Everything Else Happened

Is it possible to identify a Fringe show purely on the basis of its queue? Is the line for Al Murray full of lairy men with beer bellies? Or the crowd for The Boy with Tape on His Face populated by frustrated Pierrot clowns?

Certainly the queue snaking around the outside of the Roxy for Everything Else Happened, a new play based on the short stories of US writer Jonathan Safran Foer, adapted by David Kantounas, was a dead giveaway. Behind me in the line an earnest ingénue was busy explaining to her friends how Foer’s book Eating Animals "turned me vegan." Elsewhere people in horn-rimmed glass turned the pages of weighty novels.

Foer is, in the cliché du jour, a marmite novelist: you love him, or you hate him. Acolytes of Foer’s careful, lapidary prose and his playful, neurotic humour will find much to love in the four short, unconnected plays that comprise Everything Else Happened. For those who with an aversion to Foer—or, a useful proxy, Woody Allen—it’s a show best avoided.

That's not to say that there's nothing to applaud here. Some of Foer’s characters, most notably Rhoda, an over-bearing matriarch played with aplomb by Patti Love, are beautifully drawn; the simple, one-room set is perfectly realised by Anne Gry Skovdal; the acting is generally excellent. But, for this critic, too often these brief plays buckle under the weight of Foer’s elliptical writing.