By Tony Frame. Venue – 236 Mint Studio at Greenside @ George Street

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As audience members, we are welcomed as guests to Anthony Maranville’s eulogy for his grandmother; a larger than life character who drank like it was going out of fashion. She also made up the most outlandish stories and tried to pass them off as truth (an uncle in the family who was a famous baseball player being one of them). Grandma’s ‘book of secrets’ (a journal of sorts that she kept, with photographs and clippings) is the catalyst for discovering things about her past and is used as a guide by Anthony as he navigates his way through the entirety of her life as well as his own, which starts in childhood and finishes to the present day where he is a father and has written numerous episodes of Star Trek: Discovery (2017-2024).  

Whilst the premise of this real-life tale has a lot to offer it suffers from a myriad of problems: from trying to fit way too much in (practically two life stories), into a fifty-minute show, to telling it in a passive sort of voice at times rather than an active voice. There’s moments where we’re told the story rather than shown it, and vice-versa. It also suffers from the ‘and then this happens’ syndrome: where this happens, and this happens, and that happens, and this happens, and that happened before that happened – all of this leaves you devoid of feeling any emotional weight when plot threads are revealed, and consequences have no real magnitude. Throw that into the mix with the fact that I don’t think Anthony is a trained actor means that the dramatic and more poignant scenes just didn’t have that oomph to them. 

Drinking with Grandma boldly goes where some other shows have not gone before. And whilst the Edinburgh Fringe is possibly the final frontier in a writer’s career, I wanted to be beamed up well before the curtain came down.