Fringe reviews: This is Paradise, Lament for Sheku Bayoh and Screen 9

THIS is the third consecutive Edinburgh Fringe (setting aside last year’s Covid-cancelled programme) in which the Traverse Theatre has boasted the world premiere of a hit play by a Scotland-based dramatist from Northern Ireland.

In 2018, the actor-turned-writer David Ireland (a graduate of the acting programme of what is now called the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) gave us the searing, dark comedy Ulster American.

The following year, Meghan Tyler (coincidentally another thespian who trained at the RCS) chainsawed her way into the public imagination with the extraordinary, quasi-surreal political comedy Crocodile Fever. Now, even in this strangest of festival years, the tradition of the Northern Irish Traverse play is continued by This Is Paradise (Traverse, ends today) by Michael John O’Neill.

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The Traverse’s live, in-person programme (as opposed to its considerable online offering) has been much reduced by the pandemic. Nevertheless, having opened with stellar Irish writer Enda Walsh’s glorious play Medicine and ending with O’Neill’s drama, 2021 is likely to be remembered as a vintage Fringe for the new writing theatre.

O’Neill has lived in Scotland for some years, making a tremendous contribution as a producer for companies such as the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, Gaelic company Theatre Gu Leòr and the National Theatre of Scotland. If This Is Paradise is any indication, his offering as playwright could prove to be even richer.

Like Ulster American and Crocodile Fever, the play connects very directly to Northern Ireland. Indeed, a solo drama for the character of Kate (played by the exceptional Amy Molloy), a Belfast woman in her late 20s who is attempting, against the physical odds, to have a baby, it is set mainly within the province.

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It’s April 1998, an almost innocent time in which Tony Blair might have thought that his primary legacy would be the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, rather than his role as second fiddle to the Americans in the calamitous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Kate struggles to join in with the general euphoria of “peace in our time”, such are her fears for her early-stage pregnancy.

Although she is attempting to build a stable life with her loving partner Brendy, a phone call from a desperate young woman drags Kate back into a difficult and conflicted period from her past. At the age of 16 Kate embarked on a tempestuous and unhealthy relationship with Diver, a wide-as-a-barn-door chancer in his late-30s who had charm and charisma, and was always on the run from the “bad fellas” of the Northern Irish underworld.

Now Diver’s latest “child bride” is on the phone to Kate terrified that he might have followed through on a threat to kill himself. As her compatriots celebrate peace, and with an important prenatal scan in just a few days, Kate’s off to the fictitious seaside town of Portbenony to check that Diver hasn’t committed suicide.

Kate’s remembrances of these events are interlaced with memories of her original, dysfunctional, besotted, often exciting relationship with Diver and of the sorry end of her school sweetheart “Big Joe”. Her recollections are also joined, constantly, to the stability and familiarity of Brendy and to Kate’s desire to give him a child, despite her soul-crushing near certainty that her “breaking” body cannot sustain a pregnancy.

O’Neill’s writing is compelling, sharp and sympathetic. It has an intelligent fluidity that marks it out in new writing for the Scottish stage.

FOR her part, Molloy, playing on a minimalist, wooden jetty set, gives a bravura, emotionally dexterous and deeply moving performance that captivates throughout its brilliantly sustained 80 minutes. Perfectly attuned, both to her character’s barbed intelligence and the clever nuances of O’Neill’s script, she makes an unanswerable case for director Katherine Nesbitt’s production to be revived in the very near future.

Whether Lament For Sheku Bayoh (Lyceum, ends today) could sustain a return is a moot point. The play is Hannah Lavery’s reflection on the death in police custody, in Fife in 2015, of 31-year-old, Scots-Sierra Leonean man Sheku Bayoh. This presentation, for the Edinburgh International Festival, is the live theatre premiere of a piece that was shown online in November of last year.

Patricia Panther in Lament for Sheku Bayoh. Photograph: Jamal Yussuff-Adelakun

Now that we can experience the piece in its natural habitat, shorn of the restrictions and distancing impacts of virtual reality, we can get a truer picture of its capacities as a work of theatrical drama. Performed by its strong, original cast of Saskia Ashdown, Patricia Panther and Courtney Stoddart, with composer and musician Beldina Odenyo, the affecting poetry and moral urgency of writer-director Lavery’s piece undoubtedly benefits from being experienced live and in person.

However, the production underlines the fact that, in trying to combine elements of documentary theatre, verbatim drama, poetic lament, polemic, music and song, Lavery is attempting something extremely difficult. How to simultaneously bear witness to the truth, and the lies, about Bayoh’s death, pay suitable tribute to his life, mourn his passing, place it in the context of the racism that continues to blight Scottish society and relate it all to the belated and ongoing public inquiry into the circumstances of his demise?

It is an extremely tall order, and one that the play often measures up to. In its moments of poetic reflection, Lavery’s script is tender, touching, righteously angry and powerfully uncompromising.

The sections of the text that offer us historical information and political context are clear and essential. The tone of the performers is, by turns, and as it should be, solemn, sad and defiant. The visual dimension, which shows us photos of proud Scot Bayoh wearing his kilt and pictures of the movement for justice led by his family, is often poignant.

However, Lavery has never quite found a solution to the problem of how to structure such diverse material in theatrical terms. As staged, the piece looks and feels stilted and somewhat awkward.

Both the occasional choreography and the use of colour (which comes via video projection and in the strobes that illuminate the stage) seem like failed attempts to inject some kind of vitality into a production that is simply too static. Odenyo’s guitar music is, for the most part, beautifully played and wonderfully atmospheric, even if, at the top of the show, she makes an unfortunate dirge out of Robert Burns’s great poem For a’ That and a’ That.

ALMOST inevitably uneven though it is, Lavery’s play certainly succeeds in conveying the urgency and importance of the issues raised by Sheku Bayoh’s death. His demise came five years before George Floyd’s life was so brutally snuffed out by Minneapolis police officer, and now convicted murderer, Derek Chauvin. It is, surely, to Scotland’s shame that Bayoh’s loved ones are still waiting for justice.

Screen 9 (Pleasance @ EICC, ends today) is another immensely timely piece of theatre. Indeed, when the young theatre-makers of Piccolo Theatre created the show, which is about the infamous mass shooting in a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012, they could never have imagined that, within two days of their Fringe run beginning, the UK would experience the terrible mass gun murders in Plymouth.

The cast of Screen 9, a play about the cinema shooting in Aurora, Colorado

The appalling events in Devon add a terrible immediacy to Kate Barton’s verbatim piece about the Colorado atrocity and its aftermath. On July 20, 2012, at a midnight screening of the new Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises, gunman James Holmes set off tear gas grenades in Screen 9 of the Century 16 cinema.

He then opened fire, murdering 12 people. Holmes also maimed and injured a further 70 people, 58 of them with gunshot wounds.

The play, which is staged in partnership with US-based charity Survivors Empowered, uses testimony of survivors of the massacre to convey the shock and horror of Holmes’s assault.

Barton’s carefully constructed text expresses strongly and compellingly the terror of the attack, the desperate attempts by people to escape, to protect others, even to see the murderous shooter through the tear gas.

The play also reflects movingly on the immediate aftermath, including the desperate attempts by paramedics and police to get wounded people to hospital. Furthermore, an interesting strand in the drama gives expression to the differing opinions on gun control that are held among survivors of the mass homicide.

VITALLY important though the issues raised by the play are, however, the production never quite finds a way to dramatise the material sufficiently. A long segment in which the actors sit in the midst of the audience recounting testimony makes conceptual sense (as if placing us all, cast and theatre-goers alike, in a cinema hall), but it makes for ineffective theatre.

The moments, during scenes in which survivors meet, in which people attempt to comfort each other physically, clash awkwardly with the general stasis of the piece. They also highlight the uneven acting abilities of the four-strong cast.

As we know from Scottish hit play Black Watch, verbatim testimony works best in the theatre when it is invigorated with imaginative dramatisation. Screen 9, sadly, has much too little of that.