Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic For most of the year, Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre hosts a modest bill of touring theatre and trad music. During the Fringe, though, the 270-seat main house and the 120-seat studio burst with new work, returning productions and transfers. This year there are 10, rotating around a roster stretching from 10am to 11pm.The most impressive is Cyrano, Australian writer and actor Virginia Gay’s metatheatrical, modern-day spin on Edmond Rostand’s drama about the long-nosed lover from France. First seen in Melbourne in 2022 and now making its European premiere in a new staging directed by Clare Watson, it is a dazzlingly clever piece of theatre that manages to be witty, knowing, satirical and heartfelt all at once.The outline of the original is visible: the eloquent, arrogant Cyrano, ashamed of his overlarge nose, uses his way with words to woo his beloved Roxanne on behalf of another. Gay’s genius, though, is to have her rebranded characters — a gender-flipped Cyrano, her beloved Roxanne, love-rival Yan and a three-strong chorus — construct the play themselves, interrogating it as they go. It is Rostand by way of Pirandello, with a big dollop of knockabout Aussie humour: Six Characters in Search of a Hooter.So we get Jessica Whitehurst’s vivacious Roxanne demanding more autonomy; Brandon Grace’s himbo Yan wondering whether he is a protagonist or a punchline; and Tessa Wong, David Tarkenter and Tanvi Virmani’s entertaining chorus quibbling over plot points. At the show’s centre is Gay, as a queer Cyrano, pontificating on the power of poetry and lamenting her sizeable snout. There is no prosthetic proboscis in sight, though: a simple decision that suddenly allows the story to be read as a moving meditation on the turmoil of loving someone from a body you do not feel you belong in.Stuffed with silly dances, physical comedy and audience interaction, Watson’s staging has a winningly laid-back combination of humour and heart. This is joyously smart stuff. ★★★★★Alongside Cyrano in Traverse 1 is American writer Adam Rapp’s play The Sound Inside, which was nominated for six Tony Awards when it ran on Broadway five years ago and which now makes its UK premiere in a taut production from director Matt Wilkinson.A two-hander, it tracks the relationship between Bella, a tenured professor of creative writing at Yale University, and Christopher, a precocious, prodigiously talented misfit student. At first, it seems irritatingly overwritten: a sophomoric drama laden with literary debate, stuffed with strained similes and liberally peppered with quotes from as many authors as possible, from Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Fred Gipson.Slowly, though, things get murkier. Bella has terminal cancer. Christopher is writing a strange, semi-autobiographical novella about a murderous freshman. They go for dinner, get drunk and share a brief moment of romance. They reveal secrets. They take turns talking to the audience, unreliable narrators both.It is helped by a stark, slick staging from Wilkinson — a bare stage, two chairs, subtle lighting from Elliot Griggs, a doomy soundscape from Gareth Fry — and by two strong performances from Madeleine Potter and Eric Sirakian. She is cautious and curious in a lumpy cardigan; he is fidgety angst with a bulky backpack. Rapp’s play emerges as a compellingly cryptic yarn, totally open to interpretation, like a Paul Auster story. ★★★★☆Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell’s So Young, meanwhile, is a sturdily constructed comedy-drama that slowly reveals itself as a timely exploration of unexpected grief. It is 2021 and fortysomethings Davie and Liane are at their old friend Milo’s for dinner, where they meet his new 20-year-old fiancée Greta. They are outraged because Helen, Milo’s wife of 20 years, has died just three months previously from Covid.What starts as a sitcommy dinner-party play about midlife crises, vanishing libidos and too much red wine gradually evolves into something far deeper: an astute portrait of four people struggling to come to terms with a traumatic period of their lives. Gareth Nicholls’s staging unfolds without fuss on Kenny Miller’s multilevel domestic set, allowing room for Maxwell’s deepening dialogue to stretch and reverberate.It boasts a quartet of superb performances from Lucianne McEvoy, Andy Clark, Nicholas Karimi and Yana Harris, too. Clark is hilarious as bumbling chatterbox Davie, and McEvoy is astonishingly good as the wounded, bitter, bitingly funny Liane. In one long speech, she recounts Helen’s sudden decline and lonely death in a Covid ward. It is utterly shattering. There is a profound sense of collective anguish in the theatre. ★★★★☆The Traverse 1 bill on the festival’s opening weekend is completed by Same Team, Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse’s raucous all-female football drama that first ran here in December.Traverse 2, meanwhile, houses Batshit, Australian artist Leah Shelton’s surreal solo show about women’s mental health; In Two Minds, a dreary two-hander about a strained mother-daughter relationship from Irish playwright Joanne Ryan; and My English Persian Kitchen, Hannah Khalil’s one-woman play about coercive control, which involves the audience being served warm portions of Persian soup.A History Of Paper, also in Traverse 2, has a sad context. It was written by Kent-born, Scotland-based playwright Oliver Emanuel for the radio in 2016, attracted the attention of composer Gareth Williams and was nurtured into a musical by Dundee Rep artistic director Andrew Panton. Emanuel died of cancer at 43 last year, survived by his wife and two children, so this posthumous production of his tragic love story resonates poignantly.The musical’s central concept is charmingly whimsical: the story of a relationship told through the paper trail it leaves behind. A middle-aged Scottish man pulls receipts, postcards and tickets from a cardboard box, each one evoking a memory about his late wife and their life together at the turn of the millennium. A restaurant menu conjures their first date, a jar of confetti their wedding, a faded letter her fateful offer of job interview in New York. Interspersing the narrative are brief, poetic passages on historical episodes involving paper: Hemingway’s lost manuscript, artist George Wyllie’s giant paper boat; a scribbled note from the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11.The Richard Curtis-cuteness is leavened nicely by some nostalgic humour — there are good gags about Radiohead and PizzaExpress — and underscored by Williams’s floaty score, played live on the piano by Gavin Whitworth. Performers Christopher Jordan-Marshall and Emma Mullen share an infectious chemistry: he is a shy, self-effacing wannabe novelist, she a playful, brazen travel writer. They sing beautifully together.It all unfolds perfectly sweetly until two-thirds of the way through, when the story takes a twist that derails it entirely. To reveal exactly what happens would be a spoiler: suffice to say that it will draw grimaces of recognition from those familiar with the 2010 movie Remember Me. ★★★☆☆Some years are better than others when it comes to the Traverse Theatre’s Fringe programme. Nineteen eighty-five, which had new plays from Peter Arnott, Chris Hannan and Jo Clifford, is still spoken about in hushed tones by those that were there. The last great year was probably 2018, which featured Mark Thomas’s Check Up: Our NHS@70, Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R Sheppard’s Underground Railroad Game and David Ireland’s UIster American.There is more to come this year, including the world premieres of American comedian Natalie Palamides’s romcom Weer and Syrian-Palestinian theatremaker Khawla Ibraheem’s solo-show A Knock On The Roof. Twenty twenty-four could yet prove a great vintage.To August 26, edfringe.com
