sensors, voting and lie-detection technology in an interactive examination of truth, interrogation and fake news. After an afternoon spent happily accepting miniature imaginary cities and impossible conversations between dead artists, we’re suddenly asked a much more awkward question:

How do we decide what is real?

Perhaps that’s the joke running underneath the whole Fringe.

Theatre openly tells us it is lying.

The lights go down. Someone walks on. We know the room isn’t a battlefield. We know the cardboard isn’t a city. We know Van Gogh never met Lennon.

And still, for an hour, we agree to believe.

Outside the theatre, things can be rather less courteous. Images arrive without context. Claims become facts through repetition. Technology measures us. Somebody confidently explains something they haven’t checked.

Maybe the little dark room isn’t such a bad place to practise.

Because creativity isn’t only about escaping the world we’ve got. Sometimes we make a smaller, stranger, funnier version of it so that we can turn it around in our hands.

Look underneath.

Move something.

Ask whether it really has to be there.

Then the lights come up and Edinburgh is waiting outside. The rain is still falling. The world has stubbornly failed to reorganise itself during the performance.

But perhaps we have moved half an inch.

Sometimes that’s enough.

Go into the room. Let them build you another world. Then bring something useful back.

SundayFringe continues every Sunday at 10am on Twitter/X — a quiet hour for sharing and discovering art, theatre, writing, photography, craft and whatever else people are making. Follow #SundayFringe, bring something of your own or simply come and see what others have been creating. Everyone is welcome.