There are piquant pairings in the city of Jekyll and Hyde. In the international festival two plays about addiction and recovery. On the fringe, two shows about what might be thought to be the opposite: Gwyneth Paltrow.
David Ireland’s new drama, The Fifth Step, directed by Finn den Hertog for the National Theatre of Scotland, bangs on to the stage with the crackling, cackling dramatist’s talents flaring. Ireland, whose Cyprus Avenue (2016) features a man who thinks his baby granddaughter is Gerry Adams, now finds comedy and grimness, hallucination and naturalism in the exchanges between a young man (Jack Lowden) who has recently joined AA and his older mentor (Sean Gilder). The Fifth Step suggests, as did Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things, that addiction is part of the basic condition of being human.
In the fifth step of the AA programme, people share with their sponsors a “moral inventory”, a list of bad things they have done. The idea is to shake off shame. Ireland – who is a tremendous tease as a plotter, throwing out red herrings and last-minute swerves – marvellously shows confession as part of addiction and as itself addictive. These conversations range freely, straggle, compel. The fellows talk about the young man’s obsessions: his father (“cunt”); his wanking (20 times a day); his movie fixation (his favourite genre is “anything violent”); his fitness regime. Then, suddenly, Jesus turns up beside him on the treadmill at the gym, looking like Willem Dafoe and with soft hands like those of “a sad child”.
The power between the men shifts. In a moment both exciting and overemphatic, the drab, unsparingly lit settings of Milla Clarke’s design – institutional meeting rooms and cafes – are dismantled and pushed around by Lowden, just as his mentor’s authority wanes. The two actors register the changes more subtly but with impressive force. Gilder begins bluff and relaxed, slowly imploding as secrets are revealed and anger floods his face. Lowden, first seen leaning away from human contact, fists lightly clenched, later with knees uncontrollably jiggling, slowly stops looking lopsided and becomes squarer, more solid. For a few moments he seems merely wholesome. That, thank goodness, is misleading. Nothing is mere in Ireland’s world.
Lowden is at Edinburgh in double guise. As actor and as co-producer with his wife, Saoirse Ronan, of the film The Outrun, based on Amy Liptrot’s memoir. Meanwhile, a nifty adaptation of The Outrun by Stef Smith is staged by Vicky Featherstone, founding artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland.
This really has no right to succeed at all. The power of Liptrot’s account of a wild spirit whose life is torn by alcoholism, and who fights her way to an existence free of drink, depends on something almost impossible to convey on stage: a fusion of her feelings with the landscape of Orkney. She grew up with wind-whipped open spaces, sheer drops and a rearing ocean; a girl who was never afraid of heights.
Although Lewis den Hertog’s videos swirl with cloud and mist and stars, the set design (again by Milla Clarke) – a wooden sauna-like box perched on a hillocky stage – cannot suggest the sweep of the land. Featherstone and Smith put across something different, driving inward to Liptrot’s tumults. Luke Sutherland, who grew up in Orkney, has composed music that suggests possibility and temptation. There are liturgical soarings: voices keep rising and sinking, like waves, and nag sweetly like addiction, a single note needling again and again. Techno beats run through the cramped buzz of our heroine’s London life, where she parties, falls in love and alienates her partner with her elusiveness, her drunk excursions. “Make mine a double,” she yells as she runs haphazardly hither and thither.
The excellent thing about Isis Hainsworth’s performance is that she is not only reckless and fragile but also sturdy. Like Liptrot she avoids the impression of secret self-admiration, the narcissism of public remorse. The production quietly suggests her looking to the world outside and finding it sentient: a shadowy chorus appear like the islands’ standing stones. Not everything is only about her, though Et in Orcadia ego.
On the fringe, two shows have swooped on Gwyneth Paltrow’s courtroom spat with an optometrist who said she had crashed into him on the ski slopes, leaving him a fractured sadsack; his opponents produced snaps of one of his personalities beaming on a camel in Morocco. Paltrow, who won the case, said she lost half a day’s skiing and felt “icky”.
“Icky” would have been a good song for I Wish You Well: The Gwyneth Paltrow Ski-Trial Musical, the trim and tuneful musical directed by Shiv Rabheru, which takes its title from the sinister whisper Paltrow dropped in her adversary’s ear as she left the court. I Wish You Well wastes no time in its 60 well-sung, neatly choreographed (by Arlene Phillips) minutes, from the opening invitation: “Deep Breath. Smell that. It’s MY VAGINA.” Diana Vickers’s Gwynnie is skinny, bright and belting; as the optometrist, Marc Antolin unleashes his rage for fame by dropping his trousers (neat, possibly leather trunks underneath) and roaring out a song; Idriss Kargbo’s judge shucks his gown and quiver-bottoms his way across the stage in sequins. Making the most of Rick Pearson’s smart lyrics, Tori Allen-Martin is outstanding, vibrating vocally and pectorally in the part of the lawyer (“Gemini, Swiftie, vegan”) who is representing the eye-man but who, with her “passion for high court fashion”, really wants to be more than friends with Gwynnie. A September transfer to the Criterion in London has just been announced.
Awkward Productions’ two-hander Gwyneth Goes Skiing, written and performed by Linus Karp Joseph Martin, is just as gay but less merry. A jaunty but overextended piece of droll cajole. Members of the audience are summoned (tipped off in the queue) to read the parts of supporting characters. Drag queen Trixie Mattel puts in a pouting video appearance as Paltrow’s mother, Blythe Danner. The optometrist’s manipulatable lawyer is a raging Muppet. In a smart piece of typecasting, a fruit plays the part of Gwynnie’s daughter, Apple, crunching when she takes the stand.
Linus Karp is Gwynnie, brought to an approximation of life with a sudden wide smile, wafting hands and massive hair swishing – ultimate proof of the fact that most women are thought to be recognisable only by their hair. In both shows, the most risible moments come verbatim from the actual trial. The moment when celebrity and cash made everyone look bonkers and Paltrow became paltry.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Fifth Step ★★★★
The Outrun ★★★
I Wish You Well: The Gwyneth Paltrow Ski-Trial Musical ★★★★
Gwyneth Goes Skiing ★★★
The Fifth Step is at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 25 August, then Pavilion theatre, Glasgow, 28 to 31 August
I Wish You Well: The Gwyneth Paltrow Ski-Trial Musical is at Underbelly George Square, Edinburgh, until 26 August
Gwyneth Goes Skiing is at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 26 August
