Jagged Edges

A promotional image from the play, Edges, performed at the National Arts Festival. The image was found on Google.

I was wary going to another musical performance after the disaster that was What's In A Name. Natasha even more so. And yet, I had heard good things about Edges, so I wanted to give musical theatre another chance.

The fact that there was a queue to get in was a good sign. The fact that it was in a fairly big theatre was another. The fact that it turned out the guy from What's In A Name was in it? Not so much. But it didn't turn out to be half bad.

I think that I can pinpoint where Edges went right and where What's In A Name went wrong. You see, What's In A Name tried so hard to pull together songs purely by the reference to people's names. It was the only connection between the songs, and I felt that the play was trying too hard to be something that it really wasn't. Edges did not make this mistake.

Watching Edges felt like reading a collection of short stories. Each song was a story in itself, and none of them fit into each other. It was not as though the show was trying to make sense as a whole – it was merely looking at clips of people's lives. There was a bit of a theme to the songs, I realised after the show had ended, but the theme was a subtle one – it was relationships. Each song looked at relationships, whether between friends, family members or colleagues. Each song granted you a glimpse of someone else's life, and together they provided a glimpse of different kinds of relationships that people have with each other – the strengths, the benefits and the drawbacks to entering into relationships and what they look like when they work and what they look like when they don't.

Once again, the voices were fantastic. There were only two small problems that I encountered, and that is that one of the guys (the one who performed in What's In A Name funnily enough) had a terrible American accent when the rest were great and that one of the songs that was performed had also been performed during What's In A Name. I do not know if the songs were written specifically for the musical (I certainly didn't recognise any of them aside from the one that I recognised in What's In A Name), but it certainly felt like they had been written just for the actors. Each actor slid into the roles so well, it felt incredibly natural, and this was another aspect of the show that separated it from What's In A Name. The natural flow and order of things rather than the broken discussion with the audience that came between numbers.

Edges will certainly not be up amongst my favourite shows from Fest, but there have certainly been worse plays. It has not entirely reconnected me with my love for musicals, but it has restored a little of the enjoyment that I get from watching them, and was enough to convince me that, should another musical opportunity present itself, I will not hide in my room, but might consider going to see it.