Edinburgh Fringe 2026
The Wreck
Buzzcut Productions
Genre: Multimedia, Puppetry, Theatre
Venue: Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Two siblings dive a shipwreck and decide the fate of their family’s seaside nightclub. A live-cinema show about diving, dancing and descendants. Combining live camera work, practical filmmaking, puppetry, and a live score.
Review
In front of the stage area is a huge scrim separating the audience from the performers who play music, manipulate puppets, narrate, act in scenes and run the multimedia for this show. Imagery and live video is projected on the scrim as we follow the story about a family and their night club and a journey to the bottom of the ocean to find the shipwreck. Two siblings played by two actors in the company on screen in discussions about their family’s night club and how they plan to dive to the shipwreck to find a special memento from the night club.
Immediately we are swept away with an accordion playing seafaring music and the gentle sound of waves and waves projected onto the large scrim screen. The location is very clear and the siblings make plans to dive. Next, two divers in dark blue diving gear are diving deep and using typical hand diving signals that show a thumbs up to ascend, a thumbs down to descend and an OK signal that means all is well. The divers are puppets representing the siblings projected onto the scrim screen. The puppets are very well designed with every detail and look very authentic. Eventually they dive to the deepest part of the ocean, where the wreck is located on the sea bed. For these scenes the divers have been replaced with two much smaller divers – showing that they are deeper and thus further away! The attention to detail of this company to their storytelling through puppetry is noticeable.
New techniques involving multimedia are incorporated to tell the story that is acted behind the scrim and projected via cameras to the larger screen, which is fascinating. A particularly effective use of simply pointy shapes denoting pincers of a crab is really fun! The two actors playing the siblings show a range of interactions as they agreed and disagreed about how to save the night club in typical sibling fashion. Their live action dialogue is well written and clearly serves the story through their characters. The cast (in view of the audience through the scrim a lot of the time) work hard to bring all of the elements together in a creative, imaginative, original show. Flashbacks are used effectively, together with live dialogue, puppets, beautiful imagery, objects, video and projections to tell this intriguing story.
