Its difficult to gauge how the audience is supposed to react to this tale of a bungled heist presented by Crumpet Theatre Company. I think it was a comedy, but I attended on one of those Edinburgh occasions when the cast almost outnumbered the audience. The masking of the skylights had fallen down in the previous show ruining the first scene which I assume were supposed to take place in blackout. Both cast and audience were nervous, and as a consequence laughs were thin on the ground well, positively anorexic, actually.
Charlie (James Manning) and Frankie (Luke Murray) screw up a robbery, and for reasons too complicated to go into here Frankie ends up dead (this must be one of the shortest appearances on the fringe by any actor, ever.) Thence the plot spins off into a tale of retribution, attempted murder, bombs and guns, as Lillian (Katie Pickering) and Amy (Rosina Cochrane) get involved in a bid to retrieve diamonds from inside a mutilated corpse and not upset the eponymous Crow gang.
The young amateur cast attack this nonsense with gusto, but some of these lines are unplayable or sayable (the only crack around here is the one in my arse). Director Daniel Cope hasnt made the best of what is admittedly a difficult space, and some strange decisions have been made in rehearsals. Why, for example, is there no wine in the wine glasses, but plenty of stage blood in the corpse (maybe the same substance could be used for both)? Why does everybody keep wandering aimlessly around when theyre speaking? Why do the scene changes take so long when theres so little scene to change?
These guys are only here for a week, and Id love to be able to tell you to go and support them. There may be a few more laughs with a larger audience, and if the actors would get over their nerves and actually look at each other from time to time, who knows. But the truth is, when one of the characters shouted How did I get myself into this mess, everything was fine this morning! I nodded heartily and put my notebook down in case the other four members of the audience thought I was the director.
