Drowning their sorrows ... or toasting success?

Go To Gaza, Drink The Sea Assembly @ Assembly Hall Until August 30 (not 18)

Gagarin Way The Stand Until August 30 (not 17)

Reviewed by Mark Brown

***

SOME Edinburgh Fringe productions seem destined for greatness, so tantalising are the elements they bring together. Barflies, the latest work from Edinburgh-based site-specific theatre specialists Grid Iron, appeared to be such a show. The play, which is performed in an Edinburgh boozer, is based upon the writings of Charles Bukowski and directed by Ben Harrison, creator of Fringe hits The Devil's Larder and Those Eyes, That Mouth. Someone even takes your drinks order at the beginning. What's not to love?

Sadly, the piece never really measures up to expectations. No blame attaches to lead actor Keith Fleming, however. His Henry, a Scottish Bukowski, has all the elements required, from the author's alcohol-fuelled brilliance to his violently conflicting attitudes to women. Propping up the bar like a human sack of potatoes, he is the very image of the debauched genius.

The problem lies, rather, in the show's conception. Unusually for Harrison, the text lacks coherence and momentum. Moreover, the women in Bukowski's life (all played by a slightly struggling Gail Watson) are little more than fleeting caricatures. Even the tragic beauty, Cass, fails to achieve the status of a real, affecting human being. The thinness of the female portraits might plausibly be claimed to be a manifestation of Bukowski's approach to women. However, you can't help but feel they have been somehow reduced in the transfer from the page to Grid Iron's unorthodox stage. The uneasiness of the presentation is exacerbated by some awful stage sex. The story in which Bukowski imagines himself as a six-inch-high sex toy seems like a pale reflection of an image from Pedro Almodovar's film Talk To Her.

As so often with Grid Iron, the piece is strong on ambience. Not for the first time, this is largely down to the extraordinary interventions of composer and sound designer David Paul Jones. His live and recorded bar music is superb, culminating in a beautiful new arrangement (with exquisite live singing by Jones himself) of Robert Burns's song The Lasses, O. The unevenness of the production notwithstanding, this closer is a veritable coup de théâtre.

There is unevenness too in Dennis Kelly's new play Orphans, for Birmingham Rep and the Traverse. A drama in which Liam, wayward brother of Helen, arrives in his sister's London home covered in blood, it is very much a play of two halves. Suspended tantalisingly in the first half between naturalism and abstraction, the piece unbuckles after the interval as it stretches our credulity beyond endurance.

Helen and Liam, the orphans of the title, were together throughout a difficult childhood in the care system. Against the odds she now has a good job, a nice home and a seemingly good marriage to Danny, with whom she has a child and another on the way. Liam, by contrast, drifts around London, hangs out with dangerous people and is regularly the subject of police inquiries. His sudden, blood-stained arrival, with a story of helping a wounded youngster in the street, inevitably raises questions.

Kelly (author of the successful Edinburgh Fringe play After The End) generates considerable tension, oiled with smart, broodingly dark humour. Like designer Garance Marneur's hyper-realist set (part middle-class domesticity, part spiked-fenced urbanism), his text has a bleakly premonitory atmosphere. There is, however, something of an identity crisis at the heart of the play. Unable to decide whether he wants to write in the tradition of British kitchen sink naturalism or the abstracted domesticity of the late Harold Pinter, Kelly tries to play things down the middle. The results are disappointing.

As the drama turns to the contorted realities of British racial politics, Islamophobia and street violence, Kelly asks us to take mental leaps (particularly in relation to Danny, who has, hitherto, been the epitome of the educated, liberal professional) his play cannot sustain. Had we been in Pinterland for the preceding hour - a place where violent non-sequiturs and unexpected behaviours are commonplace - Danny's sudden turn might just have been plausible. Here, though, Kelly seems to be playing it straight; Danny isn't a symbol or a metaphor, but rather a "realistic" character with all the demands of consistency that requires. As such, his big decision becomes entirely implausible, and the play begins to come apart at the seams. All of which is a pity, as director Roxana Silbert has fashioned a taut production with a universally impressive cast.

If Kelly's play disappoints, promises are dashed even more painfully by Justin Butcher and Ahmed Masoud's Go To Gaza, Drink The Sea. Coming just seven months after the Israeli invasion of Gaza, the piece promised - through music, choreography, dialogue and video images - to give a powerful artistic expression to the existential crisis of the Palestinian people. The involvement of writer and choreographer Masoud and player and singer Nizar Al-Issa held out the prospect of a play inflected with the extraordinary poetics of the Arab world's cultural traditions.

What we get instead is a work which combines documentary theatre, verbatim drama and a very British kind of realism. Video footage from the BBC and Al Jazeera coverage of the Gaza war is flashed on a TV screen. John Ging, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency, is represented on stage, saying the words we heard him utter back in January. There is even a recreation of the moment in which the BBC revealed to a bereft Palestinian father that one of his children had been found alive, but could no longer walk. This is emotive stuff, of course, but no more emotive than it was when shown on TV screens seven months ago. Simply attempting to lace through it the story of one young man's journey to Islamic militancy doesn't render it any more theatrical. Whatever the extent of your political, or simply human, sympathies with the people of Gaza, the crushing disappointment of this piece is that it prioritises polemic over art.

The problems are of an entirely different order in the staging of Gregory Burke's brilliant political comedy Gagarin Way by The Stand comedy club and the Comedians Theatre Company. It's true, of course, that when well-known stand-up comedians appear in plays it puts bums on Fringe seats. However, as this show proves, it's more doubtful whether comedians perform comic dramas better than trained actors.

Watching Phil Nichol, Jim Muir and co struggle with the Fife accents and the sharp wit of arguably Burke's finest play is like watching a fly trying to swim through treacle; although, to be fair, Bruce Morton gives a reasonable performance as the kidnapped capitalist. However, even the stellar gag about Jean Paul Sartre and Jean Genet is lost here, and that's just not funny.