Edinburgh Fringe Reviews

Some shows should never have made it from the rehearsal room to the stage. Others, like Toast: A Tragedy in Three Slices, should perhaps never have made it from the kitchen. And yet, here we are, in a sweaty basement with twenty strangers, watching a man in a crumb-speckled tuxedo spend an hour lamenting the existential plight of breakfast.

The plot,if one can use such a lofty term for what is essentially interpretive sulking,centres around a single slice of toast (represented, quite literally, by a piece of Hovis on a plate). The toast is in love with butter. The butter, alas, is already spread too thin. What follows is a tale of longing, despair, and carbohydrates, told through monologues that sound like a sixth-form student trying to rewrite Hamlet while on a gluten-free diet.

Our protagonist delivers lines such as, “I am golden, I am crisp, yet I am never enough,” with the conviction of someone who has mistaken snack food for proper meals. He frequently interrupts himself to produce new props: a jar of jam, a cold fried egg, a suspiciously stale croissant. Each makes a brief cameo before being dramatically hurled into the wings, where they sit forgotten.

There is music as well. At the fifteen-minute mark, a bassoon emerges and we are treated to a dirge titled Crumbs of My Soul. The melody wanders aimlessly, as though even the notes wish they weren’t here. Halfway through, the performer weeps onto his toast. I’m not sure what the symbolism was, but it seemed to be the crux of the entire show.

Audience interaction proves less successful. One unfortunate man in the second row was asked to “play the toaster.” His task? To crouch and make ding noises on command. He complied with the weariness of a man who realised too late that he should have gone to see stand-up instead. Later, we were all instructed to chant “Marmite is love, Marmite is life” while the performer smeared the stuff across his chest. At this point, a couple quietly left, but the rest of us stayed,perhaps out of solidarity, perhaps out of morbid curiosity.

The finale is predictably absurd: the performer smashes an entire loaf of bread against his head while shouting, “We are all slices!” before collapsing in a heap of crumbs. Silence. Then polite applause. Not because it was good, but because we admired the sheer, unrelenting commitment to the bit.

What do I think of Toast: A Tragedy in Three Slices? It is pretentious, baffling, and unhygienic. And yet there’s something oddly admirable about it. This was a man who truly believed in his bread-based tragedy, and for that, he earns an extra star.

Two stars. One for effort, one for the crumbs.

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.

Among the thousands of shows this year clamouring for our attention, Mind the Gap managed to stand out,largely because it was staged inside an actual council-issued wheelie bin.

Yes, that’s right. The performer, who introduces himself only as “Gregor, Keeper of the Lid,” spends the entire 55 minutes inside the bin, popping his head out occasionally to whisper sweet nothings about his doomed affair with the London Underground. The narrative, such as it exists, revolves around Gregor’s passionate yet forbidden love for the Piccadilly Line. “She was always late, but so am I,” he sighs, before lowering himself back into his plastic coffin and shaking it violently to simulate “the rumble of a train through the tunnels of desire.”

From the moment the show begins, audience comfort is not considered. We are crammed into a makeshift venue that resembles the back corridor of a Greggs, seated on stools that feel like they’ve been designed as a warning against sedentary lifestyles. The smell of bin plastic under stage lights fills the room, creating an atmosphere that can best be described as austerity chic.

The performance itself is a kind of postmodern endurance test. Gregor alternates between monologues about his subterranean romance and long periods of silence where he simply closes the lid and leaves us in darkness. One audience member whispered, “Is this part of it?” only to be shushed by Gregor’s muffled voice from inside: “All silence is part of it.”

There is, inevitably, music. At the 37-minute mark, Gregor produces a battered kazoo, pokes it through the bin slot, and wheezes out a haunting rendition of something that may have once been My Heart Will Go On. This, he tells us, represents “the signal failures of my soul.” A few people giggled; the rest stared into the void, wondering whether leaving early would constitute art criticism or self-preservation.

The finale is bold, if not exactly triumphant. Gregor attempts to climb fully out of the bin, tangling himself in his own prop railway map, before collapsing to the floor and declaring, “We are all commuters of the heart!” The house lights come up, revealing an audience unsure whether to clap, call for help, or demand a refund. In the end, we did clap, partly out of politeness and partly because we were relieved it was over.

Two stars.

Some shows at the Edinburgh Fringe make you laugh, some make you cry, and some make you wonder why you left your flat in the first place. Cabbage: The Musical manages to do all three,all within the first five minutes.

The concept, if I understood correctly, is that a cabbage wants to become a star of the West End. Played by a woman in a green sleeping bag with actual cabbage leaves stapled all over, our heroine belts out original numbers with titles like Photosynthesis of the Heart and I’m Just a Side Salad in Your Love Story. The songs are delivered with an earnestness so intense it feels like an act of aggression.

The minimal set design deserves a mention. A lone Tesco shopping bag sits centre stage, for reasons uncertain. Occasionally, another cast member (there are three in total) emerges from the fake door at the back of the stage dressed as a carrot, a courgette, or,bafflingly,a wheel of brie, to serve as foils to the cabbage’s quest for fame. At one point, the carrot accuses the cabbage of being “too leafy to headline,” a line screamed at full volume while the performer tripped over a microphone cable.

Audience participation, unfortunately, is mandatory. Midway through the show, we were instructed to “be the soil.” This involved crouching on the sticky floor of the venue while the cabbage roamed about us, whispering, “Feed me with your nutrients of applause.” One man flatly refused.

Musically, the show is eclectic. The opening number sounded suspiciously like an ABBA track played backwards, while the eleven o’clock ballad was performed entirely in falsetto with plastic trumpet accompaniment. At one point, the brie launched into a rap about dairy privilege, which may or may not have been ironic. The audience sat in stunned silence.

The finale is, I will admit, spectacular. I won’t give it away, save to say I’m surprised lit Catherine Wheels are allowed in such a small room. This ending – once we realised that nothing had caught fire was met with nervous giggles, followed by a standing ovation from two people who had clearly lost all sense of reality.

You might not expect it but this will have an effect on you. Days later, I found myself staring at the cabbage and lettuce in Sainsbury’s with something close to trauma.

Three stars.