Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Fringe round-up – Mixed blessings

Hit and miss at Edinburgh. It always is.

Hit and miss at Edinburgh. It always is. Random impulses drive you to select one show from the thousands on offer. Coffin Up (10 Dome) contained the hint of a macabre pun (‘coughing up’?), so along I went. It begins in a mortician’s office. There’s a coffin centre stage. The lid springs open and a masked clown sits bolt upright. He waves. Surprise! On comes the undertaker, also masked, and we learn through wordless gestures that he’s bankrupt and has embarked on a killing spree to save his business.

It’s charming enough in a cheesy kind of way. The best thing is the soundtrack, a sequence of pub tunes and orchestral favourites that lends subtle emphasis to the dramatic mood. Alas, the plot is a meandering muddle which makes as much sense as a striptease at a nudist camp. But if you’re a fan of mime you’ll enjoy it enormously.

Me, I prefer words. Words are my thing. Words are also, as it happens, the single most important development in the history of creation. Babies, chimps, drunks, deaf people, visitors to loud discos and foreigners without a common language all use mime. The rest of us communicate verbally. So mime isn’t really an art form but the ingenious circumvention of a debility, the excellence of an impairment. And at a festival celebrating the wonder of humanity it’s strange to be deprived of the best tool ever designed for expressing the wonder of humanity.

My next stop, Translunar Paradise (King Dome), had attracted a lot of advance buzz: the one to watch, the sleeper hit, the surprise smash of the Festival. Oddly enough, the word for this swarm of rumours is ‘the word’. So you can guess what’s coming next.

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