Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Low Down
Darkfield have brought another immersive production where you are placed in a container outside Summerhall. This time round the immersive experience, in which they have become skilled, in takes you down various levels of hell. You are caged in what is supposed to be a hotel room with a guide to support you into the pits below.
Review
Eulogy follows the usual process of plunging you into darkness and then being sent somewhere unpleasant. Here you are given a room name, enter the container, find it and settle in. Then on goes the headphones and then you are taken to somewhere in your mind.
The audio is busy in your head with a left and right check so that you know which part of the experience is in the correct ear.
Once there you are in this hotel room, a cage with a couple of pillows, ready to meet your personal guide. You are then asked a few simple closed questions, which are strange and only become important later on – your own eulogy exposes the cleverness of the conceit.
The story struggles a little to keep you focussed, meandering around the various levels. It needs a better storyline depending a little on audio shocks like the crashing of a vase which brings you back in focus.
The impressive quality, this time round, is in the surround sound of the audio artists. At no point do you feel that you are in a container in the middle of the fringe trying to avoid the sun. And whilst the wind in the container was welcome on a roasting hot day, it could do with much more physical intervention.
The cleverness of the ending begins with the vase being replaced, it being of bone China. After your own demise and you have been cremated, a replacement vase keeps you going for the next resident. As for you, you are now at the end – literally as the light comes from the door and it is time t leave.
It was not a huge queue for the performance I was at, and perhaps the immersive experience as practised by Darkfield is losing out to other immersive experiences and this one is not quite as effective as others I have experienced. It does, however, manage to unnerve you to an extent once you get to realise that it is far more personal than you first perhaps thought it was going to be.
Given where we are in this particular world, being taken in cages anywhere where they are going to be transported in the back of vans or whatever, there was an opportunity here to do something very significant. The resonance I felt when I walked into this confined space into which I was then further caged when told it would be a hotel suite, with the reality eschewing the promises made had some significance in the current world crisis in immigration. Perhaps that hell would have provided a stronger focus.
