Edinburgh Fringe 2025
21 New Messages
Spark Plug Theatre Collective
Genre: Experimental, Theatre
Venue: Space at Niddry Street
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Structurally this has a lot to offer but whether it manages to deliver is a question that was only partly answered by the end. It has a few curious structures which add to the confusion as our mainly silent actor starts the clear up. By the end of the piece, she has reconnected with her own daughter suggesting that the point of the exercise was for the living to take a tough lesson form the recently departed.
Review
21 unanswered messages suggest either a long stay away or someone who struggles with technology or a combination of both. It is an intriguing concept. Using the audience to read out each of the messages adds to the mystery but means that the level of performance is down to the paying public’s desire to contribute more than their entrance fee.
As for the messages, themselves, they are a range of the mundane and the important along with a mysterious car accident which attracts the police but defies explanation. So, the conceit is that a daughter is dutifully clearing out the house or flat of their recently departed mother. During this time, she is also dealing with the demands of her own daughter. Mainly silent and dependant upon reactions to the messages being aired, we get little of the character of the woman. The crying after tenderness on a message or the obvious memory of times past are hinted at rather than being explicitly noted for us. Eventually that hint is insufficient to round the character we have spent the last twenty minutes or so watching as she disappears. She could do with an earlier phone call from her daughter when she springs into life and the rapprochement is reached.
Everything subtly hints at relationships, never fully explored and that was part of my frustration, however it also opened up possibilities for us to draw our own conclusions. My frustration came from wanting to know more about the hit and run and hitting another car and why the police were involved.
It could do with a busier set. The clearing away felt more like tidying after a party than a wholesale clearance.
There is a really good idea in here which I think is very interesting. I may have struggled to wonder why the principal character was laughing at one point but certainly was aware that the ending which saw her making a connection once more with her own daughter worked particularly well in context of the entire show.
This is a daring attempt to do something different in a short period of time – runs for 25 minutes.
I would also recruit speakers outside before we go in which helps retain the illusion of the theatre. By recruiting inside it lost some of the feeling of theatre and became more perfunctory. That is compounded when the instructions given in person are then backed up by the projection of the answering machine on the back of the stage. It was a good idea to personify the answering machine, and the textual exchange between mother and daughter of the present also worked well on the screen.
