Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Four More Short Plays Loosely Linked By The Theme of Crime
Low Bar Theatre
Genre: Comedy, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: theSpace on the Mile
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A quartet of tightly scripted, cleverly crafted and nicely staged pieces featuring a trio of hard working and, on the evidence of this performance, highly adaptable actors. Four quite different and quite dodgy crimes see some absurdist and surrealist action. And some that’s just plain bonkers.
Review
Low Bar Theatre are back with another set of short form plays loosely themed around crime, once again setting the bar high in the short play format, This time it’s a quartet of tightly scripted, cleverly crafted and nicely staged pieces featuring a trio of hard working and, on the evidence of this performance, highly adaptable actors.
Using either a bare or extremely simple set augmented with an interesting array of appropriate props, our trio of actors, Flinn Andreae, Laura Pujos and Jaz Tizzard, weave the quite different tales using a series of perfectly formed characters or, on occasion, clever caricatures.
We start in the Wild West, and a great train robbery with Andreae and Tizzard’s cowboy attired persona effecting a hold-up on Pujos’ eccentric English scientist and his pet whales (yep, pretty absurdist), being carted by railcar to Salt Lake City on the madcap snake oil scheme to end all snake oil schemes. Or should that be whale oil scheme? Bonkers, with a bewildering denouement.
Then Tizzard’s character arranges to meet up with two old friends in a celebratory reunion with a macabre twist, involving forgery, fraud and more than a little frisson and friction. Watch as the two friends are inexorably drawn into the simple, yet daring and believable scenario.
Then there’s a domestic take on Macbeth and the ability of the three witches (in this case unseen old ladies) to predict the career of Tizzard’s ambitious character and her floaty, universalist husband (Andreae again). It’s redolent enough that Bard lovers will get the nuances in the text but the denouement felt as though it lacked the punch implied by the developing dialogue. Or was that part of the cunning plan?
Last up we ‘ad a couple o’ cockney geezers, racketeers in fact, moseying on down to the butchers to extract their dues. Great wordplay between all three characters, Andreae this time playing the funny racketeer, gullible and idiotic, to Pujos’ straight man, with Tizzard the cunning butcher. Lovers of cockney rhyming slang and verbal dubiety will particularly enjoy this piece.
Created by the pen of Charles Edward Pipe, this is a quartet of very different plays, each nicely formed with a beginning, middle and end with a variety of twists and turns buried neatly inside. The acting is on point throughout, characters and caricatures perfectly formed, physically and with superb accenting and crystal clear delivery – not a word gets lost, even though the pace is pretty frenetic. Costumes add authenticity, particularly in the train robbery where two splendid gun totting cowboys faced off our erudite English gentleman, complete with rather wobbly false moustache.
It all adds up to a thoroughly entertaining, amusing hour of top quality theatre. Short form plays don’t get a lot of air time at the Fringe so this is certainly a show that comes with a firm recommendation.
