Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs
Sweet at the Crown Plaza, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: Eton College Productions

Ravi Bali

This is an abridged version of the David Halliwell play about the revenge fantasy of one Malcolm Scrawdyke and his friends. Expelled from art school for being lazy and disruptive, Malcolm plots vengeance on the school head Mr Allard while coincidentally plotting world domination through his newly formed political organisation the Party of Dynamic Erection. Armed with a fervour for power for no particular purpose, Malcolm and his pals hatch a plot to deal with the bureaucrats who stifle them, and whom they castigate as joyless eunuchs.

Boasting a uniformly strong cast of very young actors, this play does a good job of mocking the radical pretensions of the self-deluding, know-next-to-nothing characters. The production does suffer though from being condensed from nearly three hours to an hour and forty minutes. The trimming of much of the play to suit fringe leaves the audience feeling that the resolution is forced rather than flowing from what precedes it. The character development also feels rushed and unconvincing for the same reason.

That aside, if a send up of Sixties style radicals sounds appealing or if were a fan of the old TV show Citizen Smith then you will find much here to amuse you.

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