Fringe Review - Teaching the Fringe

A subtly dark story told with wide eyed irony, a kind of perfect one person Fringe show that sums up the odd moral landscape of the relationship between storytelling and audience.

Teaching the Fringe

Keir Cutler is in the Fringe pantheon, he is one of those regulars who returns with a new show or a remount of an old show every year, hits as many Fringe cities as he gets into, travels light and joyful across the country mounting funny / disturbing / emotional theatre, then movin on. His classic character has been a high school Shakespeare teacher, a sad excuse for a wise old man who walks that fascinating line between insightful and obnoxious, delightful and deviant, until he falls quite decidedly over the edge to unredeemable.

The character is totally unappealing, but funny and hugely informative about the Bard if you can keep your wits about you and watch for the irony, ie; the moments when the kind, intelligent playwright is having you on through the voice of the unsavory educator. Turns out, this fascinating, nauseating, masterful character play may be over the heads of some audience members. Cutler’s play this year, called “Teaching the Fringe,” centers around a real letter of complaint that was written about the Shakespeare character he created and toured with in years previous.

Using the real letter as a focal point he removes himself one step back from his character and speaks in the first person about what brings him to the Canadian Fringe circuit, the amazing uncensored sexy celebratory no holds barred spirit of the Fringe, and then the disturbing shock of this letter of complaint. The best moments for me were when he told stories of the madness that can emerge, utterly unexpected, frantic and loud, from otherwise well behaved audiences, he jokes that we should submit him with bios and programs of ourselves, the audience, as we enter so he can know us and prepare. Culter engaged us in a dialogic way that made the energy change from active to passive in the audience, exactly the kind of move that could trigger more interaction then he might really like mid-stream; exactly the right way to make us feel in our bones the risky immediacy of being on stage.

The risk an actor/creator takes in telling the story of an unlikable person is enormous, only because it seems otherwise rational people come out of the woodwork to miss the point, to forget it’s art, to conflate the creator with the character and blame the actor for fictional actions or ideas. This is the very best reason to keep making art, I figure; keep poking folks into remembering the difference and purpose of artifice. It’s a brave move to turn what must have been a pretty traumatic audience reaction (see the play for details) into a funny, self-deprecating but also scathing piece of theatre. Under TJ Dawe’s direction the piece has a witty lilting rhythm and lovely moments of business, word play, painful truths and deadpan delivery. Highly recommended.

Check out remaining Montreal Fringe dates here.