Margarita Dreams

It may almost be worth going to see Margarita Dreams just for the feeling of camaraderie it creates among the audience afterwards: we’ve all been through an ordeal, together, but we made it. Well, apart from the ones who walked out earlier.

This 'comedy revue' is one of those productions that raises a heap of questions: chiefly, how on earth did it get this far without lots of alarm bells ringing somewhere?

Four brave young actors take on an oddly old-fashioned series of sketches, some of them vaguely linked but most drifting like half-deflated balloons. The show is so devoid of point or punchlines, it almost feels like bad improv. In fact, Margarita Dreams was written by Richard Sparks, author of Rowan Atkinson’s classic schoolmaster sketch. Even Atkinson would struggle to squeeze juice from this barren script.

The big walk-out moment this particular afternoon is a weirdly over-long mini-farce in which a guy tries to persuade a girl to join him in a broom cupboard, then Brad Pitt ends up in there, after which some trousers rip unconvincingly. The show’s high point? A song about string theory elicits some titters, but that’s about it.

You have to feel for the actors who do their best with such meagre material: it must be tough performing in front of such a bewildered, silent audience. The best they can hope for is that it becomes one of those so-bad-it’s-good phenomena, Edinburgh’s equivalent of an Ed Wood movie. Rest assured, those people who saw it will never forget it.