Mammoth

Adapted from her original Finnish work, Jessikan Pentu (Jessica’s Cub) by Leea Klemola, Mammoth transfers effortlessly from the Boreal landscapes of Finland to a forest in Scotland.

A cut above your average Fringe meta-play, Mammoth sees Jessica, a highly unstable woman who has undergone a nervous breakdown, hiring a Fringe space to stage a performance in the hope that it might bring her family together. It is a project doomed to fail, but rather than simply being a comedy of errors it descends into something far darker. Her overly eager mother plays her teenage son, who apparently had no interest in playing himself, and her well-meaning husband tries as best as he can to accommodate her desire to regress to an idealised primitive state.

The action takes place in an upstairs room at the Pleasance Dome and a forest simultaneously. There is no fourth wall to break, and at points Mammoth seemingly operates in four different contexts on four different levels. By the time a naked and bloodied man appears inexplicably at the back of the room, the entire venue is in a dream world on a journey to the safari park outside Dunblane.  

Klemola’s script is excellent, the only drawbacks being a few jokes and references lost in translation such as the Huldra forest nymph the main character resembles, but its new Scottish face succeeds in preserving much of its original charm and rawness. You’ll struggle to find anything else quite like it.

Engaging, hilarious, disturbing and visceral theatre.