Bully

There is a meagre, solitary space at the top of all the Gilded Balloon’s stairs, a room called The Turret, which, in spite of all its fun and colourful signage, reeks of danger. There is something abjectly foreboding about passing through those doors, as if you might candidly step on a dragon’s tail or hear the lock turn sharply behind you. Anything could happen here.

But as fairytales have told us, the rarest, most precious things come hand in hand with peril, and this forsaken turret is where you have to go to claim what must be one of this year’s Fringe’s most special treasures.

Richard Fry is a little known actor whose portfolio counts just a handful of low key TV and film roles. The only evidence of his leanings as a writer comes in the form of homemade videos on his MySpace page that point more to a Sunday hobby than a serious pursuit. And before drama became his thing at age 30 he earned his bread collecting bins and chopping wood. But don’t be fooled by the signs, Bully is top-drawer theatre that extravagantly belies his apparent inexperience.

It’s a monologue in verse about the cycle of violence, told through the story of a boy who grows up learning that all humans fall into one of two discrete categories: bullies and victims. A taste for malice haunts the males of his bloodline and has vampyrically passed from grandfather to father to first-born son with the exactitude of clockwork. Playing the part of the timid younger brother and spanning his life from tragic childhood to tainted adulthood, Fry chants the inner afflictions of a well-meaning soul who tries to escape the cycle by becoming a sufferer. But can he ultimately curb his fall from grace and defy the cruel gods that be?

This is very different from the reinforced steel theatre of the Traverse kind. This is one man with a chair in a turret, with no resources other than his own sharp tongue to convey what is revealed to be a deeply moving and edifying study of the human condition. The sincere, eloquent rendering of a timeless theme brings to mind Greek tragedy in all its sturdiness, with the poetry ever-pleasing, never standing out as a forceful flourish. You will admire his art, his wit and his verbal dexterity, and be thrilled by the frequently vulgar, slang-addled story. Bully is a mesmerising experience and a most exemplary Fringe monologue.