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Champions

Four stars 

 

A naked man sits in an armchair at the centre of an impressionistic version of a family living room. A TV set, a lamp, a vintage record player, surrounded by walls with only one door out. As the man breathes deep in the stillness, voices of his homophobic father, his mother and his therapist pierce the TV static like ghosts in the machine. Film footage of two men wrestling naked - in a field, on a beach, in the sea - beams on to the walls like an earnest reimagining of Ken Russell’s Women in Love. 

 

As we cut between recorded snatches of real life conversations and the on screen struggle, it is as if all the everyday agonies swirling around inside the man’s head are being transmitted as a state of art living installation. 

 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad for sure in this intense forty-minute audience with Andreas Constantinou, the Danish theatre artist who tells his story without moving or saying a word. First performed by Constantinou for his Himherandit Productions in 2020, and presented in Edinburgh as part of the Danish Showcase, the result is part meditation, part purging, part live art, and part public therapy in a deeply intimate exchange. 


Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025 - Pleasance @ EICC until 16th August, 8.30pm


The List, August 2025

 

ends

 

 

 

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