Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Tweeds
Minotaur Theatrre Company
Genre: Fringe Theatre
Venue: The Space @ Symposium Hall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
An elite and covert hunting club at Exeter University accidentally shoot their leader. The fractious group unravels further when she turns up to their next meeting, unharmed. An absurd tale ensues to uncover who she actually is.
Review
It is a regular occurrence to witness fringe theatre performed by a privileged few, arriving from top tier universities or funded by parents so it was intriguing to witness a new play that claimed to turn this on its head. The targets of this play were the wealthy and entitled, breaking their university protocols and UK law by hunting animals instead of clay pigeons.
Right off the bat they nail the toe curling nature of the stereotypical upper classes and it’s on the nose funny. The scenes take place in their local drinking hole, which is a clever choice with the limitations of the Space at Symposium Hall, and they illustrate the divide between rich and poor with beautiful cruelty.
Unfortunately after the initial set up the story starts to unravel for the characters and also for the audience. The flyer tells us that the leader of this group dies in a hunting accident. It also tells us that this character shows up at the next meeting seemingly unharmed. A great premise to jump off from but sadly the story cannot connect itself completely from there. We have characters that are meant to be together but show no evidence of this in either dialogue or action until we are told they’re a couple at the end. A protagonist that is welcomed into this elite group by offering them a screwdriver and claiming to be a ‘handyman’. We have been led to believe that this elitist bunch are a clique who look down on everyone and given their recent actions to another ‘underling’ in the pub it doesn’t ring true that they would just welcome him with open arms. Then the main ‘meat’ of the story is the identity of the leader back from the dead. Is she a clone? Is she a doppelganger? None of these avenues are explored with any depth from any character and the story wraps up with no conclusion and a very bizarre plot twist that is so far from the comedic world that’s been created, leaves the audience confused and slightly alarmed.
Some great ideas are thrown around in this piece from the student run Minotaur Theatre Company with some standout performances especially from Katie Trollope as Babette. The throughline of the story however needs attention as the strong comedic start is outweighed by countless unanswered plot questions that are posed throughout the piece and simply left flailing in the wind. Further work on the plot and the writing will improve this work significantly.
The writer Tabs Nixon definitely has potential but there is scope for this piece to be more dramatically fulfilling. I will however keep an eye on their work for the future.
