Mark Thomas : The Red Shed, Traverse, Edinburgh Fringe

A show in which I found myself with an unusual viewing point.  As the queue forms Thomas comes out, chats to a few people, and asks if they would be willing to help him out on stage.  So six of us found ourselves being invited out of the audience to sit at tables on either side of the stage, and hold up masks to our faces when the characters we represented appeared in the story.  A chance to see Mark working from close up, and to observe the reactions of his audience.

The Red Shed is in Wakefield, a Labour Club in which Thomas performed many of his early gigs.  To help celebrate the building's 50th anniversary Thomas wanted to find evidence for a memory he had of the Miner's Strike in 1985, which had become mythologised over time, and that search forms the basis for the drama.

Recorded voices, the masks of the selected six, and audience singalongs play their part.  But mostly it's just Thomas' powerful storytelling, taking on characters, painting scenes, and indulging in some beautifully constructed ranting.  There is, naturally, plenty of socialist wisdom and illustrations of the ways in which the current government are removing our rights, plus the surprise that Greggs sausage rolls have an ethical dimension.  Oh, an there's a lot of laughter.  Thomas is still one of the sharpest comic brains in the UK.

The story itself is intriguing and moving, but there is a further dimension which asks us to look at how we spin the story of our own lives, of how we can sometimes falsify our own memories until the revised version becomes as much a part of truth as the reality.  The truth is never simple, not even when it's our own truth.

Thanks, Mark, for letting us be a part of it.

Not to be missed.

Mark Thomas : The Red Shed is on at the Traverse until 28 August.