Lyra, Edinburgh
Three stars
The studio of the former school transformed by the Lyra organisation into Scotland’s first dedicated theatre for children and young people resembles a playroom prior to Bruno Gallagher’s new show for this year’s Manipulate festival of visual theatre and animation. Young audience members try on masks and costumes that sit on hangars waiting to transform the wearers, who pose for dramatic selfies. Other props sit on tables waiting to be perused. Wild images of surreal characters line the walls, while all the while a package tour soundtrack compiled from sunnier climes plays with joyful abandon.
If this interactive pre-show spectacle allows a glimpse into what goes on in Gallagher’s head, it also acts as a trailer for what happens upstairs in the theatre by way of a quartet of what their creator calls ‘Absurdities’. These are bite-size vignettes inspired by Gallagher’s wanderings in Europe played out by an array of creatures that have effectively burst through the frame of the wall drawings downstairs and come to vivid life.
So, in The Doppelgänger, a man comes face to face with himself. The Face of Truth sees eyes, nose, mouth and ears join forces as a series of moving parts finding where they belong, while Firebirds brings together some feathered friends. Till Eulenspiegel and the Bad Frankenhausen Bear draws its title partly from a fictional sixteenth century German folk hero that presumably inspired the name of a long running horror magazine, and partly from a spa town in the state of Thuringia. Adventure duly ensues.
Seen together, each miniature becomes a living strip cartoon imagined through the dream state of a traveller abroad. These are performed with choreographed flair by Gallagher and his co-devisers, Rachel Still and Alexandra Tsiapi, and pulsed by Rory Greene’s impressionistic electronic soundscape.
The real stars of the show, produced by the Feral company, are Gallagher’s fantastical costumes. Such inventive sartorial extravagance recalls Leigh Bowery’s larger than life designs for Michael Clark’s taboo busting ballet, I Am Curious, Orange, by way of Jeux sans frontières, the international version of madcap 1970s TV game show, It’s a Knockout. If Gallagher is playing the joker, Europe looks as endless as it ever did in this playful series of living postcards home.
The Herald, February 9th 2026
ends
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