Edinburgh Fringe: The Cave Singers/ The Real MacGuffins/ An Instinct for Kindness

A three-piece hailing from Seattle and its environs, The Cave Singers are an authentically hairy proposition. With his tweed hat and red beard, at this Edge festival gig singer Pete Quirk looked like a cross between the late Robin Cook and a stray leprechaun from Finian’s Rainbow, while Derek Fudesco dispensed his lovely, liquid guitar lines from beneath a blur of flying hair.

On record their trippy psych-folk-rock is often rather bucolic, like Fleet Foxes with more edge and on weirder drugs. On stage, however, they closed ranks, dispensing with many of the textures of their studio work and instead leaning much more heavily on an appealingly primitive blues base. With no bass player, the songs were boiled down to the basics of Quirk’s wasp-chewing rasp, drummer Marty Lund’s unfussy beat and Fudesco’s guitar, which alternated between savage and serpentine.

Their 50-minute set, drawn from this year’s No Witch album and its predecessor Welcome Joy, was essentially mantric. The songs – in which one chord is standard, two chords an indulgence – built in waves and increased in tension, spiralling upward rather than billowing out. It’s a deliberately narrow template which offers very little distinction between individual songs, but within it The Cave Singers managed to shuffle the furniture around: “Outer Realms”, with its tablas and raga-guitar, offered a convincing glimpse of the East, while “Swim Club” swayed gently, as though mildly inebriated.

They provided a rousing climax with two hard’n’heavy garage blues shouters, including the propulsive “No Prosecution if we Bail”, which sounded like early Them rumbling with the Stooges. But the highlight came when they allowed a little daylight to creep in. “Leap”, propelled by Quirk’s harmonica and a rolling freight-train rhythm, was an unalloyed delight, and almost sufficient to entirely dispel the lingering suspicion that, though The Cave Singers are very good at what they do, they don’t quite do enough. Graeme Thomson

The Real MacGuffins are a three-man sketch group - comprising Dan March, Jim Millard and Matt Sheahan - who are Alfred Hitchcock fans (hence their name) and the show, their second at the Fringe, is titled Skitsophrenic (hmm, borderline tasteless but I’ll allow that it’s Psycho-inspired). Directed by Cal McCrystal, of Mighty Boosh and Spymonkey fame, it’s a fast-paced and witty show of sketches loosely joined by a narrative about the connection between madness and comedy.

Dr Freud makes an appearance as the threesome run through an entertaining show that includes a Jack the Ripper rapper, a feline interpretation of Oedipus and a nicely original take on Jekyll and Hyde. There’s also a very clever rapid-fire skit in which Hitchcock’s movie titles are blended into a story with the most painful pains you can think of.

The Real MacGuffins know all the sketch-group tropes, and instantly guy them by coming on dressed in white coats and writhing around to music, with the pay-off being, “We thought we’d start with something unpretentious” - but there’s a rather predictable dynamic of Dan being the bossy one, Jim the artistic one and Matt the picked-on one, which occasionally lends a sketch an extra dimension but mostly doesn’t.

The Larry Hagman sketch is incomprehensible, but the rest are well written and performed with great verve and warmth, and there are touches of inspiration in the hour. Until 29 August Veronica Lee

Writer and actor Chris Larner is either a brave or a foolish man, depending which way you view his decision to perform his one-man show telling the story of his ex-wife’s death, as it's possible he could be prosecuted for aiding her suicide. Although divorced from the mother of his son some years ago, they remained good friends and he agreed to help her when she decided to go to Dignitas in Zurich to end her life after decades of suffering pain, disability and indignity through the ravages of multiple sclerosis.

In 70 minutes, which whizz by under Hannah Eidinow’s assured direction, Larner tells Allyson’s story - for this is her story, not his - in simple, unemotional language, with just the right degree of wry wit; he describes Switzerland as where “they dust the motorways”. There is the occasional pleasing rhetorical flourish, too, such as when Larner goes into a Night Mail-esque rhyme about the paraphernalia - drugs, nappies, wheelchair - he and Allyson’s sister have to take to Switzerland. The wheelchair comes back empty, of course.

I found myself strangely unmoved by this show (although many around me were sniffling, and a few quietly sobbing), partly because I didn’t fully gain a sense of Larner’s loss and partly because I’ve been on board with assisted dying for some time, so there was no great emotional or moral leap for me to make. For those who are conflicted on the subject, I suspect An Instinct for Kindness will have a deeper impact. Until 29 August Veronica Lee

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