A fast sequence of scenarios plays out in non sequitur snatches: a gangster hides out from the police and uses his daughter as his decoy; an abusive father looms over his victim; a stalker speaks of his paedophilic desire for a schoolgirl (“I just fell in love”). They are tense and tantalising, and you look for the patterns as characters come, go and wheel back around again.
The connective tissue is that they are all based on true events and real people in a show that quizzically calls itself an “almost biography” and is written and performed by the magnetic Emma Taylor. They are glimpses, like looking through a peephole briefly, and don’t connect to make a bigger whole, exactly, but each hooks you before switching. Sometimes one morphs into the next, mid-sentence, as if they are competing voices in Taylor’s head, or PTSD flashbacks to traumatic memory.
It certainly showcases Taylor’s acting range. The producer of topical sketch show NewsRevue, she stands on an empty stage with an economy of props – teddy bear, embroidery, camping chair – but barely needs them, using an exact physicality to enact vulnerability, contained hostility, and sometimes the outright aggression of the men.
Alongside them there are young girls and women: a mother who conspicuously favours her son over her daughter, a teenager in a man’s world of Hells Angels, a middle-class cougar (or is it puma?) who hosts a podcast while doing yoga asanas, and is satirised so deliciously she could become her own play, although tonally she does not fit in with the battery of other characters.
The men swagger, mansplain or rage. The women watch them, some cowering. A dark, rough world is drawn, something of an underworld it seems, although it mostly contains ordinary life, with characters who verge on the gothic and grotesque.
Made with Russell Lucas, the show has a deliberately oblique structure that leaves you slightly dangling. An intensity builds and Taylor never stops being anything less than magnetic but the disconnections create a looseness at the show’s centre despite its tight performance.
As it stands, the characters are the talking heads in Taylor’s inner world that collectively represent toxic men – and the women who either observe, collude or become a target. If built towards a bigger vision, this could become far greater than its fractured parts.
At Underbelly, Bristo Square, Edinburgh, until 25 August
