A four-way race between poet, actor, video artist and sound engineer: Edinburgh Festival’s Burn reviewed

In a new hour-long monologue, Burn, Alan Cumming examines the life and work of Robert Burns. The biographical material is drawn from Burns’s letters, and the poems are read out in snatches. You won’t learn much except that Burns was a poor farmer who later worked as a taxman. To represent his many flings with women, a few high-heeled shoes are dangled on strings above the stage but this looks strangely cheap given that huge sums have been lavished on graphic imagery projected onto a big screen at the rear. Flashing lights and surges of music add to the sense of distraction.

Cumming’s performance centres on dance, which looks like a new departure for him. His comic presence, his adroit wit and his impish, teasing face are world-class gifts but this show downplays his strengths. He moves around in slow balletic routines which are difficult to decipher.

And then there’s the poetry. Burns’s best-known verses are broadcast on a soundtrack which gets tangled up with intrusive musical compositions. Not a great result. The show looks like a four-way race between a poet, an actor, a video artist and a sound engineer. The poet finishes last and the actor comes in a poor third. And the show assumes that Burns holds little interest for the play-goers, who need trippy illuminations and hectic videos to keep them watching.

This is a straightforward black-box show that just needs a performer and a text. Any addition subtracts. Any enlargement diminishes. And for some reason, Cumming is dressed in a black Lycra T-shirt and matching shorts. He looks like a bicycling mortician who follows the Tour de France and discreetly disposes of any contestants who die of an overdose.

No Scrubs is billed as a comic monologue but it feels like a documentary about NHS corruption. The speaker, Dr Michael Akadiri, is a young medic with a limited range of interests: his income, his African heritage and his fear of anal rape. He speaks with a British accent but he dislikes colonialism and he keeps insisting: ‘I’m Nigerian.’ He became a doctor on the orders of his mother, also an NHS worker, but he doesn’t mention healing the sick at all. He confides that he hates caring for ailing passengers on planes because he can’t send them a bill.

During lockdown, he says, NHS staff went to supermarkets in medical clothes hoping to get gullible citizens to buy them food. He hated the Thursday night ‘Clap for our carers’ because it didn’t increase his salary. The strangest detail is ‘a payment of £82’ awarded to NHS workers each time a corpse is sent to the crematorium. ‘Ash cash’ it’s called. Is that a joke? Or do we really bribe health workers to kill us? It sounds likely.

Dr Stefania Licari, in a solo performance, Medico, describes the NHS as her personal match-making service. She first mated with a gynaecologist but she was jealous of the women who disrobed for him on his daily rounds. ‘I am mono-vaginic,’ she said as she jilted him.’ Then she met a thrifty dermatologist who moisturised her skin with margarine. Finally she fell for a plasma delivery man because she found his deep voice sexy.

Dr Licari is blessed with huge reserves of warmth and charm, and her show is a joy to experience. But taxpayers watching these medics will spot a worrying truth. The NHS serves the staff. That’s the priority. Patient care is something that happens accidentally, from time to time, while the workers are busy looking after themselves.

Love, Loss and Chianti is tale of middle-aged romance which uses some of the most affected and pretentious language you’ll ever encounter. The hero is a poet with a terminally ill wife who recalls their holidays in Crete. He likens monastery bells to ‘a jam-session of pots and pans’, and he calls a hunt for wild-flowers ‘bloom sleuthing’.

After a few minutes you realise that this effortful language is a deliberate effect that carries you away from ordinary speech and into the realm of song. It’s inventive, lyrical and strangely gratifying to hear in a theatre where naturalism is the norm. It can be funny too. A cheap pizza is ‘a wheel of gloop-covered dough, singed at the rim’.

Robert Bathurst captures the tragic solitude of a widower who finds himself ‘voiceless under the avalanche’. After his wife’s funeral, he visits a beloved Soho restaurant which has changed beyond all recognition. His date for lunch is an old girlfriend whose idiotic husband has become a successful novelist. Will the grieving poet succeed in seducing her? Or will he drink too much Chianti and totter home on his own? To get the full flavour of this fascinating verbal banquet you need to see it twice.