PEEP

There’s something tacitly voyeuristic about the Fringe in general. Everyone looks everywhere: from widespread celebrity-spotting to sitting in darkened makeshift performance spaces for 12 hours a day. PEEP, a returning pop-up venue in Assembly’s George Square Spiegeltent takes it to the extreme, offering in kind peep-shows. Audiences (perhaps “customers” is more appropriate) sit in individual black booths with headphones and peer through a small window to a white box where a variety of performances are played out.

Of the many shows running throughout the day, Happy Endings by Kay Adshead mythologises the nature of virginity: one part pure, untouched and sacred entirety, another a modern riff on embarrassment, estrangement and impossibility. PEEP’s curator Donnacadh O’Briain also directs many of the shows, including La Petite Mort, an earthy exploration of sexual need as one man endures impotence. These are rounded off by a five-minute Argentine dance piece, Diego y Ulises, which turns prurience, lust and anger into ballet.

At times, this is an example of style over substance. As we sit uncomfortably partitioned, it’s the venue that presses us to ask questions rather than the shows. What is our connection with what we’re seeing? Must we internalise our expression? The fact that the actors exist only to serve us drags the notion of power between performer and spectator: it can feel like we’re being equally watched and scrutinised. It is uncertain and seedy, but bizarrely liberating, playful and exciting. Perhaps tellingly, PEEP is more an experience than a performance.