The creators of Fringe sensation Fishbowl return to Edinburgh with their latest Molière Award winning production – The Ice Hole: A Cardboard Comedy. This innovative show, in the spirit of Monty Python and with a Laurel and Hardy style twist, is told by two actors with some sidesplitting and meticulous theatrical acrobatics.
Told using a thousand pieces of cardboard, in a language no-one quite understands, a great actor recounts an epic journey from the fjords of Iceland to the dust of the Spanish desert. He may be cursed by the mermaid he once accidentally caught, but he is aided on his madcap adventure by a fellow performer and, together, they tell this ridiculously amazing adventure.
Created by Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan, The Ice Hole: A Cardboard Comedy never misses a visual gag in its cartoonish burlesque. The immaculate stagecraft conjures a fantasy world for the audience through a precise choreography of cardboard objects, cut-outs and signs. In Fishbowl, the innovative company had given up speech and, for this new show, they decided to also give up sets, revealing the inner workings of theatre props; through pieces of cardboard the great actor’s sidekick creates images of the landscape, people and objects that the traveller discovers along the way.
The magic and comedy of the show hinges on the contrast between the immobile traveller – a virtuoso of invented language – and the bumbling and fumbling props man whose efforts will inevitably save the day.
[The Ice Hole] takes an impossibly complex idea and makes it work through sheer virtuosity… There is nothing currently like it on the French stage, and the instant standing ovation rewarded the duo’s ingeniousness (The New York Times).
The Ice Hole: A Cardboard Comedy also previews ahead of Edinburgh Fringe at Trinity Theatre in Tunbridge Wells from 8th – 10th June.
