James Dean Is Dead! (Long Live James Dean)
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Like many of the Hollywood-centred plays running at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, James Dean Is Dead! similarly has its finger on the pulse of the #MeToo movement. In taking our story back to Dean’s cinematic career in the mid-fifties, there is an unsettling familiarity which suggests that these scandals have rumbled throughout Hollywood for decades. Yet Dean here is a sexed-up young man with a sexual-fluidity and subsequently he recounts his experiences at the hands of Hollywood execs with a unsettling blaseness. This is an expected part of the business and those playing the game approach it with a sad normality.
Yet James Dean is Dead! does an excellent job at capturing the complex dichotomy of Dean as someone put through this exploitative Hollywood wringer – yet also his vigour as an incredibly sexual young male (in a consensual sense). This helps craft the production’s Dean as one incredibly in-tune with his sexuality, almost in a hedonistic fashion who lives his life in the rebellious manner his characters from Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden and Giant were famed for. It’s also refreshing to see a depiction of Dean’s life that does not shy away from his sexual encounters with men, instead celebrating him as an iconic figure totally at ease with his sexuality.
Kit Edwards’ impressive performance grounds these themes of sexuality and power and control, whilst attempting to incorporate Dean’s sense of bravado and joy de vivre. He certainly looks the part in his white t-shirt, Levi 101s and crimson bomber jacket.
James Dean Is Dead! (Long Live James Dean) may feel like it circles several of the same themes throughout its fifty-five minute runtime, but thanks to a strong central performance and some prescient social undercurrents it is worth your time.