Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Low Down
At 34 years young, Parlapatões is one of the longest standing circus companies in Brazil. Based in São Paulo, they bring their show, The Mequetrefo, to the Fringe this year. Mequetrefo loosely translates as scoundrels and in the show we follow these four scoundrels and their absurd adventures through the course of a day.
Review
Perhaps a good measure of a children’s clown show is arriving with a grumpy child, and leaving with a happy, animated one (and for the want of any doubt, it’s the same child!). If so, then The Mequetrefo certainly does the job.
In this show that Parlapatões has brought from Brazil as part of this year’s Brazilian showcase, four clowns, all called Dias, take us through the course of their day. From their sleepyhead awakening in the morning to the time the mequetrefo (loosely translated as scoundrels) go to bed at night their day is filled with absurd adventures and ludicrous expeditions.
From a bed constructed from two bright red ladders and a blanket, four tousle haired clowns emerge, stretching and yawning to start their day. When one of the clown’s brain comes off along with his nightcap we get an idea of the direction things are going in. They proceed to embark on a picaresque series of adventures which involve road, rail and sea as they take us on a nonsensical voyage. Their day approximates to our own with the usual quotidian routines blown apart to reveal the absurdity of the everyday – from the strangeness of the work environment to channel hopping in the evenings as we search for entertainment.
It’s old school clowning with clowning, mime and physical theatre combining to produce a show full of laughter and delight. We are in the hands of highly skilled clowns in Hugo Possolo, Henrique Stroter, Alexandre Bamba and Tadeu Pinheiro, both individually and as an ensemble performing short interconnected sketches at breakneck speed with a seriousness that belies the ridiculousness of the situations. The children in the audience were on the edge of their seats.
The clowns are dressed in typical clown attire – brightly coloured, oversized costumes that are at once both ordinary and ridiculous – there are hats, but hats topped with flowerpots, hands and even a brain and then, of course, there are the oversized clown shoes. The set is wonderfully ingenious and colourful – two oversized bright red ladders which transform into a multitude of objects throughout the show – a bed, train tracks, a bus, a boat and a TV screen – bright yellow oil drums that perform a multitude of functions and open up to yield other surprises. Bravo Hugo Possolo who designed both the set and the costumes.
The inspiration for the Mequetrefo came from the work of the English illustrator and poet, Edward Lear, who coined the term ‘nonsense’. The Parlapatões invited Alvaro Assad from Rio de Janeiro’s Centro Teatral e Etc e Tal to direct the script which was co-written with Hugo Possolo to promote an artistic exchange between artists working in different fields of comedy, mime and comedy. The result is a wonderfully integrated show that combines the best elements of both.
It’s a wonderful family show that adults will enjoy and that children will gape widemouthed at and then chortle with delight.
It’s a great shame that in this Fringe where so many shows , like this one, are only here for a week the Mequetrefo didn’t have time to build the word of mouth and get the larger audiences it so richly deserves.
My initially stony faced companion couldn’t resist laughing. His verdict? “They were really funny especially the bit with the television and the remote”. He had one small suggestion for improvement though… “I think when the clowns had water pistols, they should have given us some too” Mmm…
