Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Don Quixote: Adult Clown Theatre Show by Two Guys from Finland
Red Nose Company
Genre: Absurd Theatre, Clown, Theatre
Venue: Assembly Rooms
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
This is a show with everything — clowning, classic literature, musical performance, nudity, and tomatoes — except, perhaps, a central core. The top-notch physical comedy goes far to make it all fun anyway, but be prepared to leave the theatre wondering what, exactly, you just saw.
Review
Mike (Tuukka Vasama) and Zin (Timo Ruuskanen), the “two guys from Finland” in the extended version of the production’s title, have impressive clown skills. The show’s best moments are in their physical comedy, the timing of their facial gestures, and the amount of dramatic range in their voices, from Mike’s silly trills and Kermit-the-frog-esque stylings to Zin’s powerful bass. This is undoubtedly a show to make you think – although, for me, it mainly prompted thoughts about whether there’s a cross-cultural element that makes Finnish humour difficult to translate elsewhere.
You’ll get a bit of the story of Don Quixote acted out, and it’s done well. You’ll get a bit about the tale, including how Cervantes used the humour in the tale to get his message past the Catholic church. You’ll also get, for some reason, Mike and Zin playing guitar and ukulele to pop and rock classics – again, done quite well, but that wasn’t the question I had about it.
There are a handful of jokes: a knight getting dubbed numerous times because “the more, the knightier” is a fair representation of the standard on offer. There are even more mentions of concepts and current events – not gags, just mentions – that seem to have comic intent. There are a number of Finnish language and cultural lessons, some tomato-throwing, and brief acrobatic full-frontal nudity (half-nudity, I suppose, but the half more likely to raise eyebrows). The duo also throw in enough self-referential material, interrupting the story, to make the audience realize that the story isn’t the point.
Which inevitably raises the question: what, exactly, is the point? The pair use the Don Quixote framing to suggest their goal is to show the descent of Zin’s knight-errant into madness. From there, they pivot to an earnest questioning of what it might mean to tilt at windmills, and then it’s a moralistic digression into climate change. The show’s structure, slight as it is, links this back up with Cervantes’ accomplishment in slipping ideas past Inquisitorial censors, making me briefly question whether I’d missed an important papal/climate coverup conspiracy news update when my phone was on silent. But then there’s some masked miming, and we’re racing off again in another direction.
Even for absurdist theatre, it’s bewildering. At one point, cleaning up from the tomato-throwing, the duo encountered some issues untwisting plastic sheeting and the audience tittered. They ad-libbed that next year they might do a show entirely about plastic sheeting. I don’t think they were serious, but it nevertheless felt like an insight into the show’s evolution: throw in everything imaginable, and people will probably laugh at something.
It’s an unnecessarily conservative formula, because Mike and Zin are amply talented. Some of the biggest laughs in the performance occurred when they were simply picking up misfired tomatoes, in silence – just pure physical comedy. That particular genius still needs a framing device for a full-length show, of course, but – even allowing for the possibility that perhaps this all works much better in Finnish – their current vehicle doesn’t seem best-suited to allow their strengths to shine.
