Writer: Otis Kelley
Director: Otis Kelly
The concept is brilliant in The Booth, we get to see inside an audio booth as actors perform a radio play. Edinburgh University Theatre Company does well with it too, generating plenty of interest and laughs in this sparky and enjoyable show.
Alan, the stand-in warm-up guy (played by Joseph Stramm), tells the audience that we’re about to witness a live performance of a radio drama. He explains there will be some commercial breaks, so now we can look forward to both the play within a play and some amusing goings-on as the action alternates between onstage and offstage.
There’s Bea (Georgia Gabrielides), playing the easily terrified half of the Bussells, an upper-crust couple who’ve bought a creepy old country house at auction. Zak (Louis Whitell) plays her bewildered husband, while Joe (Finn Vogels) is the groundsman with a terrible Yorkshire accent which, he insists to director Jay (Ted Ackery), is his normal voice. In a deliciously well-observed line, the flustered Jay tells him nevertheless to “make it better”.
Writer-director Otis Kelley’s script is peppered with such witty moments and he’s able to get some glorious fun out of the characters by investing them with special traits. Most notably, Joe is a method actor, so he turns up to the audio performance in overalls and wellies, later taking a wheelbarrow on stage. Bea, on the other hand, is rather reactive and doomed to acquiesce in Zak’s wonderfully tedious mansplaining of self-help books.
Josie Embleton plays the long-suffering foley artist Sue. The visually realised interplay between the performers and Sue’s sound effects is perhaps the production’s unique selling point. It’s never explained, though, why she performs some effects live, while enacting others at the touch of a button.
The play is fresh and ambitious. It’s rough around the edges and has the potential to be developed further, but the Fringe can work well as an incubator for inspired creative ideas such as these. In particular, the play-within-a-play could be improved and the characters and their relationships could be fleshed out a lot more.
Runs until 13 August 2023
