半岛体育

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, 半岛体育 is in town for the festival and we鈥檙e taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!

As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, 半岛体育 is seeing a whole lotta shows鈥攁nd we鈥檙e letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.

Mark, a walking red flag draped in plaid, is trying to reason with Christina, Baby Phat Barbie, as she tearfully calls him out for his wandering eye. Facing stage-left, Mark winks at the audience, hoping somewhere he has an ally. Facing stage-right, Christina pulls an exaggerated frown, shooting daggers at the audience member seated front-and-center, serving as the object for her boyfriend's flirtation. In stitches, the audience howls as a single performer flips to face stage-left, then stage-right. Stage-left, then stage-right, at any one moment only showing one side of this story. This is the effervescent weirdness of Natalie Palamides鈥� WEER.

Palamides, a Los Angeles-based clown, has been a fine-feathered friend of the Fringe since 2017, when she debuted her solo show, LAID, and won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer. The following year, Palamides returned with a gender-bent one-person show called NATE, winning the 2018 Total Theatre Award for Innovation. Plucked by Amy Poehler鈥檚 production company, NATE was captured and released for streaming on Netflix in 2020.

Her return to Fringe is a dizzying dramedy. As a performer, Palamides finds herself split down the middle, one half of her body portraying Mark, the other Christina. The conceit makes for some side-splitting choreography that allows Palamides to showcase the depth of her deftness for clowning. As both Mark and Christina, she receives and rejects kisses, plays tug-of-war with a jacket sleeve, juggles car keys, and copulates. Over the course of this tour-de-forced relationship for the millennium, Mark and Christina relive their love story, desperately clinging to the three years they鈥檝e shared in the wake of a tragicomic accident.

The stage itself becomes a site of wreckage as Mark and Christina lay waste to their fairy tale in a wash of blood and mud. Gimmicks abound with pieces of the set revealed by flung-aside duvetyne on a pull string and a hollowed-out carcass careening in from above. Despite the chaos, the so-obviously-wrong-that-they鈥檙e-right toxicity of Mark and Christina, the audience is with them from the jump, participation and all. It鈥檚 nearly an hour and a half of havoc that the proscenium cannot contain. There鈥檚 a blink-and-you鈥檒l-miss-it anticipation in watching Palamides tear across the stage.

Though as she spins out of control, there are moments when you can hardly stand to watch. For once, there鈥檚 a violence to Mark and Christina that not even Looney Tunes can justify. A shotgun, one of Mark鈥檚 most prized family possessions, is as at-the-ready as a fist. As the dead horse is sufficiently beaten, I found myself wishing that Palamides herself, not just the character Christina, could disentangle herself from Mark. Perhaps I鈥檓 taking this far too seriously, but for me, it鈥檚 all fun and games until the firearm comes out. While the onslaught of false endings indicates an utter lack of seriousness (as if that wasn鈥檛 already abundantly clear) it鈥檚 a challenge to keep laughing as Christina rolls with the punches, even if, in a way, it鈥檚 her own hand throwing them.

And yet, it鈥檚 some of the most fun I鈥檝e ever had, a brilliant entry to this year's Fringe. WEER is the slap in slapstick. It's a shock that hits with a sting, but as you touch your hand to your cheek, you鈥檙e smiling.

Natalie Palamides: WEER is performed at the Traverse Theatre until August 25. Tickets are available .