Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Operation Blank
George Grant
Genre: Absurd Theatre, Comedy, Theatre
Venue: theSpace@Surgeons Hall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Someone has detonated a nuclear device over Copenhagen and an emergency meeting of COBRA has been called to discuss the UK’s response. “Junior”, a very junior minister holed up somewhere in a bunker in London, needs to pull some form of comprehensible responsible together but can’t get the dilettante of a Prime Minister to agree to a title for this project, with any chance of meaningful progress thwarted as meeting participants dive into irrelevant rabbit holes that patently fail to address the elephant in the room.
Review
Everyone has a nightmare tale to tell about a Microsoft Teams meeting gone wrong: the connection drops; the idiot on mute; the one in their jim jams thinking they can’t be seen; the disruptive gatecrasher; the louche lay about lobbing in verbal grenades. We’ve all been there. All these caricatures (and a few more) appear in George Grant’s high energy, absurdist farce, Operation Blank, that takes this online hell to a whole new level.
Someone has somehow managed to detonate a nuclear device over Copenhagen and an emergency meeting of COBRA has been called to discuss the UK’s response. “Junior”, a very junior minister holed up somewhere in a bunker in London, needs to pull some form of comprehensible responsible together with the “random assortment of suspiciously white cabinet ministers” present online.
The satire and parody in this interesting take on the UK’s political scene is full-on from the start, that quote above being just one of a whole series of digs at the relative lack of diversity in many post-millennium cabinets as well as politicians’ propensity to live in a bubble, creating inertia not results as they confuse activity with outcomes.
“Junior”, the only one in a real office, hits obstacles from the start – he can’t even get the dilettante of a Prime Minister to agree to a title for this project, the caricature of a PM booting that major decision into the proverbial long grass by the simple wheeze of naming it Operation “Blank”. Any chance of meaningful progress then gets exponentially worse as the eclectic mix of meeting participants dive into irrelevant rabbit holes that patently fail to address the room’s elephant, leading “Junior” to blow pretty much every fuse he possesses.
This is, from a technical standpoint, a very different and cleverly constructed piece of theatre, with Grant playing both the solo on-stage role as well as each of the online ones, with the latter being distinct caricatures in their own right, where clothing, background, make up and even differing hair styles are used to deliver the image on screen. These on-screen contributions were also perfectly synchronised with those from Grant’s on-stage alter ego, no mean feat given the frequency, rapidity and energy in the overall dialogue exchanges.
Grant’s writing is witty, sharp and worryingly redolent of current politics in a number of countries, and particularly the UK, his points coming across in the passion and intensity of his delivery. Some of his arguments seem a little underdeveloped but the pace of this thing means that if something misses the mark, there’ll be something else along in a minute to get it back on track.
If the suddenness and nature of the denouement pushed credulity almost beyond breaking point and Grant’s on-stage delivery was, at times, a little too monochromatically intense that doesn’t detract from what’s a very good show with a very strong message. Well worth a look.
