Lloyd Evans

Rent is a show about mortality haunted by the untimely death of its author, Jonathan Larson. On the eve of the first preview in 1996, he underwent heart surgery but he didn’t survive to see his creation become one of the most enduring hits in musical-theatre history. The producers of Luke Sheppard’s version don’t need reviewers to offer their verdict because the show has a worldwide band of disciples who maintain its bankability. On press night, the loyalists clearly adored what they’d seen. The script takes the plot of Puccini’s La bohème and transfers it to New York’s East Village in the 1990s where a salon of artistes are facing eviction.

The Last Ship, a musical written by and featuring Sting, is touring Europe, Australia and America. The show is a class-war parable set in Newcastle during the 1980s. A team of shipbuilders are about to complete a new vessel, the Utopia, when a bossy government minister, Baroness Tynedale, arrives at the docks to deliver bad news. With her bright- blue suit and posh hectoring voice, she’s a pantomime Mrs Thatcher and she announces that the yard will be seized and flogged to private investors. The shipbuilders establish a Marxist committee and plot to overturn her evil scheme. A gripping start. Plucky Geordies pitted against yuppie scavengers from London. The show even features a song about the competing merits of collectivism and monetarism. Then it all implodes.

The Children by Lucy Kirkwood is a life-or-death drama about three ageing boffins invited to fix a broken atomic power station and save Britain from nuclear disaster. There’s one snag: radiation poisoning will end their lives. Should the old crocks accept the kamikaze mission? The setting for this macabre tale is a cosy farmhouse occupied by 64-year-old Hazel (Meera Syal) and her chattering Irish husband Robin (Declan Conlon). Their colleague Rose (Kerry Fox) shows up after many decades working abroad and she urges them to join the suicidal engineers working on the radioactive site. The stakes are low because the characters are too old for their love lives to matter much The script contains a lot of chit-chat that relates only tenuously to the main story.

Who Killed Marilyn? is a new show about an old subject. Sharleen Cooper Cohen’s play examines the circumstances surrounding Marilyn’s suspicious death in 1962. Three possible culprits emerge. The mob, the Feds and the Kennedys. Bobby and Jack were desperate to hide any trace of their romantic links with Marilyn. The mob may have rubbed her out by order of the Feds whose boss, J. Edgar Hoover, paid gangsters to conduct irregular assassinations. Hoover hated JFK, we’re told. And Marilyn kept a secret diary that might have ruined JKF’s career. But that gives Hoover a reason to protect Marilyn and to use her testimony against the Kennedys. The mob also hated JFK because he failed to oust Fidel Castro from Cuba. So they had a powerful motive to keep her alive as well.

Attention spans at Edinburgh are brief. With thousands of shows on offer, the punters have to make a split-second decision based on the title and the poster. A blunt descriptive name works best, hence the popularity of Dan Kelly: How I Went to Every Supermarket in the World. Kelly spent 11 years as a data analyst collecting the prices of 164 basic items from supermarkets on every continent. The information was sold to international firms that needed to calculate the salaries of their overseas staff. Kelly, a solitary and obsessive character, liked to tour the shops with a dictaphone taped to his chest and to record the prices by muttering into the hidden microphone, like a spy. His adventures are limited to shopping centres in large cities so his observations lack surprises.

Brainiac Live! is a ‘family science’ show based on a popular Sky TV programme. It’s ideal for children under 12 and for mums and dads who want an hour-long break from their normal parenting duties. The show is performed by a trio of lab-coated ‘brainiacs’, Ed, Ned and Raz, whose antics centre around loud bangs, naked flames, puffs of smoke and the destruction of props. The fun kicks off with a helmeted Ned preparing to dive into a sheet of cling film stretched across an empty doorframe. He runs. He leaps. He plunges through the transparent barrier which rips apart as he crash-lands on to a discarded mattress. Is that science? Not really. It’s a low-level stunt performed in conditions of extreme safety.