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Home Edinburgh Fringe 2022

Edinburgh Review: What Broke David Lynch? at Greenside @ Nicolson Square

by Matthew Hayhow
August 13, 2022
Reading Time: 2 mins read
What Broke David Lynch Courtesy of the Company

What Broke David Lynch Courtesy of the Company

Two Star Review from Theatre WeeklyMaking a historical work about a great artist is a ballsy move because inevitably your work will be compared to the work of the artist’s. What Broke David Lynch? is no exception; if you’re making a play about David Lynch, you would expect the same fragmented, visceral, surreal style that you find through his work.

What Broke David Lynch? is a weird play to be sure. The show depicts David Lynch making the classic film The Elephant Man, and getting so stressed with making the costume he starts a relationship with an imaginary girlfriend.

This all sounds promising on paper. My main issue with the play is that 30% of the dialogue is movie trivia. Everyone talks in facts about Lon Chaney, Marilyn Monroe, Joseph Merrick and Lynch himself. There’s a whole scene where John Gieldgud and Anthony Hopkins talk about their favourite moments in Eraserhead. I don’t get it, perhaps I’m missing something, but, if I may offer my own movie trivia, when Roger Ebert was assigned to review Usual Suspects, he wrote one thing in his notepad – ‘to the extent I understand, I don’t care’.

       

There are glimpses of off-kilter humour that are very enjoyable. The guy that plays Mel Brooks wears a fez, holds a cigar, and wears a brown warehouse coat with all his movies written on it. Hurt and Gielgud take off giant papier-mâché heads of themselves when they enter the stage, and put them on again when they exit.

That stuff, the stuff you might actually see in a dream, I thought worked really well and wish there was more humour in that vein. The rest of the play I had trouble connecting with.

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Lynch’s movies have a reputation for being impenetrable, when really they are quite simple and design to connect with you emotionally rather than intellectually. The weirdness of What Broke David Lynch?, rather than being a pathway to a deeper level of meaning, instead obscures whatever the play is trying to say.

Matthew Hayhow

Matthew Hayhow

Matthew Hayhow is a freelance writer who has written and edited for Vulture Hound, The Idle Man and Orchard Times. He writes about theatre, literature, film, music and video games. Matthew has an MA in Linguistics and English Language fro the University of Glasgow. He is based in Glasgow.

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