Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Carter Ford: A Fair Go
Sweet Productions
Genre: Storytelling, Theatre
Venue: PBH’s Free Fringe
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A young, early-career artist moves to London to finish his show only to be distracted by one of his flatmates. His discoveries: Love isn’t easy. Nor is the act of creation.
Review
In Carter Ford: A Fair Go, the eponymous Ford begins his show by asking the audience if they believe in love at first sight. A tantalizing question to be sure, and one that’s followed by an almost stream-of-consciousness tale of how he moved to London on a whim in order to finish a promising, award-winning musical with a collaborator who’d fallen in love with him then left the country when she realized her feelings would remain unrequited. Ford, seizing the moment and not wanting the opportunity to pass, follows her. The show must go on.
Or not.
As the late great musical-theatre giant Stephen Sondheim wrote in Sunday in the Park with George, “Art isn’t easy.” Sondheim knew all too well that the creative path to new musicals rarely runs smooth, and Ford’s journey is no exception. Plans thwarted once in the United Kingdom, Ford then takes a giant narrative detour and recounts how he was floored instantly upon meeting one of his London flatmates, a woman named Julianne who he mistakenly thinks is a lesbian (she’s bi), then slowly but surely discovers once flirtation moves to action that Julianne has more than one major secret up her sleeve. The inevitable complications ensue, including a forbidden (by his parents) trip to Morocco, the effort to hide their clandestine affair from the other flatmates, and a final date to see Cymbeline together before returning to New York and pretending like none of it had ever happened
Ford has a warm and engaging presence, and it is a pleasure to be in his company and be regaled with stories of his love and professional life. Moreover, as a puritanical streak has started creeping into works by and about young Americans, it’s vitally refreshing that Ford resists censoring himself and shares the true bawdy nature of the chaotic and convoluted romantic and sexual lives that he and his friends, lovers, friends with benefits, etc. contend with and embrace. (Should judgmental Boomers and/or the coitophobic find themselves at this show, they should brace themselves and bring smelling salts.)
The title of Carter Ford: A Fair Go is apt because this work still has a fair ways to go. The story meanders at times to narrative dead ends (particularly a rather long digression about wanting pie), and some major overall restructuring could help mightily with the focus that this show currently lacks and needs to reach its full potential. Finally, Ford never returns to his initial question and the audience is left to wonder: Does he believe in love at first sight? Hopefully he’ll tell us the next time around.
