[2015092] Scotch and Soda

[2015092] Scotch and Soda

Company 2 & The Crusty Suitcase Band @ Garden of Unearthly Delights – Aurora Spiegeltent

10:15pm, Sat 28 Feb 2015

So… earlier in the week there’d been this little photoshoot, during which I met a lot of the (totes lovely) team behind Scotch and Soda, including the fantastic Chelsea McGuffin and Mozes (who I totally fawned over because Acrobat was one of the pivotal performances of my Fringe-going life), and after expressing surprise at the number of shows that I’d seen, they’d asked whether I was actually going to see Scotch and Soda. “Do you still have tickets for Saturday night?” I had asked, and – hearing an affirmative – I decided that this would be the Big Fringe show for my Significant Other. Chelsea smiled sweetly, and said “Great! We’ll reserve a couple of seats up front for you!”

So, after arriving maybe twenty minutes before the nominal start time of the show to find a stationary queue that zig-zagged around the front of the Aurora, I thought I’d check with the front-of-house team (as Chelsea had suggested) regarding our seats. “Nope!” said the main guy, “I don’t know anything about that. Go to the back of the line; they’re all good seats.” That made me chuckle to myself as I walked down the queue – still, that’s part of the Fringe experience too.

Even so, we wound up with aisle seats about three rows from the front on the far left of house… and I was pretty chuffed with that. But as we craned our necks, watching the Scotch and Soda team warm up the audience as others filled the room, Chelsea bounced past and caught my eye – “Oh – hi! We saved you seats over here!” She guided us over the stage – for a split second we were onstage in a Spiegeltent! – and took us to two seats, front row right-centre… and I was super chuffed.

From the moment the Ben Walsh-led Crusty Suitcase Band start playing, something is always happening in Scotch and Soda. The thin narrative – focused around the chase of The Bush Stranger (Mozes), of that much I’m sure – is barely necessary, because the driving score provided by the Crustys propels the show along its course of acrobatics and balancing acts and tumbling.

Some tricks – McGuffin’s bottle walking and Mozes’ roller skating, for example – are reprised from earlier works (Company 2’s Cantina and Acrobat, respectively). But there’s a freshness to the presentation here, with the visual aesthetic having an earthiness to it that made me feel like it’s an everyman performance… but not everyone can balance three-high on a rickety table. Or ride a bike around the tight stage at speed whilst performing stunts. Or swing from the trapeze, flashing genitals amidst other tricks.

For a change in pace, the company erect a tent on stage for a little shadowplay, there’s a tensely acrobatic card game, and a curiously twee sequence featuring some budgies… but for the most part, it’s non-stop action with springboards and more balancing and dancing… all powered by the jazzy blues of the Band.

Maybe it was because of the privilege and position that I had in the Spiegeltent, but I absolutely loved Scotch and Soda. It felt more holistic, more complete, than Cantina (though, admittedly, that was much earlier in that project’s gestation), and the grittiness of the visual production speaks to me more than the glitter and sheen of something like La Clique. For me, this was the best big-production Fringe show I’d seen in years.

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