Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Piano Smashers
Piano Smashers featuring Rob Thompson
Genre: Drama, Interactive, Theatre
Venue: theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A mother bequeaths her precious piano, which she spent years of her life loving, tending, nurturing and playing to her two sons, neither of whom really want it. This leads them to discuss whether they should just destroy it. But they can’t.
Review
Piano Smashers. We were 49 minutes through the billed 50 of this new work written by Rupert Page and Rob Thompson and featuring the latter as its performer here at theSpace@Surgeons’ Hall, and I was still wondering what the ?*?* this was all about.
An extended metaphor on an unwanted inheritance perhaps? Or the vicissitudes of life in general? Or the boundary line between storytelling and reality? Or, given that there wasn’t an actual piano in sight, a masterclass in getting an audience to willingly suspend its latent disbelief? Or just a lot of pretentious mush thinly disguised as avant garde performance art? And then it happened.
A mother bequeaths her precious piano, which she spent years of her life loving, tending, nurturing and playing, to her two sons, neither of whom really want it. This leads them into a discussion as to whether they should just destroy it. But they can’t. They know what it meant to their late parent and somehow feel that their mother lives on, somewhere inside the Parker upright piano, serial number 35462.
Knowing even that small amount of information about the instrument gives it an almost anthropomorphic quality, which at least starts the imagination flowing. And we need imagination in overdrive as Thompson invites us to not only visualise a piano on stage (there isn’t, just a piano stool) but that we’re in a recording studio replete with an array of sophisticated microphones positioned at key points to capture the sound of said piano as it’s slowly jacked up to its precise tipping point of 29 degrees, whereupon it will crash onto its back. Presumably with a thud.
It does. Loudly. Deafeningly so. No imagination required for that bit thanks to the stupendous sound effect. The sound of reverberating strings dies away and is replaced by a single haunting note, background to a side bar into an interesting bit of poetry which, like much of what had preceded it, left me still possessing a puzzled look.
Thompson then embarked on the history of the piano itself. Interesting enough but then things took another bizarre twist when, having inveigled a couple of audience members into playing the roles of the piano’s inheritors, one of whom was delivering said instrument to the other, Thompson somehow persuaded what remained of the small but curious audience to leave the venue, claiming he needed help to heave the thing onto the set.
People do strange things in the name of art but this was a very interesting dive in immersive, interactive, improv performance as 10 people of varying ages and physical capabilities grunted and groaned as they heaved this imaginary object into its required position. Clearly Mr Thompson has never heard of Gerald Love, the celebrated Edinburgh piano mover. His “man mountain”, Martin, shifted my upright from my home solo, as if he was lifting a sack of spuds.
Then, just when we were all wondering how this would end, it did. The piano was smashed. Metaphorically of course. With an adroit piece of physical theatre, of which Thompson has a strong grasp, in addition to his peerless story weaving of course. “A piano, smashed just for a stupid play. A beautiful, lifeless carcass”, he informs us, as if mourning the loss of a soulmate.
Cue puzzled applause as the show concludes and this reviewer consigns his potential review to the “pretentious twaddle” category, the journalistic equivalent of the piano graveyard.
And yet Thompson is an engaging, enthusiastic, charismatic storyteller with the ability to change the pace, the volume, the emotional tenor at will. His “props” are inventive and “visible”, despite just being a part of our imagination. His ability to break the fourth wall draws his audience in, to the point that they’re daft enough to shift said imaginary instrument. There must be something I’m missing.
And then it happened. Thompson asked us to remain, close our eyes and think of something we’d inherited – a characteristic, a trait, an object – and think what we’d done with it, where we’d put it, what it meant to us. Bingo! I finally understood what this was about. I think.
Memories, families, traditions, dealing with loss, being too afraid to let old stuff go to create room for the new. This used to be quite easy, given that most stuff we acquired along life’s journey was physical. But with the good old interweb and social media creating mountains of stuff that’s actually impossible to delete, we’re in danger of ending up with minds so completely cluttered with junk that we become incapable of thinking. Now, I’m old enough to have had an education that taught me to think. I’m lucky. Today’s educational environment is more about ticking boxes and conformity, not about learning to think and question. And that’s what this show is about. Thinking.
This is a very good show but it ain’t for everyone. It wanders around a bit and it’s often difficult to connect bits of what could come across as a disjointed ramble. But, having spent time replaying it in my mind, there is structure and meaning if you’re prepared to do a bit of thinking.
And no doubt deep thinkers will get it sooner than I did, But anyone prepared to mine their reservoir of disbelief suspension should get something out of it, hopefully sooner than I did. Just flick your brain to “open mind” mode, engage thinking and roll with it. Right to the end.
