Edinburgh festival / Fantastic Voyage
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Twentysomething infantilism, that determinedly irresponsible retrospection that has students shirking jobs and mortgages to collect the toys from cereal packets, is never more fully realised than in those endless conversations in which the reluctantly adult sit around swapping TV memorabilia from their early years in front of the box. This phenomenon is well understood by actors Gavin Robertson and Andy Taylor, whose shows mercilessly exploit today's raging appetite for childhood nostalgia.
Following the West End success of Thunderbirds FAB, the pair are back on the fringe with another carefully observed pastiche, a fantastic voyage into the crude special effects of Ray Harryhausen films such as Clash of the Titans and One Million Years BC. It's a small jump from the mechanical mannerisms of Thunderbirds to the stilted stop-frame animations that characterised these epics, and the actors' techniques are essentially the same, translating puppetry into live-action mime. The pair could be accused of indulgent, repetitive vacuity, but what saves their feather-light material from such criticism is the careful observation and sheer skill of their performance.
To the strains of a superbly bombastic film score, stiff-upper-lipped commander Harry Pepper and his cabin boy Tom travel 20,000 leagues under the sea to fight the evil emperor Daryus and his cat Satan, encountering an anachronistic mix of prehistoric monsters, pirates and Roman soldiers along the way. Morphing seamlessly into human characters, submarines, "animated" skeleton armies and a particularly fine T-Rex, they create a composite adventure that is somehow innocent and knowing, while at the same time. In true Harryhausen style, Commander "What the blue blazes?" Pepper is always emerging from "just behind the ferns", and the homoerotic love between two Roman soldiers makes a funny, running motif.
Best of all, however, is their particular brand of trompe l'oeil, which accomplishes effortless shifts in scale, from gargantuan statues to the miniature detail of tiny bubbles escaping from a crashed submarine. These micro-macroscopic changes in focus are powerfully suggested by Robertson and Taylor's ingenious physical contortions, but the actors are clearly confident that they can rely on the film's running in the heads of their audience to fill the gaps. Perhaps future generations will be staging live productions of The Simpsons, or re-running the laughably outmoded SFX of Jurassic Park; one thing's for sure, tapping into the imaginative imprint left by childhood telly and cinema is a sure way to box-office success.
n Pleasance, 11-18, 22-23, 25-26, 28-31 Aug, 5.30pm
LIESE SPENCER
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