REVIEW: Power Play :The Empty Chair, Pleasance Pop Up, Edinburgh Fringe ✭✭

Mark Ludmon reviews Power Play: The Empty Chair at the Pleasance Pop Up presented as part of the Edinburgh Fringe

Power Play: The Empty Chair The Pleasance Pop-Up at 21 Broughton Street at Edinburgh Fringe

Two stars

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From Harvey Weinstein to Kevin Spacey, the discussion over power in Hollywood and the wider entertainment industry remains a hot topic. With #MeToo still in the news, it was inevitable that it would be a subject tackled at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, with several plays exploring toxic masculinity and the impact of sexual assault. It is the big issue covered by Polly Creed’s The Empty Chair which is part of the Power Play programme at the Pleasance Pop-Up inside a second-floor apartment in Broughton Street.

With the audience sat on sofas, the dining room has become the home of an actor, Grace, in Beverly Hills in Los Angeles where she hosts post-Oscars drinks for three friends. Sat at a dining table with five chairs, the four gossip and joke but their light-hearted conversations begin to move into more personal territory as three of them share traumatic sexual experiences involving a powerful Hollywood mogul, Martin Wheeler. He is absent - the fifth chair - but a picture builds up of an environment where older men still feel they have a right to exploit young women. The fourth person in the room is Martin’s wife who uses the familiar arguments that creative, talented men should be given some leeway but the play makes it clear that this is not acceptable.

The accounts that the three victims reveal sound horrifyingly real and it turns out they are based on real-life experiences. It is important for these stories to be heard but The Empty Chair lacks an emotional connection with the characters who feel distant and formulaic. Aside from their accounts, there is little plot or tension and, while the banal chit-chat serves to emphasise the trauma they have suffered, there is just too much of it.

The show is linked to a new campaign from the Power Play collective of theatre activists to study gender inequality at the Edinburgh Fringe. It includes the Power Stations survey into performers’ experiences which will feed into statistic analysis by economists at University College London and the Institute of Fiscal Studies. With Power Play focused on shows written by and predominantly featuring women, the campaign aims to highlight inequality in British theatre where 65% of theatre-goers are female but only 28% of playwrights are women. The Power Play programme is one small part of tackling this inequality but there is still a long way to go.

Running to 25 August 2018

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