Edinburgh Fringe 2024 reviews: Heartbreak Hotel / The Gummy Bears' Great War / The Ceremony

Heartbreak Hotel, Summerhall ★★★★ 

If the show’s title leaves you expecting schmaltz and dodgy Elvis impressions – well, you might be disappointed, and possibly pleasantly surprised. This quietly powerful two-hander from New Zealand-based company EBKM is a cool, sometimes almost clinical dissection of heartbreak and break-up, one that delves with unflinching clarity into the physiological and psychological aspects of loss and grief when a relationship comes to an end.

Yes, at times it feels a bit like a lecture – if one delivered with songs, courtesy of Karin McCracken’s new-found vocal and synth skills, learnt as distraction therapy after splitting with her long-term partner. But then the whole show feels at times as though McCracken is attempting to rationalise and intellectualise her grieving process, though the deeply human aspects emerge increasingly forcefully as the show progresses. Its inevitable final scenes – prepared for since the start – are raw and chilling in their matter-of-fact casualness.

McCracken simmers with restrained emotion in the lead role, with Simon Leary nimble and convincing across a number of other characters, from puzzled physician to care-worn ex. Director Eleanor Bishop allows time and space for the show’s insights to hit home, and it’s all the more powerful as a result. There’s an impressive, LED-based staging from Auckland company Filament Eleven 11, though the bank of lighting screens that surrounds the actors is used to remarkably subtle effect.

A true tearjerker is a rare thing at the Edinburgh Fringe, but Heartbreak Hotel achieves that and plenty more besides. Alongside its penetrating insights, it’s the show’s compassion and acceptance of human need and fragility that linger long in the memory. 

• Until 26 August 

The Gummy Bears’ Great War, C alto ★★★ 

The proud nation of Gummy Bears – Lemon Yellow, Raspberry Red, Apple Green among them, obviously – has declared war on the far superior power of the Dinosaurs. It’s a futile endeavour, but one driven by valour and heroism in the face of certain annihilation.

Why? That’s the big question behind Sardinian theatre company Batisfera’s half-hour, table-top show, where tiny Gummy heroes and heroines get Shakespearean speeches of philosophical heft, and where the Dinosaurs’ civilisation seems about to implode under the weight of its own paper-stamping, inquiry-launching bureaucracy.

But it’s a question that’s never properly answered, even as the shows heads inevitably towards the conflict’s grand cataclysm. Indeed, The Gummy Bears’ Great War feels in many ways like lots of build-up with little pay-off. But it’s a fascinating, intimate experience nonetheless, with striking images of massed armies of inch-high sweeties lit dramatically with angle-poises, and a mounting sense of doom in both camps as war approaches. It’s a nicely judged satire on the sweeping emotions of belief and tradition triumphing over more prosaic issues of facts and pragmatism – one with evident resonances in our own times. But it’s also a rather slight show – no doubt intentionally so – that might draw more blood if it dared to bare its teeth more. 

• Until 25 August 

The Ceremony, Summerhall ★★★ 

How to describe, let alone assess, a show that’s different at every outing, and one that maintains much of its mystery even when you’re right in the middle of it? The Ceremony’s host and master of, well, ceremonies is Aussie Ben Volchok (pictured above, image by Kate Cameron), whose opening gambit for his free-form, crowd-sourced hour of improvised theatre-cum-ritual-cum-comedy is: what even is a ceremony in the first place? At this particular outing, it embraces thoughts on gender philosophy and 9/11, synaesthesia and dead dogs, and plenty more besides. At other times, it’ll be something entirely different, and no doubt in an entirely different form.

Volchok himself seems unsure whether his show counts as comedy or theatre, and that teetering on the borderline between two forms might explain The Ceremony’s challenges as well as its strengths. Delve into subjects more deeply and you might end up with more serious-minded theatre, or be more comfortable to mock and you’d produce something approaching stand-up. It’s a head-scratcher of a show, one that’s so reliant on audience input that it dares to stare failure in the face. But Volchok is a warm, engaging presence throughout, creating a space where audiences feel comfortable to self-disclose – just be aware that what you reveal might end up a major focus for Volchok’s whimsical peregrinations. 

• Until 26 August

• The Edinburgh Fringe runs until 26 August 
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