White Cabin
St Stephens, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: Akhe Group (Russia)

Andrew Chippindale

There is absolutely no narrative that can be discerned within this hour and a half long progression of sequence after sequence of surreal, wordless trickery. But such is the nature of the presentation that this matters not one bit.

Two beardy clowns and a far less clowny woman trundle about the stage in a picturely way, threading it with elastic, dropping screens, shedding newspaper and interacting in a series of tableaux. They come, they go, one takes a corkscrew from his pocket, attaches it to the cork in a bottle of wine suspended from the ceiling, fastens the corkscrew to a noose, also found in his pocket, puts said noose round his neck and attempts to hang himself from the bottle of wine with the inevitable effect of un-corking the bottle and getting a shower of red wine for his trouble. All terribly funny. Well done.

In fact, if there is one real discernable feature of this show it is how much alcohol the three performers chuck over themselves through its duration.

You get the picture, right? Certainly Europeans on the mainland know how to make a proper mess of a stage in the course of making theatre. By the end of the show the stage is covered in newspaper, wine, champagne, vodk, whisky, discarded elastic and ashes. What does it all amount to?

Anything you like, really. You probably know whether you like to watch this kind of thing or not, and if you do this is one of the better examples of it around.

1 August to 25 August.

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