Birdwatchers' Wives

You've got to watch what they put in your coffee at Summerhall. Are you really seeing a seven foot bird woman, or is it just an ornithological bad trip?

Cross Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent with Patsy from Ab Fab, add a dash of Queen Victoria, and you get somewhere close to Rita Grebe. She thinks she's a bird – a great crested grebe to be precise. Apparently thinking you're a bird is a real life phenomenon. It happens when twitchers identify too closely with their feathered friends. There's even a name for it: avian-therianism.

Caroline Smith created Rita after an artistic residency with the RSPB and some of the humour, designed with a specialist audience in mind, is lost on the average fringe-goer. The clash between Rita-the-human and the Rita-the-bird can be funny all the same. Rita might think she's got wings but she's still on a carb-free diet. In one bizarre interlude she impatiently pokes three slices of bread that she won't eat herslf, one after the other, down the upturned throat of her silent assistant, Grouse.

Don't ask me what happens. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason underpinning any of it. There's an avian singing competition called Birdoff (Birrrrrdawrrrrf) in which Rita is up against her greatest rival, Maggie, and somewhere along the line a birdwatcher gets picked to death. Seeds of a plot frustratingly never get anywhere. Perhaps a bird ate them?

Cuckoo. Magnificently cuckoo.