Edinburgh Fringe 2024 reviews: The Sound Inside / So Young

The Sound Inside, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★

Adam Rapp’s unapologetically intricate, bookish two-hander arrives for its UK premiere at the Traverse Theatre following a successful run in New York, including no fewer than six Tony nominations. It’s not a new work, then, but its themes and its gloriously, unashamedly erudite writing make it one of the strongest offerings in the Traverse’s Fringe programme.

Not for nothing do literary references ricochet back and forth across Rapp’s Ivy League thriller-cum-love story. Bella Baird is a Yale professor of creative writing, and she discovers a particularly committed yet eccentric student – Christopher – in her freshman class. Though they’re meant to be focusing on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Christopher admits his life has been taken over by writing his own first novel, a tale of a creative writing student suspiciously like himself and his puzzling friendship with a teenage lad.

Rapp’s creation is an artful piece of artifice in which dividing lines between what’s real, what’s fiction and what’s simply imagination are always up for question, and where themes and ideas recur within an intentionally writerly architecture, as Bella shocks her young protégé with one of the most taxing questions of all. At times it feels like a complex clockwork mechanism whirring into action before us, one whose ultimate purpose seems crucial but elusive. But even within his abstract philosophical discussions, writer Rapp maintains a sense of human warmth and need between his two increasingly co-dependent characters.

Madeleine Potter is quietly commanding as the academic, exuding intellectual authority but caught off-guard, too, by her student’s disarming self-assurance, even abrasiveness. Eric Sirakian, on the other hand, hints at a fragility underneath Christopher’s barbed sarcasm, betraying a childlike sense of excitement behind his world-weary dismissals of modern-day mores.

Director Matt Wilkinson delivers a production of fierce focus, in which his actors speak softly but with ringing clarity, leading the ear through Rapp’s literary conceits and allusions with playful wit and provocation. Elliot Griggs’s lighting, in particular, picks out these two lonely figures against the often sepulchral darkness with sometimes clinical effectiveness.

The Sound Inside is a sometimes confounding examination of creativity and mystery, one that wears its literary inspirations as badges of honour, but one with a very human heart all the same.

• Until 25 August

So Young, Traverse Theatre ★★★

There’s no shortage of issues under examination, either, in Douglas Maxwell’s new four-hand comedy of manners So Young in the same venue, from inter-generational resentments to memorialising the dead, from friendship to betrayal, from rites and traditions through to the inevitability of change.

Its format, though, is one that may seem familiar – perhaps overly so. Liane and Davie are off to spend an evening with their old friend Milo. They’ve known him since their university days, but he’s just revealed there’s someone new in his life: feisty student Greta, more than two decades his junior. Over the course of a tense and brutally honest evening, opinions are aired, and increasingly eyebrow-raising details are revealed, as the quartet grope their way towards a fragile kind of resolution.

So Young feels very much like Maxwell’s dinner-party crisis play, and he embraces the form eagerly rather than setting out to subvert it to his own ends. His writing is just as gloriously idiomatic and witheringly witty as elsewhere in his broad output, and he has a nice line in scorching Glaswegian put-downs. So barbed and effective is Maxwell’s humour, in fact, that it threatens to upstage the serious issues he’s raising – perhaps one reason why amid his plethora of themes, few seem to hit their mark convincingly. His insights into growing older sometimes feel a bit cut-and-pasted in, as a character stops in their tracks to reminisce about earlier times or consider the inevitability of death, while his handling of 40-something versus 20-something sensibilities adds little to what we might assume already.

That said, the excellent cast (pictured above: l-r Lucianne McEvoy, Andy Clark, Yana Harris, Nicholas Karimi, picture by Aly Wright) fills out a lot of subtleties in some fine and incisive performances – Lucianne McEvoy as the affronted teacher Liane, especially, is all righteous fury tipping over into barely suppressed grief and resentment. Andy Clark has a little less to go on as her jokey long-standing husband Davie, while Nicholas Karimi remains something of an enigma as the bereaved Milo: is his new love real, as he and Yana Harris’s strong, confident Greta profess, and who gets to decide what that even means?

Direction by Traverse Artistic Director Gareth Nicholls is beat-perfect and crisply conceived, and Kenny Miller’s boho set provides a convincingly naturalistic backdrop to the evening’s decidedly uncomfortable exchanges. So Young has a lot going for it – with expertly judged performances, lots of laughs, and some big ideas floating behind it all. Maybe its dense web of interconnected themes shows just how difficult it is to disentangle any of them, or maybe it simply sticks too faithfully to its well-established format. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable show, but it might not challenge you too much to think afresh about any of the issues it raises.

• Until 25 August

• The Edinburgh Fringe runs until 26 August 
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