“One of the most visually exciting shows this EdFringe.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

We enter to be pleasantly surprised by the drapes. Oscar Wilde famously (and accurately quipped) that violence was endemic in America because the curtains were so ugly. These hand-painted, floor-to-ceiling, mini-mega masterpieces are a delight, exactly the kind of thing you would imagine a company funded by a mural painting day job would have on tap. I especially like how the statues shown seem to be stepping off their pedestals and at least one has (appropriately) been decapitated.

Centre stage, imprisoned in a world of her own is Théroigne de Méricourt. She has been held captive for twenty years, stepping out of the French Revolution and into an asylum. Thousands of other wide-eyed revolutionaries have lost their heads, she’s lost her mind. She ekes out an existence, meditating on the wheel of fortune which has taken her from the life of a provincial orphan to grand places in the company of grand people.

Born in Belgium, Théroigne de Méricourt became an opera star and orator. She was among the women who marched on Versailles in October 1789. Dressed in a man’s riding habit she attended key National Assembly meetings in the run up to the passing of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’. She organised. She agitated. She was too pro-Girondin to survive the emptying of Marat’s bathwater. She became a problem. She became an inmate.

This is a production of supple strength and subtly. A family affair in which two Texan mural-painting sisters (with costumes by their mom, who also sewed the drapes) have brought together one of the most visually exciting shows this EdFringe. As Théroigne de Méricourt, Cara Johnston is intense like being stuck in an elevator with an angry swan is intense. A reference to the Hot Crazy Matrix would not go down well these days, so I won’t make it. But if I did, Johnston’s performance would be off the charts. The details of her performance are exquisite, from her browned-up teeth to her pitch-perfect vocal work. Nothing is out of place. Every stitch of canvas is set to keep this hell for leather script on course. Johnson turns our favourite bijou space in Edinburgh into a tardis – infinitely, impossibly bigger on the inside than on the out.

Come for the history lesson about a woman who must not be forgotten. Stay for one of the most interstellar, and yet movingly down-to-Earth, performances you’ll see. Get your tailcoats on and go see this!

Read the company’s #EdFringeTalk with us here!