Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Don’t Stop Me Now
Tricky Hat Productions with The Flames
Genre: Community Theatre
Venue: Royal Scots Club
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Tricky Hat Productions have taken Flames from all over Scotland, to bring them together for an opportunity at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to promote what life is like for those over the age of 50. As an improvised piece of art, this demonstrates how people with experience, when given the opportunity to perform, will tackle difficult subjects and present prescient pieces of narrative to provide us with a new perspective. As always, Flames bring us a challenge as well as a joy in everything they do, and this is absolutely obvious here.
Review
Tricky Hat Productions’ method of bringing people together a few days before a performance to use both the deadline of that performance and the opportunity to talk about any subject that may emerge works once more.
It has created a company quickly dependent upon each other, physically and emotionally onstage to platform their stories. Stories that they have to tell.
Taking us through many set pieces including about being strangled by a policewoman, balls, fear, ironing and the smell of toffee, resilience, hot steamy yoga, fruit flies and a skull in a fish tank, as well as cancer among many others, this meanders with ease between them – the physical movement allows theatricality to be the sewing needle that weaves its way through the narrative works well. There are a few stories that shone, and I particularly enjoyed the fruit flies, the skull in the fish tank, the champagne from the corner shop and the very surprising reason behind toffee being the smell from an iron.
As with all community productions, the acting will be of a different standard across the board and that allows it to have an authenticity rather than an issue or a problem. It’s a joy to recognise and to realise that people are joined together from different stages in their creative development as well as different stages in their life.
The directing is securely used to give people platforms and in particular, the way in which this interaction with live music, recorded music and recorded sound, as well as the projections of the back, are really well imagined and realised. It’s lovely to see different Flames appearing, who may not be onstage, but still contributing. And that is part of the joy of this, that people who cannot be there can still, in effect, be there.
Technically, this is once again an opportunity to show that the methodology works and works well. It not only has the creativity at the forefront of what it’s doing but also is representing a community that very often we are attempting to put into an institution. Don’t Stop Me Now is more than a headline. It’s an instruction. And what we should be doing is clearing a path in order to beat our way to the front of the queue for when the Flames return – this is growing old disgracefully, but with purpose.
