Splish, splash, success ... Fuerzabruta in Edinburgh. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod
I know Lyn Gardner was unimpressed by Fuerzabruta, but I had a whale of a time standing in the crowd being sprayed with water, coated in debris and captivated by the Argentinian company's gravity-defying antics. Much as I was thrilled by its novelty, however, a thought occurred to me during the show: would there come a time when I would look upon Fuerzabruta as sniffily as if it was just another commercial, mass-market product on the same circuit as Cirque du Soleil and Stomp?
This is a show, after all, that is already turning into a franchise. A new parallel production will open in New York this October, like another branch in the Starbucks chain, while the current version tours Europe. My taste is not normally for such big-budget, homogeneous crowd-pleasers, so is it only a matter of time before I grow cynical about it?
And if my attitude does change, am I merely revealing my own snobbishness? I think back to when Stones in His Pockets by Marie Jones played at the Traverse in 1999. Boasting superb performances by Sean Campion and Conleth Hill in the original Belfast Lyric production, it was one of the hits of that year's Fringe. Then, of course, it transferred to the West End, became a staple of the commercial touring circuit and my attitude changed. I never saw it again, but in my imagination (fuelled by reports from people who did see it), it became a cheap cash-in of no artistic merit. How can that be fair?
Context does play a part in this process. Seeing a play up close and personal in a studio theatre, when the playwright's ideas are fresh and the actors are at their peak, is very different to seeing the same play two years later in a mainstream theatre after an umpteenth change of cast.
But is it hypocritical for those of us who love the theatre to rave about a production and campaign for its success, only to turn cold on it when it achieves the kind of mass appeal we always believed it deserved? It's hard to remember a time when Stomp was an innovative experiment in percussion, when the Blue Man Group was part of the avant garde and when musicals about the wives of Argentinian leaders seemed pretty cutting edge. Does commercial success kill the soul of such shows or is it merely our restless quest for new ideas that makes them seem stale?
Or are we merely snobs and theatrical trainspotters, like those of us who will go to see The Bacchae this weekend only to boast about seeing Alan Cumming when he was still performing in studio plays at the Traverse?
