Rosie Hollingworth’s Scruffy

CAMDEN Fringe has returned for another year with performances about crime, eating disorders and father-son relationships.

The festival, which runs until Sunday, August 28 and is now in its 16th year, was set up to “complement rather than challenge” the annual programme of comedy events in Edinburgh.

Shows have already been impressing audiences at venues including the Etcetera Theatre, where the fringe began in 2006, the Cockpit and the Museum of Comedy.

Unusual shows include a Mafia crime drama Eight Hundred Dollar Value, Play in Your Bathtub, “a site-specific immersive experience” that audiences view remotely from their bathroom, and a hybrid between Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte and reality dating shows Love Island and Take Me Out.

Organiser Michelle Flower, 47, said: “Crime is definitely big this year, I don’t know where it has come from. Every year we have themes that are a little different.

“We had shows before on the MeToo movement, a lot on sexual harassment, but we have seen an increase in popularity of true crime podcasts in recent years, so it could come from that.”

This year’s event is slightly smaller than last year as the Edinburgh Fringe has returned to its full programme.

“We were never set up to challenge it, it was more that in Camden in the summer all the theatres and comedy clubs would empty, and everyone would go to Edinburgh in August. We wanted to put something on to keep people here and give audiences something to go along to.”

Phil Green in 90s Boy – Blair, the Lovegun and Me

One of the best shows so far from this year’s fringe is Scruffy by the Sugar Theatre Company. It sees Rosie Hollingworth, 24, playing a nine-year-old version of herself, Maisie Webster. We’re invited into her life and dance performances, before being told that Maisie is living in an eating disorder clinic and is dangerously unwell, a revelation that pours a bucket of cold water on the audience.

It is based on Hollingworth’s real-life story, and features a video clip of her trying to show off a roundhouse kick to her parents, a scene that Hollingworth replicates on stage. She said: “It is pretty much what happened to me.

“I was struggling to find a topic that I really cared about so I looked back on my own experiences. I didn’t want to do something about ‘this is what I have been through and you’ve now got to feel sorry for me’. I’ve seen a lot of performances like that. It was about being a kid and putting on a show that talks about the issue from their point of view. Maisie wants to draw and dance and perform, as well as dealing with her eating disorder.”

Hollingworth said she changed the character’s name from Rosie to Maisie as it made it less upsetting to play her. One of the ways she got into her nine-year-old mindset was by blasting Avril Lavigne’s Best Damn Thing in a studio and dancing away. “I put it on and just danced, and I was dancing as myself at first, but then soon enough I was dancing as my nine-year-old self again.”

Rik Grayson and Ryan Kennedy in The Last Word

Other shows include a return to the Camden Fringe for Phil Green with 90s Boy – Blair, the Lovegun and Me. Green, 42, talked about how he wanted to get back to a time where he had more focus and passion – his teenage self in the 1990s. It romps through follow-up songs by one-hit wonders (Who else had forgotten about Spin Doctors?), and the relationship with his dad.

“In the original show I was just going to talk about the 90s and how silly some of it was, then I got my diagnosis (attention deficit disorder) in 2020, and it made my behaviour when I was a child completely make sense. So that got me into looking at it all differently in respect to my life and looking back on it.”

Another play to focus on father-son relation­ships was The Last Word at the Hope Theatre. The relationship between Rik Grayson (Sonny) and Ryan Kennedy (Jack) was reminiscent of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton; the end-of-his tether straight guy alongside an irritating and emotionally defensive partner.

The entire plot by Lisa McMullin could have come straight from an Inside No 9 episode, as estranged Sonny tries to get back to Bolton for his dad’s funeral, alongside Jack who turns up in the nick of time, clutching a dog on wheels and wearing a Gary Glitter-style sequinned jacket, scarf and boots.

En route the duo have a conversation that has been brewing for some time. All isn’t as it seems until the punchline is delivered, that Jack is in fact the spectre of Sonny’s dad.

“The writer wanted to explore the complicated, sometimes toxic, relationship between two men. It was important that the relationship between these two men wasn’t clear to the audience but both had to portray a sense of deep familiarity and closeness,” said Kennedy.

• The Camden Fringe festival of comedy and drama runs until August 28 in venues across Camden, Islington and Westminster, with tickets available for under £15. https://camdenfringe.com/