Fringe Review: NOSEJOB, Studio at Paradise in Augustines
The beauty of the Edinburgh Fringe is that you can walk into one show expecting a straightforward bit of theatre and walk out of the next wondering whether you’ve just witnessed something brilliant or whether you’ve completely lost the plot.
Nosejob has still left this reviewer wondering that very thing….the truth? We still don’t know!
The show follows Max, who wakes up one morning to discover that his nose has disappeared. Unfortunately for Max, his missing nose has rather ambitious plans of its own, finding fame online and becoming a hugely successful tech entrepreneur. From there, things get increasingly bizarre as the show dives into beauty, identity, internet culture, power and our obsession with how we present ourselves to the world. It is loosely inspired by Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose, but takes that original idea somewhere considerably more… well, Nosey.
And this is where we think Nosejob is going to be a very Marmite show.
There were clearly people in our audience absolutely loving it. You could hear the laughs landing around the room, especially when a particularly niche reference or absurd moment hit its target, and there was a definite feeling that some members of the audience were completely on the show's wavelength.
Marmite though it may be, there is plenty to admire. The cast throw themselves completely into the strange world that the production creates, the visual design is wonderfully odd and there is clearly an enormous amount of thought behind what Heads on Crooked are attempting to explore.
The problem for us was that we spent too much of the show trying to work out whatweI was supposed to be taking from it, rather than simply enjoying what was happening in front of us.
There are some genuinely interesting ideas here. Beauty standards, celebrity, technology, capitalism, identity, and the increasingly complicated relationship we have with the online world are all great ground for a piece of theatre, and the company's own explanation of the show makes clear that the intention is to get the audience thinking about what we consume, who controls it and how it affects the way we see ourselves and each other. We never quite got there personally but were grateful for the experience all the same as the subjectivity of theatre is what makes it so special!
For an audience who enjoys experimental and deliberately absurd theatre, we can absolutely see why Nosejob would be a huge hit. There is a confidence to the weirdness, and the performers are clearly having a great time with the material.
That's the beauty of the Fringe: not every show has to be for everyone.
We suspect there will be people leaving Nosejob completely obsessed with what they've just witnessed and we enjoyed the experience to stick our nose into what the company are doing next!
*** Three stars
Reviewed by: James Edge
Nosejob plays at Edinburgh Festival Fringe until 30 Aug, with further info here.
