Skip to main content

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2018 Theatre Reviews - Chase Scenes / Famous Puppet Death Scenes

CanadaHub @ King’s Hall
Four stars

A woman steps on the stage looking like a heroine on the run from a film noir. On the screens behind her she’s just been revealed in an actual movie, walking in the park after dark. Now, in the flesh, the scene is so familiar you think you know what’s coming next. As it turns out, the woman, followed around with two others filming her for a live video feed, makes the equivalent of a jump cut and a quick-fire costume change, and we’re onto the next thing.

Over the next hour in Chase Scenes, the trio, led by the show’s creator Ming Hon, take turns to act out sixty bite-size scenarios that move between madcap and mayhem. Hon, Alexandra Elliot and Hilary Anne Crist simulate running upstairs, downstairs, up on the roof and late for the train, all the while being chased by a series of nightmares that simply won’t let up. It’s an exhausting (for them) and at times cartoon-like subversion of male gaze clichés that drag the audience along for the ride in entertainingly breathless fashion.

If Hon’s creation looks like the wild card of the CanadaHub programme, Famous Puppet Death Scenes takes things even more out there even as the Old Trout Puppet Theatre’s compendium of gothic miniatures does exactly what its title suggests. Our host for the evening is one Nathaniel Tweak, an ancient marionette with the gravitas of the solitary late-night freaks framing episodes of The Twilight Zone and its ilk. Tweak conveys the earnestness of the occasion, with dark shades of Edward Gorey leavened by a gallows humour. All of this comes to life, and indeed death, in a series of brutal encounters punctuated by a running gag involving what might well be the hand of God.

The Herald, August 11th 2018

ends








Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Big Gold Dreams – A Story of Scottish Independent Music 1977-1989

Disc 1 1. THE REZILLOS (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures (12/77)  2. THE EXILE Hooked On You (8/77) 3. DRIVE Jerkin’ (8/77) 4. VALVES Robot Love (9/77) 5. P.V.C. 2 Put You In The Picture (10/77) 6. JOHNNY & THE SELF ABUSERS Dead Vandals (11/77) 7. BEE BEE CEE You Gotta Know Girl (11/77) 8. SUBS Gimme Your Heart (2/78) 9. SKIDS Reasons (No Bad NB 1, 4/78) 10. FINGERPRINTZ Dancing With Myself (1/79)  11. THE ZIPS Take Me Down (4/79) 12. ANOTHER PRETTY FACE All The Boys Love Carrie (5/79)  13. VISITORS Electric Heat (5/79) 14. JOLT See Saw (6/79) 15. SIMPLE MINDS Chelsea Girl (6/79) 16. SHAKE Culture Shock (7/79) 17. HEADBOYS The Shape Of Things To Come (7/79) 18. FIRE EXIT Time Wall (8/79) 19. FREEZE Paranoia (9/79) 20. FAKES Sylvia Clarke (9/79) 21. TPI She’s Too Clever For Me (10/79) 22. FUN 4 Singing In The Showers (11/79) 23. FLOWERS Confessions (12/79) 24. TV21 Playing With Fire (4/80) 25. ALEX FERGUSSON Stay With Me Tonight (1980) 1. THE REZILL