Review: Steen Raskopoulos: Friendly Stranger

Steen Raskopoulos | Photo by Matt Stronge

Steen’s back! “Steen! Steen! Steen!” They chant, a deservedly warm welcome for one of Edinburgh’s warmest performers, absent since 2018. And it’s great to see him back, because no one really can do what he does. What Steen Raskopoulos does, for example, is a Barbenheimer review by a Greek Orthodox priest. It’s a beautifully off-kilter idea. But the Raskopoulos magic is in the way he brings audience members in on the deal. The smallest gesture or noise and he ushers them, coy but willing, into the performance. Friendly Stranger packs a number of these ideas, but this isn’t a disparate collection of sketches. Like an escape room, each discarded clue provides a key in the broader narrative – a twofold machine which combines a murder mystery with a delightful demonstration on the kindness of strangers.

He’s ably assisted by the disembodied voice of Stephen Colfer, who some might recognise as the bathetic narrator from Dreamgun: Filmreads. Or maybe the more productive pairing is tonight’s main character audience member, who responds brilliantly to the words Colfer puts in his mouth. Something, though, isn’t quite right. Maybe it’s that tonight’s audience don’t quite bring the energy needed to make Raskopoulos’s art fly. But maybe this is just a bit too convoluted for its own good. The intricacy of Friendly Stranger feels forced. Miss a mime played stage left and you’re struggling to keep up. Raskopoulos’s sweet, easy wrangling of his audience sits at odds with the effortful management of 1000 narrative jigsaw pieces.