It’s a formula with a proven track record. Last year’s Limbo, the Australian centrepiece of Edinburgh’s Christmas programme, which also enjoyed long runs in London, showed what was possible when you brought together a crack team of musicians and a handful of skilled acrobats, then framed them with a grungy cabaret aesthetic in the Paradiso spiegeltent. Presented by the Underbelly and Company 2, Scotch and Soda ticks the same boxes, and has enough musicality to keep a festive audience diverted for 60 minutes, but it is no match for Limbo’s sassiness, imagination and jeopardy.
The setting is an Austrian barroom where men in Tyrolean hats, braces and calf-length lederhosen play cards over a rough wooden table, or knock the dust off ancient-looking suitcases. Ben Walsh’s score for the Crusty Suitcase Band has an appropriately Germanic feel, expanding from a jaunty oompah two-step to old-time jazz and swing, with a brief foray into a rumbling dub deconstruction to add an otherworldly touch to a solo trapeze routine.
Always on the move, the musicians give Scotch and Soda its character and shape, but they also make the circus tricks seem like an afterthought. The show has its moments – such as the construction of an Empire State Building out of packing cases and the long-bearded acrobat named Mozes supporting his body by the nape of his neck – but they come amid a surfeit of routine tumbling, underwhelming handstands and sketches that come to nothing. Even the show’s sole novelty, an act involving three budgies hopping on and off a music stand, has an air of uncertainty.
That piece is performed by co-director Chelsea McGuffin, the show’s only woman. I could complain about the nine-to-one gender imbalance, but prefer to imagine the women have chosen wisely and that somewhere a spirited all-female cast is performing a smarter, riskier, more awe-inspiring show.
• Until 21 December. Box office: 0844-545 8252. Venue: St Andrew Square, Edinburgh.
