Homunculus
★★★★★
Five Star Pick
★★★★★ Five Star Pick
Written by Santiago Mallan, Homunculus is a gloriously chaotic collision of old and new: a classic farce built on Elizabethan and Jacobean screwball mechanics, written in loose iambic verse and set in the present day. The play has had succesful runs in New York and Brussels and even spawned a film adaptation before coming to Edinburgh this year for its Fringe debut.
The staging is visually arresting, with a cavalcade of outsider art and colourful curiosities to look at while the madness onstage unfolds, and the love-triangle-gone-occult plot functions as a vehicle for very contemporary anxieties around open relationships, internet gossip and art-world clout. Mistaken identity and accidental alchemy combine with more than a dash of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to make a Frankenstein for the Jeremy Scott generation. One of my favourite moments in the show was Clay delivering a dismissive tirade on Mimi’s ‘naive’ art style, including repetitive use of the word ‘jejune’ as a slur.
The whole cast are fantastic and show real skill in managing to bring an air of chaos and disarray to what is in fact a tightly organised piece of staging, wrapped around an almost insanely dense script. Every line is packed with references, gags and layers, taking in everything from vlogging to the Venus of Willendorf.
Homunculus is exactly the kind of weird, auteur insanity that the Fringe is for. It won’t be everyone’s jar of hex-goo, but if you like your comedy both cerebral and slapstick, please do not miss out on it while it’s here.
★★★★★
