We're all connected at the Fringe, writes PETER CRAWLEY
LIKE THE unravelling protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper, scouring her walls for meaning, or Nyree Yergainharsian in Where Do I Start?, flipping through identity cards for her sense of self, a critic combs the Absolut Fringe for patterns. Here, then, are my postcards from the edge.
MicrophonesDuring last year's Fringe I criticised the use of onstage microphones. This year only something like 60 per cent of all performances have used them, though admittedly in startling ways.
In Melanie Wilson's Autobiographer, words slip from its character's dementia into the ether of its soundscape. Corn Exchange's Man of Valourmade the masterful Paul Reid the co-designer and sound technician of an entire world, weaving his body into imagery, his voice into music. And Willfredd Theatre's excellent Follow(ironically about hearing difficulties) used microphones to distort and abstract language. You just can't take a stand without someone sticking a microphone in it.
LightsThis year lights became conspicuous performers. Take the handheld inspection lamps of Chunky Move for I Like This:manipulated to reveal, in styptic blinks, juddering shapes and strobed surprises. Or Follow, again, for which Sarah Jane Shiels's handheld lights often did precisely that. If Rough Magic's Jumping Off the Earthwas less successful, even replicating the fathomless darkness of space with a lengthy blackout, it was also rather brave: not because theatre lets there be light, but because in what it reveals it is a light.
DurationTime loses all meaning when we're bored or excited. But at the Fringe it gains significance. Checking in on the 12-hour hotel-room freakout of Waterdonkey's Happeningis also to appreciate its performers' endurance. Fergal McCarthy's week-long residency on an island in the Liffey, No Man's Land, was a similarly assuring if startling presence: whenever you thought of him, there he was.
THEATREclub's epic performance of Twenty Tenbest proved the mesmerising effect of a durational show, where its polyphony of user-generated voices merged into a community of thought, and our pulses began to beat in time with the performers.
Plot Alvin Sputnikhas one so stirringly simple (find your wife, save the world) that it even makes time for a disco interlude. Many shows simply lose theirs. And real life, the material for countless one-person performances this year, won't easily deliver it.
That's why Veronica Dyas's In My Bedis so wonderful. Though Dyas incorporates various clichés of reality theatre – photographs, diaries – her life is amplified with a novelist's sense of detail and shaped with the drive of catharsis. It's why you have to shore yourself against her traumatic story of sexual recovery, but not the unspoken volumes contained in her grandmother's cafetiere.
Only connectSeeking connections may be the pursuit of the disconnected, those for whom experience is individual and "social" means "network". However discrete the methods and meanings of performance seem, the trads and fads, the self-analysis or group therapy, the Fringe asserts that everything is in conversation. That we are somehow bound together in shape and stories. That our voices will be heard . . . maybe with some assistance.
