As ever, there is plenty on offer at the fringe for those wishing they had never had to grow up. Geoffrey Hayes is the one-time jobbing actor who devoted 20 years to presenting Thames TV's children's show Rainbow. He is in Edinburgh with the series' puppets and its 2D set to reconnect his gleefully nostalgic crowd to their lost youth. But Over the Rainbow makes strange viewing - not least because Hayes revives his talking-down-to-the-kiddies Rainbow persona, keeping his real self hidden behind those yellow dungarees.
That condescending tone isn't always compatible with comic timing, and there are as many cringe-filled silences as belly laughs in Hayes's account of Rainbow's rise and fall. His conceit is to discuss his co-stars, Zippy, George and Bungle, as if they were real. This denies us the chance to hear what actually happened behind the series' scenes, but generates a few good gags (Bungle the bear going on to cameo in The Winter's Tale, for instance).
There is an edge of sadness to proceedings too - and it is not always clear whether that is sadness at the demise of a certain innocent brand of kids' TV (as Hayes emphatically suggests) or for Hayes himself. Not that he isn't self-aware: he notes that one good thing to come out of Rainbow's cancellation was that "I could earn loads of money as an ironic postmodern icon". And there are plenty of feelgood moments here - singing along to the theme tune, and so on. But there remains something ineffably poignant about this story of a frustrated film star playing the dementedly sunny protector of all our inner children.
Until August 26. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
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