Scroll through the listings on the edfringe app and you’ll find dozens of productions have been cancelled since their announcement. These ghosts at the feast are a reminder of how hard it is to get any show up and running, whether at the world’s biggest arts festival or not.
Among the cancellations in 2022 was Dance Body, choreographed by writer-performer Yolanda Mercy, who previously had a hit with Quarter Life Crisis. She now returns to the fringe with the tale of a 33-year-old British Nigerian playwright, Ade, navigating the rocky road on the way to getting her script staged by a major London theatre. Ade finds herself patronised by producers, replaced as lead actor by an influencer who will guarantee more ticket sales, and slowly erased from her story. The future of the project is jeopardised by forces beyond her control but Ade still asks herself if she is at fault.
The same question arises when Ade visits a theatre where she is in the running for an associate playwright gig. In the stalls, she is asked to move by a couple and an usher who are falsely convinced she must be in the wrong seat; the matter is gracelessly resolved and the embarrassed self-doubt sits with Ade not them. The play she watches, about slavery, is presented to a mostly white audience and she is duly mistaken for one of the actors afterwards.
In a show that explores the industry from all angles, Mercy gives an often raw, affecting performance, which nevertheless retains light warmth. She captures the flushed sense of shame that has followed Ade since her education as a working-class scholarship student at a private school, where her achievement was soured by racism and classism. This is the experience that has fuelled her script, Day Girl. But Ade also feels discomfort among friends in south London, where she is not seen as “endz enough”, and is automatically assumed to be living the high life as “booked, busy and blessed”.
What success actually looks like for rising playwrights is examined frankly as a seemingly never-ending cycle of unpaid pitching and development. You technically don’t work, jokes a friend, and the pain comes from the fact that they are both right and wrong. Such bittersweet humour is a constant. Mercy dismantles the subtexts and signals of script meetings, where statements are disguised as questions, and pertinently considers how artists are (not) supported in the long term by theatres.
It is a disarmingly open show, clear-eyed about the industry’s box-ticking and pigeon-holing, as well as its reluctance to dwell upon failure amid the hysteria for a hit. But what struck me most was Mercy’s empathy for artists, and the duty they feel to those whom their show represents. That empathy extends to anyone working in the crucible of the fringe, which can be an unforgiving experience. After starting off with a refreshing consideration of where festivalgoers’ ticket money goes, she ends with a generous gesture towards other acts. Whether their productions feature on the festival’s “sold out” boards or they’re tagged “cancelled” on the app, it’s always worth remembering the Beckettian ambition to just be failing better.
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At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 26 August