Playbill Pick Review: Chris Grace: Sardines (A Comedy About Death) at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
The comedian returns to Fringe to ask the question: Can death be funny?
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, Playbill is on board our FringeShip for the festival and we’re taking you with us.
Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon! As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we’re letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.
Death: The inevitable ending for everyone and everything around us. Sounds like the perfect topic for a comedy show, right? While the idea of listening to someone talk about death for 45 minutes might make you hesitate, don’t. You probably need this show more than you realize.
Comedian Chris Grace (from NBC’s Superstore) returns to Fringe after a sold-out run of his show Chris Grace: as Scarlett Johansson and his many shows with Improve group Baby Wants Candy last year. This time, Grace returns to ask a few light and easy questions: Can we enjoy life if we know how it ends? Does making art actually help?
Full disclosure to readers of this review: A month ago I lost a close friend unexpectedly. So the idea of seeing a show that would clearly force me to think about death, grief, and loss, and once again question my own mortality…was going to be a bumpy ride. Would it be a good idea, while still grieving, to sit and force myself to confront these concepts with 100 or so strangers? Only time would tell.
The show is a simple one. There is no elaborate set, props, light or sound cues. It is just Grace, standing alone on a black box stage all in white (a traditional color of mourning in Chinese culture). He begins the show by asking his audience to imagine a screen, perhaps it’s one of those mobile screens that people use to set up for at home slide shows or movies. Then he asks you to pretend he has a computer and a projector that will display the imaginary images on his imaginary screen. Grace explains that he could have rented an actual screen and projector, but he wanted his audience to engage their abilities to imagine and create…or was it that he wanted to save £600 on a rental? Who’s to say?
Through the course of the show, Grace returns to the imaginary screen—and on it, a family photo taken in 2012. In that photo are his two older siblings, his mother, his partner, and himself. Within seven years, Grace informs the audience, all of them will have died.
At this point, you might be asking, ‘Is this a comedy show?’ And that is where Grace really shines as a storyteller, a comedian, and an artist. His ability to weave comedy with tragedy, and laugh-out-loud one-liners with heartbreaking vulnerability, is special and feels entirely unique. A trend these days, especially with American stand-ups, is the creation of stage personas that are purposely disingenuous and inauthentic—they make their audience laugh from their inability to be relatable to anyone watching. Grace feels like a breath of fresh, sincere air.Â
This can especially be seen as Grace confronts his estranged father who, even up to his death, did not accept Grace for being gay. After not speaking for 19 years, Grace describes a meal with his father at a local Chinese restaurant where he smashes a bowl of uneaten dumplings out of frustration and anger. The side-splitting punchline after that gut punch of a scene: For Grace—a “chubby, Chinese gay bear”—the loss of uneaten dumplings was almost as sad as the situation was.
One particularly poignant moment in the show is Grace’s metaphor for the feeling after loss. He compares it to sardines (hint hint, the title of the show). No, not the fish—the childhood game. The premise is similar to hide and seek, but instead of exposing a hider when they are found, the seeker joins them in their hiding spot until the other seekers find them. Grace says that loss is similar to Sardines. Eventually, our loved ones are all together (in whatever version of the afterlife or beyond you believe in) and we’re left here, still living, on our own. While I’m sure that metaphor can feel depressing and lonely to some, I found something cruelly poetic about it. No matter how alone one might feel after a loss, you’re not alone in that feeling. We all feel like the one Sardine…left behind…looking for their other fish. That commonality was a surprising comfort to me.
I will end this review and say that you still might not think this Fringe show is for you if you are uncomfortable or anxious when it comes to talking or listening about death. I’m right there with you, and so is Grace. And to that I will say, I challenge you to reconsider. Chris Grace: Sardines (A Comedy About Death) is a quintessential Fringe production. It’s a small, humble show with no bells and whistles, nor does it need them. It is just one performer gracefully (no pun intended) holding an audience’s attention and hearts as he navigates a subject that hits very close to home for him and I’m sure many audience members. I wouldn’t change a thing about this production and only hope the show continues to have a life after this year’s Fringe.
Chris Grace: Sardines (A Comedy About Death) runs at Assembly George Square Studios, Studio Five, until August 26. Get tickets here.
