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  • Edinburgh Festival theatre blog #5

  • By Rachel Halliburton

    Posted: Mon Aug 14 2006

  • Time Out's deputy theatre editor Rachel Halliburton surveys the most ludicrously titled shows on the Fringe

    Edinburgh Festival theatre blog #5

    Udderbelly venue in Edinburgh

  • There are few things more likely to gain instant attention on the Fringe than giving your show a ridiculous name. Journalists and tourists alike have a weakness for ludicrous titles, and there’s a bumper crop of them this year including ‘Jesus: The Guantanamo Years’, ‘Karp F’Tonk’ (which claims to involve a serenading egg) and ‘Pigeon Man Apocalypse’ (don’t ask). But woe betide the company or performer whose talents do not extend beyond their attention-seeking heading. Summoning the attention of the world only to reward it with a piece of mediocre work which could make a hangover look entertaining by comparison is probably as embarrassing as those dreams where you turn up at school without your clothes on. Feature continues

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    I’m afraid I gave ‘Bouncy Castle Hamlet’ a miss precisely because I felt it would be impossible for the show to live up to its wonderful title. Now, nothing I’ve heard has justified such cynicism – I could have wasted the chance to witness a radical revitalisation which, Heineken-style, refreshes the parts other Hamlets don’t reach – but somehow I doubt it. I’m not sure which was worse – the thought of Hamlet bouncing Yorick’s skull off the floor as he soliloquised, or wondering if the set would burst when swords were pulled in the final bloody showdown. Perhaps audiences will be more generous with their expectations, and the company’s cheques – unlike their production – won’t bounce.

    It was sadly less easy to resist ‘We Don’t Know Shi’ite.’ It seemed to promise everything – hot topicality, verbal ingenuity, and a sailing-close-to-the-wind irreverence – but in the event it was more like a Famous Five guide to the Five Pillars of Wisdom. The company who put it on, WMD (White Middle-Class Degenerates) theatre, cannot be faulted for their sense of enterprise: five actors went out and interviewed a vast range of people to find out precisely how little the British public knows about Islam. Maybe it’s because the levels of ignorance they found were so high that both the informative element and the satirical level of their show are so low – take, as a sample sentence, ‘So all of these Muslims seemed really cool’. (That’s before they tackle the fundamentalists.) ‘Doe a Deer’ from ‘the Sound of Music’ is reworked; a skit renames University Challenge as ‘Universally Challenged’ – so many ideas, so much material, but I was left more infuriated than informed.

    ‘A Midsummernight’s Tree’ was also a disappointment – and the effect wasn’t helped by sitting outside on an Edinburgh summer’s evening that felt as if it was reaching yearningly towards sub-zero temperatures. To be fair, the surrounding real estate and horticultural setting of Belgrave Crescent Gardens deserved six stars plus, and the tree, lit-up against the deepening dusk, certainly looked suitably enchanting. However, there should be a golden rule that if – despite your Shakespearean allusions - you are going to have a plot thinner than a gnat’s bikini-line as a backdrop to a series of cabaret acts, those cabaret acts should shine as brightly as the midsummer stars. There are a lot of circus skills being used in theatre now, so audiences have fairly high expectations of what your average juggler/trapeze artist can do – but between the dropped balls and pointless twirling, this reviewer was more pucked-off than enchanted.

    The only show I’ve seen so far whose merit outshines its ridiculous title is ‘The Sperm Monologues’ at Udderbelly – the wonderful new venue in the shape of a purple upside-down cow. Several men were interviewed to find out the message they would give to children born from sperm they’d donated at a clinic, in a filmed session that would be shown to the child on their eighteenth birthday. I was a little disappointed afterwards to find out that few of the men had actually put their balls where their mouths were - so to speak: the majority of interviews were based on a hypothetical donation. But faced with the proposition ‘if you only had one chance to speak to your child, what would you say?’ the interviewees produced the basis for a script that was both funny and moving. Amid the harsh natural selection process for Fringe publicity-seekers, this is a piece that deserves to go all the way.

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