The Devil's Kitchen Design

Stars: ✪

If you have ever seen Four Weddings And A Funeral, you may remember when—in response to the crass couple singing saccharine songs in the church—Gareth is seen grimacing and hugging his head in frustration at the awfulness of it all. Believe me, on watching this stultifying, badly-acted shocker I nearly did the same: only my professional politeness—and the sparsity of the audience—stopped me from doing so.

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Telling the story of a hapless Irish "frightener", whose pub-owning, gangland boss not only steals his girlfriend but also tries to have him killed, The Good Thief is beautifully and energetically acted by one man, a white table and two white blocks. These last three objects are cunningly employed to conjure the stairs of a house, a car, a pub and a lot more besides—further, our man keeps talking as he moves them forming seamless scene changes as he narrates.

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The journalist Jonathan Meades once described Jeffrey Bernard's Spectator column as a "suicide note in weekly installments" and, indeed, Bernard was a legend in his own lunchtime. Or, more aptly, a legend in his own closing time, for Bernard was one of those flamboyant, romantic alcoholics—though married four times, he was often heard to describe booze as "the other woman".

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Over his 11 years at the Fringe, your humble reviewer has seen many extraordinary sights but, you may take it for granted, he never thought that he would ever watch an undead Macbeth exhorting his zombie minions in iambic pentameter; and yet this is precisely what he has just seen.

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The concept of wandering from location to location to perform the various scenes is a good one and particularly appropriate when adapting a Sherlock Holmes story, for it was his desire to be right on the spot that so differentiated Sherlock from his brother, Mycroft. Owen Dudley Edwards—Conan Doyle's official biographer—has adapted this short story, relocating it to Edinburgh, and our meanderings take us from St Patrick's, initially on a search for Holmes (who is found at Old College), and thence to George Square where the bulk of the play is acted out.