Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Petty Tyrant
Shakespearean Cabaret
Genre: Absurd Theatre, Cabaret, Classical and Shakespeare, Comedic
Venue: The Space
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Taking elements of Absurdism and Shakespeare the audience is transported into an alternative realm. At times confusing, often funny, but always excellently delivered by an extremely skilled performer. A beautiful crafted tour de force of true theatre that is worth staying up for.
Review
It is very hard to describe what actually happens in Petty Tyrant. The one question I asked myself repeatedly during the performance was ‘how am I supposed to review this?’ It is too fast paced to take any real notes. The ideas in this work hop around like activated protons just to bounce of another idea and then fly in a completely different direction only to hit something else. Probably one would have to see the show twice or maybe trice to even start getting all the references and links, carefully interwoven in the fast paced script. I found trying to hold all the different strands together quite overwhelming. It felt at times that two plays were running concurrently.
The author-performer Carla Kissane classifies her show as Shakespeare cabaret. There is definitely plenty of Shakespeare, spoken beautifully with great understanding of verse and the archaic language. It is clear that she spent a lot of time with the bard. The verses flow beautifully and there is a noticeable familiarity of the work that makes the iambic pentameters sound like every day speech. I would love to see her as Hamlet. Kissane would outdo many of the famous men who have played the Dane.
However, she speaks so fast that it is at times hard to quite grasp what she is saying, let alone where to put it. She hasn’t picked the most well known speeches. While I am still trying to place the extract, she has moved on to the next bit in her show, often something that feels very unrelated to what she has just said. There are no pauses that allow the audience to reflect, to let the associations come. Before one has tasted let alone digested what has just been served, the next course arrives. This can get a bit much and at times it feels less like being at a cabaret and more like under attack of a verbal steamroller. I felt exhausted twenty minutes in.
The show doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Kissane introduces various characters that are tricky to keep apart. This has a lot to do with her word games. She says a word and then quotes the dictionary definition of that word, for example ‘petty’. This is immediately followed by her returning to what she has to say. At other times she relates what she has just said to some contemporary concept. Drawing a linguistics arch across the centuries. Mostly that works very well, but it is over in a flash and I guess I have missed quite a lot of these verbal acrobatics. While clever and funny it is also very confusing. The storyline itself has a weak plot or a no-plot. Just an ordinary work day in a special place of hell for poets even Dante didn’t imagine. Since he is a poet that’s probably not surprising. Kissane’s character is supposedly the one who wrote Shakespeare’s complete works but has been forgotten. There is no explanation why or how. I think there were references to the saying ‘anon is often a woman’ in there somewhere, but I really couldn’t pin point anything directly. Before I had a chance to wade through the avalanche of thoughts she had just deposited at my feet, she was creating havoc somewhere else.
The story goes something like this: All poets seem to be stuck in Purgatory/Hades/Circle 12B of hell just off the magic roundabout, where they have to face a trial with a judge, but the judge frequently hands out death sentences. How that affects the already dead poets didn’t become clear to me. Kissane’s character Carlotta-B-from-1593 (the year Venus and Adonis was published) has been sent to us – the new arrivals – to lead our induction in purgatory. So I assume we are all poets? There is some audience interaction that really confused the three tourists behind me. However, they clearly enjoyed the madness of it all and laughed a lot. It also appears that Carlotta B is scared of the situation she is in, so much so that some of the show is actually lost in her constant fear. More of half of the show is over, when she rushes to prepare us for our, let’s call it ‘probation hearing’. I couldn’t help feeling that Kissane cut an awful lot from the show to make it fit into the Fringe format. The end felt very rushed if not to say cut off in midair. It certainly didn’t feel like an ending and I left with many unanswered questions. Even after spending some time letting it sit, I am none the wiser.
The performance reminds me of a Shakespearian, who has put on a costume made of a cross of Dadaism and Absurdist theatre. It looks superficially like a homage to both art forms, but the chore isn’t there and so the inherent over-arching social-political critique seems to be missing. Alternatively, I have missed the critique. There are lots of brilliant jibes with a sharp tongue at the little annoyances of everyday life. This is an enjoyable whirlwind show, at times funny at times baffling. The costume is striking and so is much of the performance. The Petty Tyrant of the title is a microphone stand that distorts Kissane’s voice, which makes it hard to understand. I am also not really sure what the Petty Tyrant is supposed to present. I feel I have missed much and now I am wandering aimlessly. This might be intentional or I am just not getting it.
Carla Kissane is clearly a well educated and intelligent woman. She is a skilled actor with a great understanding of how to deliver Shakespearen verse with a naturalness that I have only seen a few times before from the likes of Judy Dench or Mark Rylance. I just fear much of what she has put in this show is lost on the audience. Especially, at the Fringe, where one often gets spectators who visit the town and whose first language is not English.
