FringeReview Scotland 2025
An Evening with Alex Franz Zehetbauer
Alex Franz Zehetbauer produced in collaboration with Buzzcut Double Thrills.
Genre: Absurd Theatre, Cabaret
Venue: Centre for Contemporary Arts
Festival: FringeReview Scotland
Low Down
Zehetbauer’s performance is nuanced and engaging with a hint of danger at every turn with a respectful nod to cabaret. Acutely aware of how an audience should be able to interact whilst also sit back and enjoy, this was often a masterpiece of alternate cabaret. Technically, some of the work, including playing piano with his feet and chewing a microphone, set a different level of performance.
Review
Zehetbauer opens from the side of us, hidden, and singing repetitively into his hand held and tie pin microphone. In a spellbinding section simply repeating two lines of his song slowly emerging at our side until he came on stage, the microphone that he was using was one he then chewed, put in his mouth, and all of my health and safety fatherliness wanted to jump up and shout, oh no, you’re going to be electrocuted.
But the electricity that came was in that performance. Zehetbauer reimagined how songs should be interpreted. Zehetbauer uses songs repetitively to develop melody and become performance art with confidence and vitality.
When he sang and developed that repetitive melody things became much more layered and effective which transcended cabaret and performance into blending pop culture with the type of melodies that would not feel out of place in a Hebridean lament, but with absurdity at its heart.
The organ was utilised as accompaniment to songs until it became a stage prop. It served a visual metaphor as he played it with his strange boots. Hooked by these leathery fingers of a boot that he was wearing, like some sawn-off, gorilla-ed ankle-length shoes, the continued absurdity, included the pantomimic form of trousers that were connected at the bottom, making some of his movements rather awkward. But that awkwardness was used to entertain.
Technically Zehetbauer knew his form and played to that understanding of how to deliver, when to pause, how to act and react and keep us all enthralled. It was both engaging and challenging over how performance should be perceived.
Buzzcut has given us the opportunity not just to understand what it is that we want to see from our performers but what it is that we want to learn from others. Learning from the way in which Zehetbauer engaged with the audience, presented his work, gave us an opportunity to rest, to laugh, to enjoy, to feel part of it was something that made this an all-round experience.
Shorter than I would have wanted it to have been, longer than perhaps his dalliance was meant to have been, Zehetbauer gave us a golden opportunity to see work that we would hitherto not have seen even at the most avant-garde-ish and now increasingly conservative of festivals that Edinburgh hosts each August.
Taking risks is what is needed and Buzzcut curated an experience that allows me to buzz along to what is next, cut from the cloth of nights like this where we can contemplate new and risqué, meet the heights of an Zehetbauer and be daring to perceive the possibility that we could achieve such heights.
