Dumb animals: Viox Motus' Grandpa Fredo show is a performers' delight.
Taking their place on the grandest and most prestigious stage of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe - that is the main Traverse stage - the tiny Vox Motus company prove that their runaway success on the Traverse's smaller stage with Slick two years ago was no fluke.
If that show was Slick by name and slick by nature (it went on to win the Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland for technical excellence), The Not so Fatal Death of Grandpa Fredo is full of similarly brilliant technical wizardry.
The show is based on the true story of a man who came from Norway to Colorado in the US to try to preserve his dead grandpa in his domestic freezer. The locals, in the small town where he pitches up, cannot decide whether this is good or bad for a community already suffering from a polluted river and dying businesses.
The Sarah Palin inflected Mayor and former Homecoming Queen (played with terrific relish by Imogen Toner) mobilises the townsfolk in a series of increasingly rash initiatives, most of them accompanied by inappropriately catchy country and western songs by Michael John McCarthy and by wicked parodies of US television reporting.
Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison’s script is not entirely sure what it is trying to do; the two of them are so focused on generating oohs and aahs of delight from audiences from the inventiveness and cleverness of the designs and staging that they sometimes forget about the actual shape of the drama. Is this a show about tolerance of one's slightly eccentric neighbours? (In this town, just about everyone is eccentric). Is it about a small community against the rest of the world, defying big media? Is it a character study of family life or even an environmental play about the limits of science?
In the end, the quite brilliantly clever set, a shed which opens in as many ways as a Swiss Army knife, the riotous pace and the ingenious effects carry them through so that you stop worrying and just sit back and enjoy the ride.
The final tableau, as Fredo's grandson returns to his native Norway, is a suitable climax, unexpectedly beautiful and touchingly humane.
- The Not So Fatal Death of Grand Fredo is now touring Scotland. There is a full list of dates on Vox Motus' website.
