Edinburgh Festival Fringe theatre and children's shows reviews: Klanghaus: InHaus | Is It Art? | Taiwan Season: The Way Back | Anything That We Wanted To Be | Edgar Allan Poe: The Murders in the Rue Morgue

In our latest batch of Fringe reviews, you’ll brush up against radical punk sensibilities, a surprising and quirky potted history of art, and some powerfully symbolic war-themed puppetry.

Klanghaus: InHaus ****

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 27 August

Underground, literally and metaphorically, InHaus sees a downstairs studio strewn with furniture. There are mirrors on the walls. Red light. The whole room is an instrument, and it is a space for play. Sit where you like, lie down, stand, or dance. Walk around, explore. Wear ear defenders, or don’t. The band (Karen Reilly, Jon Baker, Mark Howe and Jeron Gundersen) wends their way through the studio. “We’re here forever! This is our house!” they exclaim, with bright eyes.

Klanghaus are undeniably cool. The company (The Neutrinos - a band of musicians and sound artists - in collaboration with the visual artist Sal Pittman) specialises in site-responsive promenade performance. Through building relationships with built environments, and blending cinematic techniques, live music, light, sound design, and staging, they have created their signature style, which is at once intimate, immediate, and immersive.

You are surrounded by music on all sides; the beat is in your chest, your blood. Workaday implements are turned into musical instruments. Now, a handsaw is a violin. Now, a vintage telephone is a microphone. Pittman’s projections, while sadly absent on the day (on account of a pre-show injury), promise a spectacle all their own, and the company’s previous work can attest to this.

In any case, one’s experience of InHaus will always be wholly singular, as the band and the space shifts to accommodate its small audience, and the audience moves in and out of place. While powerful, the piece can also prove overpowering at times. But if the brick begets the mortar, it is surely with the best of intentions. Klanghaus’s artistic approach is one of radical generosity - a punk sensibility in soft focus.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Klanghaus: InHaus (Photo copyright Gordon Woolcock)

Is It Art? *****

Greenside @ Nicolson Square (Venue 209) until 19 August

Nine characters. One gallery. An empty pedestal. Two questions: is it the greatest work in the history of art? Or is it nothing at all? Devised by CFACoLab - a collective of actors, dancers, composers, visual artists and designers - Is It Art? is an art-lovers paradise, a theatre-goers wonderland, and almost certainly, a traditionalists nightmare.

CFACoLab possesses a very special, and very specific, aesthetic. Theatrical elements combine the expertise and knowledge of the group, and a sense of experiment and play is embedded from the get-go. That the show also functions as a potted history of art should be unsurprising, but surprise is this company’s forte, and this piece is so clever as to be dumbfounding.

Here, the performers are the palette, the paintbrushes, the paint. They are the picture, the frame. They coax artist movements, philosophical theories, and practices from obscurity, falsification, and yesteryear. Two musicians create the sound-world of the show (they underscore, and are instrumental to, the action), and each character - as well as having their own individual identity - embodies a specific colour.

There is dancing; there are Seagull onesies; a painting is painted and a painting is performed. The piece is alert to acts of spectatorship and arts criticism, too, and it also begins to theorise a future direction for art, as a form, as we know it. Is It Art? is deceptively simple, though, and makes for a delightful, quirky, and wholly unique experience. If you haven’t seen it, book at once - go now. If you’re lucky enough to have seen it once, double your luck - go again.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Taiwan Season: The Way Back ****

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 27 August

In a quiet house, a young boy tries playing the guitar. Then war comes—the boy becomes a soldier, and is blasted apart in an explosion. Amidst the wreckage of what’s left, his intrepid right hand goes on a journey to reunite with the rest of his body. Through puppetry and shadow play, Double Theatre conjures up a fantastical adventure through a liminal world where cities are haunted by empty coats, and dismembered limbs have the power to leap, cower and console.

Fable-like yet without an ounce of saccharine, The Way Back evokes the ravages of war in a way that’s palatable to younger audiences, while also preserving its devastating emotional truth. The expressive puppetry is utterly charming, every gesture imbued with personality; combined with delicate soundscapes, dextrous object theatre and poetic lighting, the production creates a dreamlike space where, against all odds, life and humour can still be found.

Perhaps that’s why the beauty of the show never seems to cheapen the violence it’s meant to symbolise. A bright burst of confetti elicits gasps of delight from the audience, and somehow our pleasure is able to sit comfortably next to our sadness. Its visual spectacle thrums with, and gains resonance from, the tender grief that runs underneath.

Moreover, by rooting its story within a universal longing for home, its themes are accessible and meaningful to all ages. Adults can read The Way Back for its parallels to the war in Ukraine, and all those around the world who are forced to flee the places they love best.

Whereas everyone in the audience will recognise the ways in which the show speaks to our innate desire for safety and belonging, as well as the courage to find our way back to ourselves when all seems lost.

Deborah Chu

Anything That We Wanted To Be ****

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 27 August

Doctor or theatre director? It's a question that 34-year-old Adam Lenson was forced to answer when, as a teenager, he selected his A-levels. The fact he went for the latter means that we’re all here, in the show, today. We also learn that he’s undergone treatment for cancer that perhaps, in a parallel universe where we aren’t, might never have happened.

On a wire strewn stage, aided by a couple of old television sets, under the blue white light of both sci-fi and medical dramas, time and space are expanded and compressed through the ingenious addition of a looping pedal, which creates multiple versions of different realities, a theatrical, musical version of Hugh Everett’s multiverse theory. It enables Adam to take us through the many decisions that have led him and other versions of himself here, there or elsewhere and to question where he might have ended up instead.

Delivered direct to audience, it has the confident, authoritative, direct-to-audience address that many a solo male monologue, particularly at Summerhall, seems to deploy, but also an unusually good blend of a personal story with a bigger, at times almost intergalactic perspective. We’re told that we can be anything that we want, Adam says, but in reality we can’t. We have to choose, but it’s the choices that we make that make us who we are, with connections between events sometimes only becoming clear in retrospect. Little does young Adam know when he listens to Fleetwood Mac as a child that as an adult it will be accompanying him through more challenging times.

What would this review read like if I saw this show yesterday rather than today? We'll never know, because the previous one overran and now, here we are, like Adam, making our choices and seeing what happens.

Sally Stott

Edgar Allan Poe: The Murders in the Rue Morgue **

theSpace @ Surgeons Hall (Venue 53) until 26 August

Two decent performances and some outrageous French accents can’t disguise the fact that this is an unfortunately dry reading of the original detective story. At times you wonder if Darren Haywood imagines C. Auguste Dupin to be a significantly smarter ancestor of Inspector Clouseau. Otherwise it’s actually faithful to a fault in that it rattles through the somewhat stodgy dialogue and swathes of forensic detail carefully but dramatically it’s rather inert.

Not so much an adaptation, this is more like a transliteration of Poe’s tale, but a murder mystery featuring a razor-wielding primate has no business being this unexciting.

Rory Ford