Reviews

Office politics and corporate games are in full force in this one-act play from the award-winning writer, Tim Marriot. The senior manager Jo, played with a devious smile by Nicholas Collett, is going through the annual review process with Emily-Jo Davidson’s head of department Nicky. It’s a two-hander that needs only a straightforward set (desk, laptop, bottle of scotch in the bottom drawer) and two terrific actors to drive the story through its twists, turns and backtracks.

This English duo represent the unique opportunity that the Fringe offers to see ‘bite size’ performances by incredibly skilled and talented performers who create what is very loosely described as a murder mystery.

Gavin Robertson comes from a physical theatre background and has a theatre pedigree as an actor, writer, teacher and director and producer. Winner of international and national UK theatre awards for television and stage, he has also turned his hand to crafting youth theatre and directing Bollywood films.

CAMP is drawn from a book of the same name published last year about the gay and lesbian Campaign Against Moral Persecution. Back in the early 1970’s, it seemed an impossible dream.  The book and now this play remind us, and especially younger queers, that the fight for inclusion and human rights was not all fun and glitter.

In her director’s notes for Blessed Union, Hannah Goodwin observes that ‘realism can be as mad, as absurd, as symbolic, as scalable and as strange as many of the heightened forms”. Playwright Maeve Marsden manages to incorporate aspects of all of that into this funny, moving, chaotic play about a “queer family” navigating the best possible way to stay together in the process of “falling apart”.