Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Low Down
Story of a young man who grows up through tragedy and the figure of a haunting father who tries to keep his influence over his son whilst the world grows up around him. The son develops into a military figure who, during a mission, gets accused of criminal activity. The audience gets to cast their vote, having heard this pela in mitigation.
Review
The pace does deliver a little bit of a problem as it is delivered so quickly that you can often find struggle to keep up with the narrative twists and turns, but the struggle is worth it.
This has been well envisaged as a solo piece in this space which makes it work effectively well. Technically there are few intrusions in terms of lighting and sound design and all of them are appropriate to the piece.
Our guide and narrator Cillian, softly and deferentially spoken southern Irish by the sound of lullaby accent, lulls us into a tale that is not a fireside comforting chat. It tells us of losing his mother in a street attack whilst he was out with his father, who seems to be an overbearing presence in his life
This young man grows up and emulates elements of the masculinity that his father is portraying, eventually ending up in a militia of sorts, in which he ends up caught up in a mission, which does not go well. It is that which the audience is then asked to decide whether or not Cillian is guilty or not guilty of the crime that he has presented to us.
The pace is breakneck. The jumble of emotions is hinted at, developed, then abandoned with barely a glance and it takes a beat to realise what we are heading towards. It takes a moment to feel the blockbuster emotional roller coaster that Devonish has strapped us in for.
At times, it could have done with finding more nuance and levels in which to pitch, but this was a day in which I was sitting there with one other audience member.
If there was something that I came away with, it was the impression that this deserves a much bigger audience.
That relationship between how an audience would interact and a performer would feed off that was lost here, but it should not detract from the fact that this is a performer at the peak of their game. The performance was raw and open. Devenish gives an authenticity that was admirable both in the way in which the narrative was presented to the audience, and in which the narrative was driven. Here was in turn, a really angry yet considerate man, searching for a role within society as well as an opportunity to become the man that he was supposed to be.
Technically this was a sound piece of performance work, though there were little gaps in the pace to allow us to draw breath. With a larger audience, you would have thought that this would allow people to grab the excitement of it and go with the performance rather than be trying to keep up worrying whether or not they have every fact considered and understood. At the end I was in awe of the performance that I had seen, and sorry that it did not gather the audience which it truly deserves.
