Edinburgh Fringe 2010
Low Down
Belt Up theatre offer the surrealist explanation of the death of Lorca. Audience and performers are locked together in as madcap and frenzied piece of storytelling as you are likely to get on this year’s Fringe.
Surrealism invades Belt Up’s unique space in the bowels of C Soco, and serves up involving, exciting, and utterly ridiculous theatre.
It’s theatre to be experienced not seen. Its awesomely good. Its unmissable. It’s Python and the Marx brothers. It’s insanely good.
Review
It’s about the death of Lorca. That bit is simple and straightforward. its the only bit that is. The ending is stunningly effective. Getting there is as huge amount of fun as you will get at Edinburgh this year.
Wedged between two world wars, the Surrealist Movement meets in Paris to proclaim its manifesto and promote its members. members of the movement come together (sort of) to tell the story and explain the impending death of Lorca, one of their prophets, in the Spanish civil war.
Dali, Magritte, Breton et al promulgate their beliefs in a world where an old world order has declined, and a new one has yet to emerge to take its place. its a place where manifestoes and meetings, motions and mayhem characterise Surrealist imaginations. Where reality is not real. the social and political are constructs, but Lorca is shot. That bit is real. the rest is made-up.
Belt Up Theatre are emerging as one of the best young theatre groups performing in the UK. Prodigiously talented, they create a space into which the audience is submerged. Its not so much theatre in the round as theatre all over the place. It is fantastically good, genuinely funny, ludicrously heroic. The staging is as innovative as the writing and the performance. The acting is uniformily strong, the music inventive.
It’s a weird and wonderful world that is created. Do yourself a very big favour and get along to it. You will be amazed, mystified, educated, entertained, exhausted by as brilliantly constructed and performed piece of Surrealist art as you might hope to experience.
