Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Low Down
Sitting in beanbags with marshmallows on sticks, like at a real campfire, we hear stories of the selkie and the kelpie. It begins with and AI generated guide, Simbioline, before we move into a mix of AI and live action warning of the climate emergency. It’s a comfortable seat, with discomfort for our eyes.
Review
This has an otherworldly quality which manages to get across the ideas and ideals with a narrative that has a surprising connection to the present day. Having begun in a realm of fantasy venue 13 has returned but not as we knew it with a number of climate emergency themed events and it’s a delight to see it back.
With Simbioline as our narrator at the beginning she explains where she has emerged from – the forest and the past, our heritage and the mythological figures of our cultural heritage.
Whilst educating it manages to entertain an equal measure, getting across the immediacy of what we face. The move from the mythical, Symbiolene to the Selkies is smooth, but it is smoother when it leaves us with the lesson that the Selkies never imagined they could tell. Using iconic and alluring Scottish stories it is anchored in here, and the message of the climate emergency is immediate and now. Clever.
Moving to the story of the Kelpies, brings even more live action and the narrative moves towards the more local taps aff approach. To those of us in the know, kelpies are agents of the devil and not to be trusted as they are in league with the devil. Once they get us on their backs they head into the sea or loch as we sit atop their form when they appear as horses. Once in the sea or loch, they devour our bodies. We need to be careful of this false prophet. Given male form and as he appears out of sea he has the look, the locks and the six pack of wonder. We see him wander through Edinburgh recruiting his latest victims.
In a 20-minute film, it might not suggest Sundance or be spellbinding but it does bind your thinking to the way in which we approach our planet. We don’t get a second chance here and time is running out for getting the first one right. That is clear in what is a very well imagined and put together film that fuses that fantasy with live action and gives us some lessons that we really should pay attention to. I really enjoyed this and found it to be well imagined and delivered. In the midst of the chaos outside it was good to have that contemplation time to sit and imagine, listening to what it is that we need to do.
AI Campfire did make me question whether I would have preferred to have a live performance and to an extent I think that there could have been a better medium but then again, I’m a theatrical person who loves a bit of film. This managed to engage the teenagers that I was with in ways that I think people running about pretending to be Kelpies and Selkies possibly wouldn’t. So, for a generation that’s not mine this is clearly a warning that my generation should have heeded decades ago and perhaps what is needed is not to muse on whether or not it was the right medium but just to stand up at the end and apologize for all the mistakes that we have made that they are now going to have to rectify.
