Every August, the Edinburgh Fringe mutates into a festival where thousands of ambitious, sleep-deprived performers descend upon Scotland to demand our attention. Some bring stories about grief, or climate change, or their latest break-up. A brave few attempt to do all three. And then there’s The Pigeon King: A One-Man Ornithological Opera, which I stumbled into by mistake after confusing “Free show, free biscuits!” with a legitimate selling point. I did not receive biscuits. I did, however, receive 58 minutes of a grown man cooing at the ceiling.
The premise—if we can stretch the word “premise” over this rickety cage of feathers—is simple: one man, armed only with a velvet cape, a smoke machine that clearly hasn’t worked properly for years, and the misplaced confidence of a birdwatcher with a flair for the dramatic, tells the story of King Alfonse, a monarch who ruled over pigeons. Not metaphorical pigeons, mind you. Actual pigeons. Except, of course, there are no pigeons, because hiring birds is expensive and unhygienic. Instead, our performer, Sanger Thistle (yes, that is his real name, and yes, he told us four times), plays every pigeon himself. He does this through interpretive flapping, occasional squatting, and long sequences of guttural noises that can best be described as a man chewing a squeaky dog’s toy while remembering his divorce.
Opera is maybe not how this show should be described. There is music, in the sense that Nigel occasionally belts fragments of Italian words over a backing track. He has, to his credit, memorised at least two lines of Verdi, which he deploys whenever the going gets sticky (i.e. every nine or ten minutes). By the third time he shouted “Vincerò!” while clutching a stuffed pigeon from Poundland, the audience began to wonder whether victory was truly within reach, or if we’d all lost in some deeper, cosmic sense.
There are moments of audience interaction, naturally—this is Fringe law. Nigel selected an unfortunate man in the front row to play “The Enemy Hawk.” The man was handed a paper beak, asked to hiss menacingly, and then promptly ignored for the rest of the performance. Later, we were instructed to join in the “pigeon chorus,” which involved clapping out of time while Nigel rolled on the floor. If art is about shared experience, then certainly, we all experienced something we can never erase from memory, no matter how much therapy we pursue.
The show ends—mercifully, though not quickly—with Nigel ascending a stepladder and declaring himself “Lord of Trafalgar Square.” He then released a single balloon in the shape of a pigeon, which promptly got caught in the lighting rig. Symbolic, perhaps, of ambition meeting reality, or simply of poor balloon-handling skills.
Is The Pigeon King good? That depends on your definition of good. If good means technically competent, thoughtfully executed, or even vaguely entertaining, then no. If good means an unforgettable fever dream that will haunt you every time you pass a bird feeder, then yes, it’s a triumph.
Three stars. One for effort, one for the cape, and one for the sheer audacity of charging £12 for something that smelled faintly of damp feathers.
