Review: Up, EdFringe

Sometimes love can be found in the most unexpected of places. In Visible Fictions’ impressive production Up strangers Jayme and Jay find themselves sitting next to each other on a plane just as it encounters difficulties and starts to plummet through the air. They are absolute opposites: Jayme has encountered nothing but bad luck throughout her life, while Jay is blessed with boundless good luck. We share the awful moment with them as their lives flash past and we all come to consider how it is that we perceive what is good or bad luck.

Performed by Zoe Hunter and Michael Dylan, the storytelling is achieved using a huge selection of objects that really demand our attention, with the characters at times represented by dolls, ambulances arriving in miniature, emergency masks plummeting from the ceiling and suitcases thumping down around them. It’s evocative, extraordinarily complex and an exciting, highly synchronised performance – practically a military operation as the pair reach for each item, use it in the story and then reset it for another scene. Beyond this enormously skilled task, their characterisations are simultaneously beautifully warm and human, so you really feel for the protagonists. At times ridiculously comic, Jayme and Jay’s lives are filled with every emotion, from hilarity to heartbreak, each scene given expanded clarity and breadth by the manipulation of objects.

The set and staging too is impressively considered, as the pair move beyond the desk into a microcosm of air disaster. Around them, multiple investigation scene number tags draw our eyes to personal items as would be scattered in an aviation disaster, and warehouse storage racks holding them are reimagined as new spaces. The pair pull in a whiteboard to present facts about the safety of air travel, it’s informative and perhaps surprising, reassuring us that fewer than 2% of accidents are plane crashes and the chance of dying in one is minimal. Using objects of different sizes also fits neatly with the idea of shifting perspectives, as the audience is encouraged to verbally engage in thinking about ideas of good and bad luck, and how individual perspectives can have a tangible outcome on results.

Clever and edifying this show may be, but above all this it is thrillingly entertaining, fast moving and made enormously human by the objects within it that speak of the detail of individual lives. It reminds us that the most obvious things are not always what are most precious: it’s all about how you look at it.

Original Co-Creators: Zoe Hunter & Martin McCormick
Original Co-Creator (Character Stories): Frances Poet
Director & Co-Creator: Dougie Irvine
Composer & Sound Designer: Kevin Murray
Set & Costume Designer: Becky Minto
Lighting Designer: Kai Fischer
Original Composer: Andy McGregor
Produced by: Visible Fictions

Up runs at Gilded Balloon Appleton Tower until Saturday 24 August as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.