Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Low Down
Buen Camino is a solo show written and performed by Susan Edsall. It comes from her personal experience of getting over loss by walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail. Playing 27 characters along the way that by turns guide, narrate, advise and hinder her path, it is her real life experiences that guides the audience through the ups and downs of her path to redemption.
Review
With the soft, nostalgic music of Fleetwood Mack to welcome us in, this little play had a homey, backwoodsy feel from the off. With a simple but effective theatrical aesthetic, Edsall’s performance carries the finely tuned script through its ups and downs, as well as its bumps and curves along the road. Overall it is a nice story that at times comes across a little earnestly.
With the action opening on Susan losing her beloved husband, she descends into alcoholism and depression until she hears a mysterious voice that laconically orders her to ‘Walk the Santiago De Compostela’. She has never heard of it, coming from small town America, but she obeys and starts her guided journey. She is looking to find love again in the world, and this pilgrimage falls in her lap like a gift from God.
Edsall morphs into many characters: a kind of omniscient narrator, other pilgrims, a ‘volunteer from the future’, her father, and divinities. Mostly women helpers – with the exeption of her husband, good men are conspicuous by their absence, the ones that we do learn about are antagonisers.
Aided by simple projected media, the story moves along swiftly, darting back and forth along the literal and metaphorical path, with snippets from her childhood, her marriage, her relationships and psychological state. Guided by the narrator, acting as a weather goddess, sending her positive weather vibes. The characters often relay the half tongue-in-cheek mantra that the ‘Camino provides’ as a comfort mechanism.
As a package it works well enough. The character portrayals are admirably performed, and with the exception of a couple of moments, I could always follow the nuances that defined each character, whether it was with hand gestures or facial expressions, even though the accents were quite similar apart from an English one. However, they were often similar in tone, which did not mark them out as particularly engaging characters.
The projections aid the walk with photos of the walk’s landscape, but they lack substance and personality as a whole. I would have liked to see more use of music, since it started with it. This is a true story but there are no personal photos or film. In terms of direction, some parts felt a little rushed or uneven, and lacked time for reflection.
The personal material of this story gives it authenticity and an overall warm glow. The most engaging thing about it is the brave performance. But there is scope to be more groundbreaking here; it will appeal particularly to those who have walked or are planning to walk this pilgrimage, and who want to get back in touch with who they are. It is not original, and predictable as a format, a story that has been told before through other artistic modes, but that is fine, we know what we are going to get. In that way it feels like a marketable show that did not initiate awe in me personally, but may in others.
