Review: A Foot is Not an Appropriate Prize for the Tombola, Pleasance Courtyard

Daniel McVey brings us an increasingly bizarre tale of Lydia, village fete maven and self-declared queen of local sleuthing. If Agatha Christie (queen of crime) and H.G. Wells (grandfather of dystopian science fiction) ever embarked on a literary collaboration, this would be it. What starts off as a camp cosy crime straight off the early evening telly, complete with adverts for over-60s river cruises, takes a surprisingly Lovecraftian turn: we learn that we don’t know who to trust as members of the village are picked off one by one, leaving only their mysterious and disgusting severed feet behind. Suspects include Doctor Green (the local mad scientist, cooking up ever-more-suspect experiments in his laboratory), Miss Lemon (not Poirot’s secretary, but Lydia’s arch-rival for village supremacy), little Tommy Navy-Blue, and Miss Violet – character sketches complete with a nod to the colour coded game pieces of Cluedo.

The show’s concept is delightful and there is plenty of gently welcoming audience interaction throughout. The tombola is very real, mercifully foot-free, and select audience members genuinely do win a set of downright bizarre prizes. A good deal of the show’s suspense is guessing what these gimcrack pound-bin oddities will turn out to be. The interactive elements are both an advantage and a drawback: one of the show’s flaws is its slow pacing and low energy in the first half, a tricky thing to keep snappy when relying on long tracts of text read by untried audience members. Fringe being the largest performing arts festival in the world, some performances may draw rather more professional participants, but the risk is that one or more keen audience members will render their characters with the flat intonation of reading a grocery list aloud – certainly the case during the performance I attended. A more energetic performance on McVey’s part would inject some verve in the early parts of the show. 

It’s clear McVey certainly has plenty of verve to give, as his costumes become more outlandish, and his stage presence more exuberant throughout the performance, culminating in a truly eye-catching final musical number. The wild and wacky glint in Lydia’s eye could be dialled up from the first, giving us a hint of the twisted territory ahead. McVey’s gleeful vamping during the ballad is so fun that I wish there were more of his musical showmanship throughout the show.

If you’d like a show which upends the soothing predictability of a cosy murder mystery with a hefty slice of science fiction (with prizes!), you’ll find it here.

Directed and written by Daniel McVey
Lighting design by Sam Osborne
Costume design by Eloisa Roan

A Foot is Not an Appropriate Prize for the Tombola plays at Pleasance Courtyard until Monday 31 August as part of EdFringe