The F***ing Asylum Seekers
C Electric

I Miss Communism
Pleasance Dome

LET’S get the attention-seeking titles out of the way early. Act Provocateur International has ten shows at the C Electric venue, an old cinema repossessed in what must be seen as a minor victory for live performance. In this one, a mixture of live action and video projection written and directed by API chief and Fringe regular Victor Sobchak, the real F-word turns out to be Foreigner.

Stuart, your average bottom-feeding Brit finds his home officially taken over by a family of asylum-seekers. They are not from anywhere specific but they both reinforce Stuart’s prejudices (funny religion, funny food, funny attitude to women) and subvert them (the flat is cleared up and redecorated, the incoming family has a clutch of intellectual and cultural accomplishments and his girlfriend falls for the charismatic leader). They quickly assume power not just over him but over the country as a whole, redefining Britishness, in a kind of Daily Mail/BNP nightmare, as everyone who can lay claim to a bit of foreign blood.

The conclusion, as the foreign family hails its election victory, feels more like the end of Act One of a larger play — one wants to know what happens next. It’s a pity it is all a bit ramshackle and lacking in polish because there are some decent ideas here, some good lines and at least three very decent performances.

Ines Wurth’s I Miss Communism is certainly not short of polish, a slick, energetic but carefully controlled solo piece about a woman who was more of an economic migrant, from Yugoslavia to America, than an asylum-seeker.

It starts, improbably, with her singing extracts from Oliver! The Communists used to show it as anti-capitalist propaganda; young Ines saw it as parable of free enterprise. And there are several musical moments, including a funny, red rewrite of All That Jazz, with which the all-singing, all-dancing and winning Miss Wurth keeps up the tempo.

But the key moment is not the audience joining in a clap-along version of The Internationale at the end but when, at her grandmother’s grave, her mother refuses to reveal exactly what her antecedents were. In a country where ethnicity, religion and the way you spell your name have been and remain matters of life and death, identity is a luxury you may not be able to afford. Ines (for it is largely her story) found capitalism as much a trap as communism, and the war that engulfed her country, Croatia, after Tito died, a lot worse than both. No wonder a regime which kept all that at bay had its attractions too.

Both until August 29: Asylum-Seekers 0860 701 5105, Communism 0131-556 6550 Theatre