Three shows in 3D

Washing done, house move successfully accomplished, yummy lunch at Ooud successfully eaten, I only made it in to town late afternoon. After a brief look at the Fair Trade on the Fringe, Pleasance Baby Grand was my destination for Mould and Arrowsmith in 3D (buying my ticket over the phone whilst stood in the rather long queue – grr, weekends). This was loud and proud in its geekiness – from its boot up screen being unable to find actual jokes to its adventure story using Steve Jobs to save the world from the virus-infected 3D network-infected avatars of themselves. We had actual 3D glasses which worked very well; I even had the odd effect afterwards that my eye that had the red lens was tinged blue, and the blue lens was red-tinged for a few minutes afterwards – isn’t your brain compensation clever. I muchly enjoyed their version of the Crystal Maze, Arrowsmith’s longest line optical illusion, and the Poirot section using more tongue twisters than that Pinky and the Brain sketch (you know, that one).

Legend was on straight afterwards at C, a “brand new Greek legend” that followed Demophon, son of Theseus, in a world where all the monsters have been killed and he’s shipwrecked on an island. The Prologue and Chorus were inventive, arguing with each other and being responsible for scenery moving (and being in the right place at the right time), the story felt appropriately mythic, and the whole affair was quite winsome, deserving more than the six of us watching.

In fact, I came back an hour later for Obstacle Company’s other production, Pulse, a story about the possible last day on earth with an asteroid on an impact course. This was very different to the other play, obviously, and followed what a group of “normal” people might do in such a situation, latterly including a car crash victim with short-term memory loss. It was, quite sadly, easily realistic in a number of ways, and I left wondering what would happen to each of the characters.