Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2005

Phone Play
Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Dolan Cummings
posted 27 August 2005

Phone Play is an entertaining piece in which eight characters arrayed on stage converse soley by phone to tell an interweaving story of urban life and estrangement.

The style is light and physical, with oversized papiermache phones and periodic human visual and sound effects contributing to an atmosphere of energetic comedy, but there is also a darker side to the story, most obviously with the spectre of AIDS and unwanted pregnancy, and more generally in the sense that life on the phone is not quite the real thing. 'Phone sex' is real sex, one character insists, protesting too much. Real, no, safe, yes, but it is also unsatisfying. And the same seems to go for life in general.

It isn't the technology's fault, of course. In a likeably stylised way, the young Canadian company successfully conjure the same sanitised reality portrayed with various degrees of distortion in countless Friends-style TV shows and films about young singles. The emphasis here, however, is less on the fun and excitement of single city life with no tomorrow than on the pervasive loneliness and detachment. Who's friends with whom, and whose been invited to whose parties come up a lot in conversation, but there is no human contact to speak of, even when a friend is waiting in the cold.

Apart from the cold, it's a comfortable form of alienation, of course, afflicting relatively prosperous and free individuals, and perhaps it lends itself better to the comic approach taken here than to any more sombre tack. In any case, as the audience wanders out at the end of the show, we turn on our phones without a second thought. Some of us might even have messages.