Greenside @ George Street
Mint Theatre
Until August 29th (not Sundays)
(13:00)
The comedy adventure radio play is an extension of the American genius, a kind of second cousin to the Queen of the Hollywood Hills. While cinema dazzled the eyes, radio learnt to conjure entire worlds from nothing but voices, music & sound effects, growing out of the vaudeville tradition into a golden age during the 1930s & 40s. Jack Benny, Burns & Allen, Fred Allen and Fibber McGee & Molly turned the nation’s living rooms into invisible theatres, discovering along the way many of the rhythms, characters & comic situations that television would later inherit. Perhaps only America could make a superstar out of Edgar Bergen—a ventriloquist performing with a dummy on a medium where nobody could actually see either of them.
Gadzooks! As I set off out to review Lil’ Miss Kate – Ward of the State, a 2026 radio play for the stage, I found myself ruminating on the fact that this year marks the centenary of NBC being formally incorporated by RCA, General Electric & Westinghouse. On 15 November 1926 the network began broadcasting, helping transform American radio from a patchwork quilt of local stations into something genuinely national—the same voices, music, drama & comedy suddenly crackling simultaneously into homes across that vast continent. A century later we live in a similar world, only this time its you-tube subscriptions, Tik-Tok stars & Netflix who are providing us with our famillialy familiar voices & faces.
Ok, that’s enough of my pre-ambling bumph—what about the show itself? On entering the room, the stage is set up as a radio studio of sorts, four shiny period microphones made all the more dazzling by the lighting. It’s authentically aesthetic, a cuddly little portal back into radio’s golden age, & the illusion begins before the play itself has even properly started. The ‘actors’ banter away between themselves, remaining in character as 1930s performers waiting to go on air, including some wonderfully snidey industry sideswipes from one female actress towards the star of the show,Lil’ Miss Kate herself. On one occasion, the male actor came over asking if he had any food in his teeth – & either way it was “good enough for radio!?” It’s a clever extra layer: we’re not simply watching actors performing a radio play, but actors playing old-time radio actors who are themselves performing Lil’ Miss Kate—a play within a play transmitted from an America that never quite existed.
Behind Lil’ Miss Kate – Ward of the State is Niche Vault Productions, bringing to Edinburgh a comedy universe that actually began life as an audio series created by writers Seth Finkelstein & Teddy Dinner. Finkelstein comes out of America’s improv & sketch world, having trained at UCB, Second City, The Annoyance & The Pack, while titular star Lizzy Furey has spent almost a decade performing with New York improv team The ’96 Bulls. The conceit is deliciously daft: Kate is “America’s Second-Favorite Orphan Adventurer,” accompanied by her guardian, New York Deputy Mayor Solomon Russell, former heavyweight champion Lucinda Sheraton & faithful horse Fiorello. We also have a guest performer every night to play Sal Loon – the owner of Sal’s Saloon on Second Avenues, frequented by the 11-year old Kate as she makes her break for freedom.
“The Mole people I first encounter’d on my travels thro’ the United States mysterious mid-west.”
Then we were away—galloping forward rip-roaringly on the back of Fiorello thro’ a fully-scripted homage to those thrilling live action-adventure radio serials of the 1930s & 40s, complete with live Foley sound effects. It was all essentially a case of Little Orphan Annie colliding head-first with The Naked Gun. Despite plenty of witty quips, & whipcrack banter, as quicksand-sink by quicksand-sink the show descended deeper into silliness & surreality, I found that sometimes it work’d, sometimes it didn’t, & sometimes the humour was just a tad too American for my taste. Reversing the cultural flow metaphorically, it was a bit like trying to explain the subtle beauties of five days of Test cricket to an American.
The three main actors all give confident performances, full of dramatic physical flourishes: including smoking cigarettes, like everyone in those days, between dialogues. I think that Miss Kate herself is possibly work’d a little too hard by the script. She hardly gets a chance to draw breath, & I think that affects her emotional range a little—the dialogue comes so thick & fast there’s precious little space for the character, or performer, to breathe.
“I knew I’d always go out this way staring down the barrel of a loved one’s gun!”
Also, the special guest avatar is a nice feature perhaps for the company, keeping things fresh & different every day, but as a spectator it’s a bit like paying to watch your football team & discovering one of the star players has been replac’d by an inexperienced kid from the youth team. Maintaining suspension of disbelief is everything in theatre, & playing the reserves inevitably weakens any team. Not that this afternoon’s guest performer was bad, or even weak—the confidence levels were simply lower, & detectably so, which affects that delicate energy-flow between we audience members & the performers before us. For theatre to truly hypnotise us, that current needs to run super-smooth.
All in all, Lil’ Miss Kate is a fine show, a lovingly constructed time capsule that will appeal especially to those wanting to experience the performance styles of a lost era. In that manner, it certainly does what it says on the tin, recreating the voices, rhythms, sound effects & theatricality of old-school American radio with considerable affection. The length is pleasant as well, – 40 minutes its perfect for a Fringe show, I think. I guess some will love it more than I did, but that’s the nature of comedy—one person’s quicksand-sinking silliness is another person’s Fiorello-galloping comic delight – but I’m sitting firmly on the fence.
Damo
