EDINBURGH 2013 - BWW Reviews: KNIGHTMARE LIVE, Gilded Balloon Teviot, August 2 2013

Many people in their late twenties and thirties will remember the CITV cult classic Knightmare. Part game show, part fantasy adventure, it kept an adoring audience glued to their televisions every week to watch teams of children guiding a sightless dungeoneer around evil monsters and fiendish puzzles. The show went off the air in the mid-nineties, but lingered in the fond memories of a generation, and now lives on in this new show from Objective talent.

The chromakey technology that creaTed Knightmare's world would not be possible to replicate on stage, and the limitations of fringe theatre mean that the sets are simple, but this was happily overlooked by a gleeful audience evidently intent on reliving the thrills of wall monsters and corridors of blades. The utterance of each catchphrase was greeted with cheers, adding to the interactivity of the show, and creating something akin to a pantomime for nerdy types of a certain age. Indeed, the number of audience members immediately shouting out the answer to riddles demonstrated that this production may provide some relief for those who spent their youth yelling at the screen about how they could do better than the dungeoneers and their guides.

In this case, the dungeoneer is guided around the levels of the game by two guest comedians, a wise decision due to the necessity of filling the transitions between each room of the game. Not simply content to be a re-enactment of the show, neither the comedians, Paul Flannery's dungeon master Treguard or Tom Bell's cackling villain, hesitate to joke about some of the sillier elements of the original or of this production, but it is always fond.

"Knightmare Live" strikes a good balance between sticking close to the classic that inspired it and adding its own touches. An interesting, if rather rushed, subplot regarding the origins of Knightmare's premier antagonist Lord Fear was introduced, and at one point Treguard himself even enters the dungeon to do battle with his old foe. Particularly with a rush to pack as much as possible into an hour, not every detail is spot on, but the feel of the show is definitely there.

For anyone who might feel a pang of nostalgia at the catchphrase "Ooh, nasty!" this show is a must-see. Certainly, throughout August, children of the eighties and nineties will no doubt be uttering "Spellcasting: T I C K E T S".

Knightmare Live runs at the Gilded Balloon Teviot each day at 1730 until August 25th (not 14th).

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