Desi stand-up, drama and dance at The Fringe

An unlikely Indian representative at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival will be a solo performance from Lucknow titled Gigolo: Bold, Beautiful, Bizarre. Created for his theatre outfit, Nobody’s Studio, by actor Dewang Tewari, the play, perhaps expectedly from the title, wades into the murky world of a male escort turned serial killer. The eponymous character played by Tewari is Murli, a runaway from Andhra Pradesh who soon achieves notoriety as an latter-day Jack the Ripper. The poster for the play is suitably glitzy and neon, and carries blurbs from faux (or non-existent) reviews — a bothersome practice which is a thing these days in the world of independent theatre. Ostensibly inspired by true events, the play has snared a four-day showing at the festival, at theSpace@Surgeons’ Hall, where as many as ten performing areas have been crammed into one.

Tewari’s play includes an item number, and several interludes that draw from the lives of real-life psychopaths like Ted Bundy (recently embodied by Zac Efron on celluloid) and Raman Raghav (lionised by Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the 2016 Anurag Kashyap film). It is likely another glamourised excursion into the ‘trippy as hell’ inner world of the psychologically deranged.

Gigolo is a tad different from the usual Indian fare at the festival, which often casts the country as stereotypically exotic, but it doesn’t shy away from the Bollywoodisation considered an inseparable part of India-themed entertainment in the West — but fortunately, that is not so much the case in India itself, where theatre is a parallel culture with its own ethos, that doesn’t frequently borrow its tropes from cinema.

United by culture

Elsewhere, at the Alba Flamenca, a dance studio equipped with a Spanish tapas bar, India Flamenco A Gypsy Tale combines three distinct cultural styles — Kathak, belly dance and flamenco — “all united by a single thread of continuity over time and continents”. Flamenco’s so-called Indian roots (who would’ve known) are excavated in a journey by gypsies who travel from the subcontinent to Andalucia, sharing and imbibing oral (in a corporeal sense) traditions of dance. This particular show has seen previous iterations at the Fringe, at the same venue, and the Indian form showcased in those outings was Odissi rather than Kathak. One review pointed out, “This link between the dance styles does feel more than a little tenuous – there simply to enable the dance company to display a range of talent.”

Yet another show, From India to Triana, effects a journey of dance and music from “the most primitive sounds of India to the fiery rhythms of flamenco”. This is being staged at theSpaceTriplex, and is a presentation by The Rootless Company, a collaboration of Edinburgh-based artists with diverse ethnic backgrounds, founded in 2016. Like Tewari, who attempted to finance his trip via a crowdfunding appeal on Ketto, Rootless have employed the services of FringeFunder, a platform created specifically for those seeking to open a production at the Fringe. Both campaigns have yielded amounts much below their targets. Nonetheless, they are at Edinburgh.

Another Lucknow-based group, the La Martiniere Girls’ Theatre Club, are showcasing Shiva Tandava in Bharatnatyam at Greyfriars Kirk, a church in Edinburgh’s old town. So, seemingly, classical Indian dance (albeit in ‘fusion’ multi-cultural contexts) is a form that always finds favour come August in Scotland.

Funny folks

Of course, the largest contingent of Indian acts at Edinburgh has been contributed by our stand-ups — Vir Das, Aditi Mittal and Sumit Anand, all of whom are performing under the aegis of London’s Soho Theatre. For Anand, this is a debut tour, and Thursday evening was his ‘debut hour’. Called Nothing About Godzilla, his show, quite literally, features nothing about Japanese monster. One reviewer at The Skinny, found him taking a somewhat fresh take at predictable fare. Mittal made a critically-acclaimed debut in 2017, and her Mother of Invention was reviewed positively in a student newspaper. Das, of course, is now an old hand at the festival, where even if he draws a good house, it might be paltry in comparision to his outings on the commercial circuit back home — but the Fringe has always been considered a great leveller, and possibly even a character-building exercise for some. His show, enigmatically titled Love, at the Gilded Balloon at the Museum, received some ‘love’ from Chortle, a British portal for live comedy, for accomplishing with practised ease “the festival’s narrative demands while aspiring to broader universality,” even while being “at pains to emphasise his D-List celebrity credentials.”

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