Edinburgh snippets

I saw a few car crashes at Edinburgh but I’ll mention only one. Hells Bells (Pleasance, Courtyard) by the excellent Lynne Truss is a peculiar experiment. Truss sets her play in a TV studio and she spends the first 40 minutes explaining the storyline. The show lasts 45 minutes. So when we finally learn what the action is about, the action is about to cease. The nub of the drama concerns a TV show that was cancelled suddenly in 1995. So the play’s conflicts are rooted in the distant past and involve characters who aren’t on stage. The play culminates, weirdly, in a fight involving the destruction of some elaborately ugly hats. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that this closing scene is Truss’s comment on her own work. Strange, pointless and a bit desperate.

Coalition (Pleasance, Queen Dome) by Robert Kahn and Tom Salinsky is a flawed but often very funny political satire. Matt Cooper is a LibDem deputy prime minister struggling to control his party while maintaining good relations with his Tory colleagues in government. Cooper is not Nick Clegg. He’s a vain, scheming, foul-mouthed and arrogant Little Englander who heartily loathes anyone living outside the Home Counties. The skilful comic Thom Tuck makes him ludicrously unpleasant rather than utterly obnoxious.

The writers have sprayed comic ideas all over the place in the hope that some of them will work. And plenty of them do. They’ve gathered a harvest of jokes from every source known to man: from history, from biography, from Westminster rumour, from P.J. O’Rourke. They’ve even written a few themselves. Like this. Cooper is accused of being ‘only interested in power’. He reacts furiously. ‘If I was only interested in power, I wouldn’t have joined the Liberal Democrats!’ The comedienne Jo Caulfield delivers a great performance as an icily competent, and secretly ambitious, government whip.