The world-weary sigh which Christine Bovill exhaled at the top of her show in the elegant surroundings of The Stand’s New Town Theatre aka the Freemasons Hall could have been read as a sigh of exhaustion as experienced by so many performers and festival-goers in what is the third and final week of the Fringe. But it is, in fact, a sigh of relief to mark the end of The Great War which together with The Wall Street Crash bookended the 1920s. A decade, described by F Scott Fitzgerald as despair turned on its head, which roared as loud as the MGM lion.

Accompanied by Michael Brawley on piano and the 2017 Young Traditional Musician of the Year Charlie Stewart on bass and violin, both of whom excelling in a series of stripped-down solos, Bovill’s husky vibrato like her musical selections is a seductive mix of hope and sorrow, playfulness and vulnerability. Luring us in with the titular track Tonight You Belong To Me by lyricist Billy Rose and composer Lee David, she peppers her introductions with poetic tales of the age featuring “a new breed of fearless women” such as Bessie Smith, Josephine Baker and Dorothy Parker and great societal shifts including women’s suffrage, prohibition and the alarming rise of “bigots in bedsheets”.

Two songs stood out: Ol’ Man River from Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s groundbreaking musical of 1927 Show Boat and the Chaplin-penned Smile, which though not written until 1936 for his movie Modern Times, is included to mark the meteoric rise of both cinema and celebrity culture, as well as the rising optimism of the decade, which as The Great Depression proved was built on shaky foundations.

The pace of many of the selections may have lacked the Fascinating Rhythm of George and Ira Gershwin’s infectious toe-tapper near the top of Bovill’s excellent 75-minute set, but her emotional honesty and purity of voice, not to mention the wit and intelligence of her monologues, made for a fascinating evening about what F Scott Fitzgerald coined the Jazz Age.

Peter Callaghan
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