Morning

From August 2012

About 45 minutes into this piece I considered standing up shouting "This is total shit", smashing up my phone and setting fire to my ticket. I decided against this course of action only because the audience would have assumed that it was part of the play.

Over the years I've seen more plays on the Edinburgh Fringe than I care to remember, some memorable, some not so but in general the standard has been very high. Morning by Simon Stephens (Harper Regan, Punk Rock, Pornography) will endure for all the wrong reasons. It is awful, absolutely awful: a mélange of half-baked ideas ostensibly about coming of age but in reality just an excuse for lots of effing & jeffing, throwing things and pyromania. In a word, pointless.

No criticism of the seven young actors from the Lyric Hammersmith involved, Scarlet Billham turning in an acomplished performance as the nauseating Stephanie. Indeed in the penultimate scene she gave what might have been an interesting monologue about all that is wrong with society; unfortunately it was all but impossible to hear because of the music being played.

In fairness there was a significant proportion of the audience who clearly enjoyed this but for me (and the people I talked to afterwards) it was quite the poorest thing I have ever seen at the Traverse.

Morning, Traverse Theatre, until 19th August