Edinburgh Fringe 2026
The Colour of Water
Magia Productions
Genre: Dark Comedy, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: theSpace @ Surgeons Hall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
When words fail, these literary academics will keep talking anyways. This show stumbles into comedy through simply letting intellectuals try to explain things they don’t understand.
Review
The Colour of Water is an international collaboration originally written for the Cambridge Festival of New Writing by Brian Alkire. He and director Lara Czernecki have produced an expanded version for the Edinburgh Fringe. The play takes place in a university in Zurich, Switzerland and follows a rumpled literature professor who specialises in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, an eccentric academic whose personality centres around his time studying in South America, a people-pleasing PhD student, and a new post-doc trying to establish his independent work in the department, who frequently video calls with his grandmother back in England. All the characters claim to have seen a ‘mystical beast’ lurking in the halls of the university.
The play lacks a significant plot, and instead acts as a character study of the four academics via their interactions with this unseen ‘mythical beast’ and their conversations with the post-doc’s grandmother over the phone. The dialogue is often nonsensical and long-winded, yet is beautifully written and performed, and creates an immediate sense of who each character is. The meandering speech, the incomprehensible description of the beast, and the professor’s comedic struggle with losing her ability to understand poetry, all contribute to an arduous theme of the ineffability of so many aspects of life and human feeling. Alkire, a poet himself, leaves the audience pondering whether these indescribable sensations (and perhaps poetry itself) require description and understanding, or if we can simply appreciate the beauty of them regardless.
As such, the play felt dense and incomprehensible like a poem, yet Alkire is telling us that not understanding everything is okay. The characters themselves scour for a way to describe their feelings and the creature scurrying around, using descriptions which contradict themselves and make little sense, yet are spoken authoritatively. This theme of faux intellectualism is mirrored in the set, with a prop chess-set which has an ongoing game, yet is almost never touched except to throw the pieces around.
The grandmother is an excellent addition to the cast of characters, often contributing her own long-winded speeches, which slowly begin to shape into beautiful metaphors hiding nuggets of wisdom for the rest of the characters. The video calls to her were staged well; instead of the characters holding the phone up, the phone is set down and the actors move to the front of the stage and look outward, as if the audience is watching them on the phone screen from the grandmother’s perspective.
However, the post-doc and the PhD student lack some of the deeper character exploration that the other characters get. As it is the post-doc’s grandmother featuring heavily in the story, this leads to his character feeling like a means to bring the grandmother into the story rather than a character in his own right, and therefore also makes his actions and their motivations at the end of the play feel random and out of place. Perhaps Alkire intends for us to not understand his motivations, contributing to the theme that not everything needs to be understood.
The Colour of Water is a richly written and thoughtfully produced play, which deserves to be watched with a bit of breathing room. It is intentionally cryptic, so for full enjoyment, one needs to digest it for a while afterwards— which some may find less suitable compared to other Fringe offerings. However, it would be a highly recommended watch for those who enjoy the challenge of poetic language and want to see a show which makes them think.
