“Quite simply the best historical writing to appear at the Fringe in years.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

Vox Populi vox dei. The best thing about EdFringe is how each year one or two shows mysteriously break away from the hurly-burly and have a super successful run ft. packed houses and glowing reviews. The wisdom of crowds is rarely celebrated by the curators of our culture and politics. But democracy works. People power rights more wrongs, fights more injustices, and slays more dragons than the whole banal host of 2D cartoon superheroes. So it’s pleasing to me (and the high horse I ride around town) that the breakout success of EdFringe ‘23 is a play about how individuals working together can make good things happen, or rather make bad things slow to a stop.

Out of the Forest Theatre is the company that wide-eyed creative children should dream of running away to join. They blend live production elements like master champagne makers blend vintages. The results are sparkling.

Joseph Cullen & Sasha Wilson’s script is quite simply the best historical writing to appear at the Fringe in years. Eastern and Central Europe – past, present, and future – have been visited often by us Brits, but the full discovery is still someway off. Vikings yes. Columbus no. Ostentatiously reading the Daily Mail in Brooke’s Bar before the show, because I love the sound of tutting, I read that Albania is finally being recognised as the destination tourist hotspot such wonderful people and such a spectacular place deserve. The British horizon is widening beyond the channel and the Rhein, waltzing towards the Blue Danube. Similarly, Cullen & Wilson’s chronicle of Bulgarian 20th-century history plants a flag for many of us (oh how British) marking territory deserving of being less incognito. It’s witty. It’s intricate. It’s monumental. In the year Georgi Gospodinov became the first Bulgarian to win the Booker Prize, this drama is a landmark achievement.

And it’s upstaged by Hannah Hauer-King’s direction which is brisk without being busy, fun but never fussy. The staging is in turn upstaged by the performances which are as sharp and to the point as the original penmanship of the Pernik sword. As Boris, Cullen seduces the audience, portraying the monarch in a grayscale rainbow of loveable contradictions. There’s more than a little of Terry Jones’ in Cullen as he Chapmanesequly plays the one main character while the rest of the company twist and turn like a twisty turny thing, morphing into a host of supporting roles bold and subtle.

There’s much that is bold, little that is subtle, and nothing that is not tremendous about Lawrence Boothman’s performance as the king’s first minister. Neither is there anything banal about his evil, he is the iron-hearted fist in a bloodsoaked velvet glove on Ernst Röhm’s bedside table the morning after the night before. David Leopold is solid and unsparing kicking at the fourth wall like Luca Brasi told him to do some damage but not go too far. Leopold keeps the production pacy, like how a waterfall makes a river move faster. Sasha Wilson didn’t write herself a part as fun as Boris, but she delivers much of the piece’s range, nuance, and no-nonsense edge-of-your-seat delivery, the hallmark stamps that confirm the solid gold content. As the curtain falls it is Clare Fraenkel who wears the crown. She is the lynchpin, the beating moral compass which makes this production tick so, so many boxes.

Come for the faintly Marina Lewycka obscurity of the subject matter. Stay for the best writing, staging, and performances you will see at this (and many other) EdFringe vintages. Get your Bulgarian sheepskin coats on and go see this!

Read the company’s #EdFringeTalk with us here!