UNCLE WOLODJA. To 24 August.

Edinburgh Fringe

UNCLE WOLODJA
by Alexej Merkuchev

Theatre Workshop, Hamilton Terrace. To 24 August 2002
7.15pm
Runs 1hr No interval

TICKETS 0131 226 5425
Review Timothy Ramsden 18 August

From Russia with skill, but as yet insufficient dramatic impact.Merkuchev's comic creation, a silent clown, begins and ends his hour strutting his stage stuff in a Disney-like fantasy world, a colourful sleep-time land where he dusts down the chimneys and lightly wakes up the happy inhabitants.

Between this, there's the reality of his own life, in a black-and-white, two-dimensional world where objects never work as you want them to, and the sole visitor is an uninvited rat.

Merkuchev is a skilful performer, but whether he's wise to devise and direct his own act is more doubtful. For all its incidental pleasures and undoubted moments of wit, Wolodja is, as yet, nowhere near the character or invention of Tati's M. Hulot, whom he resembles in several ways. Wolodja is the character to whom things happen, the still person in a busy world and the one to whom the technology others use as a matter of course is unalterably alien.

An amiable hour, but as yet lacking the inspired character detail of a great clown act.

Performer/Director: Alexej Merkuchev

2002-08-24 09:47:11