Night Journey, by Martin Jones and Gregory Light, is currently playing at the Arts and Letters Club as part of the Fringe. An elderly professor is teaching a class on interpreting Homer’s Odyssey to four students in a basement storage room. All five are facing their own demons and are in the class for varied reasons. Slowly, despite pedagogy as ancient as the text, they find a way of finding meaning in the Odyssey, or at least in the actions of Odysseus, and begin to confront their own demons. So far so good.
I’m not the biggest fan of stand up comedy and Andrew Silverwood’s Love thy Neighbour didn’t change that. Like all stand up shows (IMO) it spends far too much time trying to shock without actually being particularly shocking. Maybe in the context of a rowdy comedy club that can work but with a typically polite Fringe audience it seems forced. Offering breath mints as communion wafers is mildly funny and shenanigans about a shared olive tree have their moments.
Justin Hay’s My Own Private Shakespeare is the perfect antidote to an overdose of goofy comedy at the Fringe. It’s directed by Mona Zaidi and written and performed by Hay. The starting point is Hay’s annus horribilis (to quote her late majesty) of 2024 which featured, within two months, the death of his (extremely problematic) father, a messy break up and divorce and a brain tumour. The story moves forwards and backwards in time fleshing out each narrative thread and illustrating/illuminating each narrative twist with a scene from one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. It’s deceptively simple but beautifully constructed and very well performed.
operaramblings 