The Egg Is A Lonely Hunter @ Summerhall
With The Egg Is A Lonely Hunter, Hannah Mamalis elevates the solo performer show to heights of sensation rarely attained within the form
Pull up – or, rather, push down – a lecture theatre chair, because it’s time for some of the best storytelling you’ve heard all Fringe. The Egg Is A Lonely Hunter is a rich arras woven from grief and wonder, dark and funny and hopeful – or a veil of imagery that's interchangeably beautiful and comical, laid over a persistent ache. Both could be possible in magical realism.
That is what this show is; no more than it needs to be and yet gloriously shot through with an almost unbearable amount of feeling that really does take the breath away on more than one occasion. A relation of daily mundanity and crushing internal separateness from one’s surroundings told through a lyrical lens of missing socks, black holes, and peculiar fears. For once, you will enjoy the mental gymnastics of trying to see inside the abstract until the moment that understanding breaks open to you all at once, gently but surely rolling over you like a cracked egg.
Hannah Mamalis is a born storyteller, to use a phrase that possibly does not do her capacity for creation or sensuous delivery justice. She gives the impression of newly inventing the words she has chosen as she strings them together into tangible art, not one line overlapping in purpose with another. If we are to close our eyes during her performance, yes, we will miss the minimal yet marvellous use of lighting and costume and the entrancing completeness with which she inhabits her body throughout, but we will still be hearing every moment chiselled out in all its complexity of meaning and emotion.
Whether you want to laugh in surprise at something so silly that you could never have seen it coming or be deeply moved with the same suddenness, The Egg Is A Lonely Hunter is the show for you and you and you.
The Egg Is A Lonely Hunter, Red Lecture Theatre, Summerhall, until 26 Aug
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