THE LAST YAK, PANGOLIN’S TEATIME, PLEASANCE DOME
****

Pangolin’s Teatime are a young Edinburgh-based puppet theatre company, who in 2007 picked up a clutch of awards at the National Student Drama Festival for their previous work Haozkla. This year they return to the Fringe with a new original production, and have created a thoughtful, mature fairy tale about power, reality and the magic of belief. With lovingly handcrafted masks and puppets, some rod, some glove, and a flair for storytelling, this is a beautifully thought-through work that should appeal to adult and child alike.

As the audience file into the Kingdome studio, the company are backstage and in the wings, surrounding us with the sounds of the jungle – rasping crickets, whooping monkeys, whistling birds and more. A narrator booms out that “in the beginning”, the Tiger gave orders in the jungle, and went on a search for God by climbing the mountain, passing the search to other animals as he climbs higher, until, at the summit, the Yak is discovered. As there is no-one higher, the jungle adopt the Yak as their divinity. This sequence is told as an enchanting piece of shadow-puppetry, before the almost-life-size papier mache models enter. We are treated to the parallel tales of the power struggle within the jungle, as the Bears attempt to usurp the Tiger’s leadership role, and the human story of a brother and sister coming to terms with the loss of their father. Hinging the two stories is the puppet-child Dharla, who inhabits both realities at once. As the play unfolds, the two realities unfurl and ripple into each other, and by the conclusion it seems the frontier has come down altogether.

The jungle community is beautifully realised and performed, with the sardonic Crocodile providing comic relief during the weekly jungle meetings, and the scheming but delightfully charming Bears doing their best to spend every minute of the day eating. There are fantastical creatures here too – the Dzo, and the Mango Ferrets – and the workmanship and handling of the puppets are first rate. The human story, while not as strong, provides a useful dramatic counterpoint to the jungle world, and the performers are committed and engaged with their creation. Puppetry, in all its varied forms, is undergoing a welcome revival, and Pangolin’s Teatime deserve to be at the creative vanguard of the movement. A treat.

15.40, until August 25

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TALKING HEADS PLUS, GEMS OF MAZAL, THE MEADOWS
***

Alan Bennett is much admired and much performed, but his characters are currently being given voice in a more unusual setting than he is probably used to. Stop by the Sainsbury’s Local on the Meadows this Fringe at around 6pm, and you’re likely to be greeted by a group of twentysomethings milling about, a skateboard doing the rounds, chirpily singing songs, before one of them begins narrating an excerpt of what sounds like Roald Dahl in a heightened voice. As he starts his speech, the company sets off down Middle Meadow Walk into the greenery, trailing an audience behind them. This is Talking Heads Plus, combining Bennett’s much-loved pieces with works by other authors, and claiming to bring the monologue form to life as you’ve never seen before.

After a rhyming poem about Matilda, and a speech given from the top of an upturned electrical cable roller, a girl jumps on the skateboard and races down the way, soliloquising as she goes. Her words may get lost as the distance between her and the spectators grows, but we traipse after her in the wind and the chill to catch the end of her segment. We’re then treated to a fine performance of Bennett’s Soldiering On at the side of the path. With local dogs ambling into the action, and curious passers-by joining the growing crowd, actress Ruth Thompson captures the essence of Muriel’s stoical, chin-up tragedy, prompting laughs along the way. After a final monologue by a man in a camouflage jacket, the company break into a rendition of Arlen and Koehler’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, and skip off into the distance, leaving the audience to melt away.

It’s debatable whether the open-air setting helps or hinders the performers – it’s an ultra-naturalistic, stripped-down approach to presenting theatre, with no special costumes, no setting of scenes, and no programme to enlighten the audience as to what it is we’re watching at any one point. The shock tactic of ending the lengthy Bennett monologue with a segment of The Vagina Monologues gives a nice dramatic shift, as our attention is yanked to another part of the Meadows, but with no defined space in which to work, and the scattergun effect of the quickly-shifting vignettes, the actors are required to work that much harder to create focus for their particular scenes. On the whole, they rise to the challenge, and Talking Heads Plus provides a pleasant, intriguing hour of exploring the boundaries of what makes theatre, and how to present it.

18.00 and 20.00, until August 20

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SCARAMOUCHE JONES, GUY MASTERSON TTI, ASSEMBLY SUPPER ROOM
*****

Justin Butcher is a man of many talents. Not content with penning a sumptuous script, full of wonder, lyricism, evocative imagery and beautifully crafted turns of phrase, as a performer he also keeps the audience wrapped in his spell for an hour and a half, never slackening or flagging. It’s an extraordinary achievement, and Scaramouche Jones is as delightful, funny, moving and thoughtful a Fringe show as could be hoped for.

The ancient titular clown is on the cusp of his hundredth birthday, at the dawn of the 21st century, and tonight is to be the last of his life. For his swansong, he takes the audience with him on a recounting of his magical story, of his origins and his adventures through the twentieth century, from his birth to a gypsy whore in a fishmonger’s in Port of Spain, Trinidad, through Senegalese slave traders, North African snake charmers, Italian nobility and Romany travellers from Eastern Europe. The play takes a darker turn as Scaramouche is captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in a concentration camp in Split, before concluding with his arrival in post-war London to begin his career as a clown. As he says, “half a century to make the clown, half a century to perform the clown.”

Throughout his travels, he is the wide-eyed innocent with the unnaturally white face, recipient of action rather than agent, leaping (and being thrown) from one adventure to the next as Butcher leaps from side to side of the stage, now crouching behind ship ropes to peer at his mother receive her train of nightly customers, now straddling his writing desk as he rides a camel over the sands of Africa. As the show progresses, Butcher sheds his several layers of costume, red nose, wig, jacket, as Scaramouche comes closer to freeing himself of his history. The physicality of the performance combines with his rich delivery of the lines, themselves deliciously thick and heady, like a soup. Scaramouche conjures up for us the smells and sounds of Trinidad, North Africa, Somalia and Nuremburg, as his face becomes ever whiter and his destiny draws closer, against the backdrop of the first half of the twentieth century.

This is a first rate piece of storytelling theatre, brilliantly written and performed, and well-supported by excellent direction, set and lighting design. Made famous by Pete Postlethwaite’s performances in 2001, Justin Butcher here reclaims his own work, and stamps his authority all over it. A must see.

12.20, until August 25

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TITUS ANDRONICUS, ACTION TO THE WORD, C VENUE
***

Fringe productions of Shakespeare are usually best approached with caution. Everyone wants to have a go and show their mettle, and the temptation to add their own mark to the works by offering a “reinterpretation” often begs for disaster – Hamlet in space, perhaps, or The Tempest re-enacted as a Marxist parable of the evils of modern society. Occasionally it’s a spectacular success, as with the Midsummer-Night’s-Dream-in-a-roller-disco of The Donkey Show, a recent Edinburgh Fringe smash hit that went on to a run in London’s West End and from there to New York. The list of equally spectacular failures stretches on into the middle distance. Cambridge University-born company Action to the Word’s version of Titus Andronicus falls squarely between these two stools, passing the test with, if not a distinction, then enough merit to be shared round the sizeable cast, without ever really breaking any new ground.

Their particular “twist” on the piece is to frame it in a gothic urban setting. In modern dress and squeezed into a running time of 75 minutes, this is an accessible, fast-forwarded highlights package of the epic play. Titus Andronicus, Roman hero and general, returns from a successful campaign against the Goths, bringing as prisoners the Goth queen Tamora and her children. His first task is to settle the dispute between two brothers over who should become the next Emperor of Rome. He chooses Saturnine, who then immediately frees Tamora and makes her his Empress. Titus and his family are made to pay a series of increasingly heavy prices for his harsh treatment of the former Goth prisoners, before the play’s sensationally over-the-top finale.

The company of trained performers make good use of the space, and there are no discernible weak links in the acting, although Tamora is occasionally difficult to hear. In an inventive approach to the rape of Titus’s daughter Lavinia, movement and music are used before she is slung over a shoulder and bundled offstage, later to reappear, naked and trembling, in a shopping trolley. The short running time keeps the production from flagging, the pace always lightning fast. There are some questionable aesthetic uses of the “gothic” motif, with some unnecessarily misogynistic sequences of scantily-clad girls gyrating and grinding, for no particular reason, but on the whole Action to the Word treat the play with respect and no small amount of technical skill. Simple but effective lighting, and a soundtrack featuring Placebo, Billy Corgan, and an unexpected use of Madness’s Driving in My Car, help move things along. This is a good, solid take on Titus Andronicus, allowing the text to come to the fore and do its work, and would make an excellent introduction for those who’ve not yet been acquainted with Shakespeare’s bloodiest early tragedy.

23.00, until 25 August

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