Lie of the Land
Pleasance Courtyard
****
A fine way to start a day on the Fringe would be to head to Lie of the Land, a gem of a new piece with a craftily punning title from Torben Betts.
We've all dreamed of escaping city life for a rural idyll but, as Betts has characters him and her conclusively discover, if recapturing Eden had been easy there would have been no need for a New Testament.
In their freshly acquired house by the sea, him (Neal Barry) and her (Nia Gwynne) struggle to relax and to adjust themselves to the nothingness and lack of striving they thought they had craved.
The nervy Gwynne, privately convinced that she has married beneath her, is especially fine, making her daily yoga look like training for a particularly ferocious martial art.
Stylish direction from Adam Barnard ingeniously delineates boundaries - both literal and metaphorical - through white marking tape on black floor.
Yet him and her are about to learn that it's not all about them: there's a wider world outside, one that might not have much longer left to turn.
A Festival Dickens
Assembly @ George Street
**
There's some old-fashioned stuff and nonsense, not to mention edinburgh's largest set of mutton-chop whiskers, from Simon Callow in A Festival Dickens, comprising two stories that the author himself used to perform and which lurch from the bizarre to the mawkish.
The first, Mr Chops the Dwarf, centres on a small man in high society, and is so unengaging that Callow is lucky he still has an audience for the second, Dr Marigold.
This one, about the adoption of a deaf-mute child by a peddler, is a great improvement - although Callow's tendency to drop the ends of words, especially when wrestling with the accents of the lower classes, is no help in a venue this large.
Both until 25 August. Land 0131 556 6550; Dickens 0131 623 3030.
