Written by Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland
Review by Orly Benn
Fringe heroes Xhloe and Natasha return to the too-busy, too-expensive, over-saturated Auld Reekie Edinburgh Fringe with all three of their previous shows to remind us why Fringe is worth it and why we should all try to do what we have always thought about doing. The return of their 2022 Fringe First winning show, And Then The Rodeo Burned Down begins their exhausting season of two-show-days with a theatrical masterclass in pace, timing, precision, characterisation, creativity and collaboration. Just as the wise words of Dolly Parton tell us as she beckons in the beginning of the show, we are soon taught that it is, indeed, ‘all taking and no giving’ within the worlds of theatre, budget cuts, clowns, rodeos and queer shadows (which surely only converge at this single interface).
Through stunningly sharp choreography, synchronised speech and episodic cuts between scenes and characters, Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland have created the Taj Mahal of well-oiled devised theatre, to the point where they are almost indistinguishable to each other: a joke that they certainly exploit when they start taking on each other’s roles and satirise attitudes towards human dispensability in times of cultural budget cuts.
Rice and Roland are one of the best cases against this dispensability. On a minimal stage, only lightly littered with carefully plotted props and clever lighting design that cues the change of both time, place and performance, they prove that human creativity, emotion and skilful performance are the only thing necessary to create meaning in low-budget theatre, parodying the inaccessibility of theatre-making whilst they do it; the show exists in a world that charges curse-words-per-script, and has privatised the right to structure an ending into a show that ritually gets cut off by power-shortages.
Roland and Rice’s loyalty to The Space UK, known as a host for smaller-seaters and new (often student) writing, despite their triumphant Fringe successes over the years, is symptomatic of this ethos for movement towards accessibility in Fringe theatre-making. Their ‘Fringe Fame’ is working to coax a world of theatre royalty back into the spaces of the theatre everymans, in a reminder of the delight in low-budget theatre that hinges on human creativity and possibility rather than spectacle.
Emotional and Skillful
And Then The Rodeo Burned Down runs at The Space
Running time: Sixty minutes without interval
Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic
Review by Orly Benn (contact@corrblimey.uk)
Orly is entering into her final year as an English Literature student at the University of Edinburgh; a degree filled more with her involvement in student theatre than her commitment to academia. Orly’s involvement in theatre ranges from Shakespeare to musicaltheatre, with a particular interest in modern drama and new writing, which are the leading inspirations for (hopefully) a future career in the theatre. Orly believes Fringe is an extremely exciting and affirming environment for these passions, and can’t wait to see the promising work coming up this year.
