EDINBURGH 2018 - Review: PLAYLIGHT ROBBERY, Just The Tonic at The Caves

There is surely no object more associated with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe than the humble flyer. The bane of anyone trying to navigate certain streets during August, any Fringe-goer will have tales of the sometimes extreme lengths performers will go to to get you to accept a bit of print advertising for their show.

Thanks to Playlight Robbery, by Hivemind Productions, we have finally found a better use for all of those flyers than papier-mache craft projects or lining a budgie cage. In an admirable bit of recycling, the cast of this improv show will take a flyer that you bring along, and with only the information on it, re-create the show live on stage. They gather flyers as the audience enter, choose three, and then have the audience vote as to which show they would most like to see painstakingly restaged.

In this particular performance, Bummer and Lazarus was the flyer selected by the audience, an absurd, existentialist comedy about two trapped pest-controller dogs, with close second Your Alice, about Lewis Carroll's young muse, also influencing the derived plot.

The cast are a generous and considerate bunch of improvisers, good at picking up ideas from each other to bring humour into the performance, and willing to relinquish control of a scene to another performer to keep it fresh. They are comfortable with whatever is thrown at them, even in the form of an erstwhile toddler so thoroughly determined to be a part of the performance that she wandered onto the stage several times!

The highlights of the show were often when the performers dived into physicality, whether imitating a rabbit, a colony of underground canaries, or a particularly memorable runaway mine cart journey.

The cast are capable of spinning out a flyer for an entire show, but the length does result in the momentum flagging somewhat. It might be worth experimenting with trying to restage multiple shows within the hour, giving the opportunity to be more pacey.

Hivemind Productions are performing a valuable and amusing Fringe public service here, providing catharsis from having A6 glossy paper constantly thrust at you on the streets, but also by bringing interesting-sounding shows to wider attention, giving you the urge to seek them out to see how close to the real thing they managed (creditably, the company make a point of announcing the show details from the flyer at the end to promote their source material).

Indeed, any show that convinces this hardened grump to accept flyers has got to be doing something right!

Playlight Robbery is at Just the Tonic at The Caves until 26 August

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