Murder, Madame?
Gilded Balloon Main Theatre
Rating: ***
The case of Lea and Christine Papin, two sisters in service in France who savagely murdered their mistress, was a cause célèbre in the 30s. Jean Genet famously turned the story into a play, The Maids. The theatre company The Tell Tale Hearts add two things to the tale: a grisly humour and a suggestion that the sisters were playing out the troubles within their own relationship, as much as the tensions with their mistress. The girls loved each other as much as they hated Madame (indeed, they had a sexual relationship). Here love and hate become one as the sisters don red noses and plan murder like savage clowns.
It begins brilliantly with Madame reclining on a chaise longue draped in red velvet, or perhaps blood, and continues in similar imaginative vein with a peep-show puppet theatre in which we witness the murder and the maids' imagined guillotine. This is all good stuff, full of comic menace, and has all the more force when the reclining Madame is revealed as a life-size puppet. But the show never again finds the delicate balance between comedy and violence, and overall there is an uncertainty of pitch, as if it would like to be erotic but doesn't want to offend the kids at 12.30pm.
But it's an interesting premise, and if the company could only turn its back on the spectre of Genet and use the puppets both more playfully and more purposefully, this could be a great little show.
• Till August 30. Box-office: 0131-226 2151.
Fantastical Voyage
Komedia @ Southside
Rating: ****
There's this big stage, right, and there are these two men, right, and they've got some coloured lights, and some really good music, and somehow, out of that, they conjure up 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Clash of the Titans, and Jurassic Park, and chuck in Biggles and James Bond and It Ain't Half Hot Mum to make sure we get our money's worth.
When Wayne Forester and Gavin Robertson (who also wrote this show) told their mums they wanted to be actors, they probably didn't envisage themselves making beeping noises and flapping their hands to create butterflies. But this painstakingly detailed, hilarious play requires the actors to play not just Commander Harry Pepper (fencing master, cricketer and boxing champion, when he's not saving the world from devilish Mr Bigs) and his trusty sidekick Tom Allison, but submarines, dinosaurs, giant squid, wise old men and, of course, villains.
A theatrical technique that draws on every boy's fantasy game ("I was the Spitfire, you were the Bismarck ") is used brilliantly (a credit to director Andy Taylor) to summon up a whole world. It's the fringe at its best: imagination instead of big bucks. In the words of the commander, "Good show." - Bibi van der Zee
• Till August 29. Box-office: 0131-667 2212.
