Fringe Review: THE MEEPLES: XXX, Lime Studio at Greenside @ George Street
There are certain shows at the Fringe that go beyond your standard musicals and plays and draw you in simply because they sound so completely outlandish. The Meeples: XXX was that show for us this year, Besties.
Now, we should probably warn you that the themes of this one are, as you can probably imagine from the title, very adult.
The premise is gloriously bonkers. The world's most famous puppets have been kicked off television, lost their funding and found themselves with nowhere left to go, so they open their own filthy cabaret club. What follows is a drug-fuelled descent into sex, violence, chaos and increasingly questionable decisions, as the familiar puppet characters attempt to keep their new world afloat while danger starts closing in around them. And it really does start as it means to go on.
The moment you walk in, there is a performer waving a rather alarming sex toy and shouting an invitation to the audience that lets you know immediately that this is not The Muppets your parents watched, and it doesn't exactly calm down from there, In fact, it keeps escalating.
Kermit eventually makes his appearance after supposedly abandoning the rest of the gang, and let's just say Miss Piggy isn't exactly thrilled about his return. As the evening progresses, relationships fracture, loyalties shift and the whole thing hurtles towards a rather dark betrayal.
The scale of the production is genuinely impressive. This is a relatively small Fringe space absolutely packed with performers, a live band, dancers, singers and puppeteers, with a huge number of characters and puppets constantly moving around the stage. The costumes are fabulous, the puppetry is inventive, and there is clearly an enormous amount of work going on behind the scenes to keep this thing moving. And for the first half hour or so, we were absolutely with them.
The sheer audacity of it is incredibly entertaining. There is something wonderfully liberating about watching a company throw absolutely everything at the wall and seemingly refusing to ask whether they've gone too far. But eventually, for us, the chaos started to become the thing getting in the way of the show.
As we descended further into the drugs, sex and increasingly outrageous behaviour, the songs began to feel a little too similar in tone, and we started to lose sight of what was actually at stake for these characters. The show keeps finding another way to make things more outrageous, but eventually you start wanting to know why we should care about what happens next. And we think that's where The Meeples: XXX could really develop.
There are some genuinely interesting characters buried underneath all the debauchery, and we would have loved to see more time spent allowing them to develop before the next piece of madness arrived.
The large cast is impressive, but in a space this small, there are moments where some performers feel more like part of the scenery than characters we're invested in. If Artist's Workshop are determined to keep this many bodies, musicians and puppeteers in the production, and we think they should, finding a larger space could allow the ensemble to breathe and make the whole experience feel even more immersive. Because there is a lot of potential here.
The production clearly has ambition, a very distinctive visual identity and a company willing to throw themselves completely into the ridiculousness of it all. And when it works, it is exactly the sort of completely unhinged Fringe experience you come hoping to stumble across.
We just think that, rather than continually turning the dial towards another C-bomb, another outrageous gag or another escalation, the next version could benefit from turning the dial towards character. Give us more reasons to care about these wonderfully filthy little puppets, because the chaos is already there, now give us the stakes to go with it.
We're glad we experienced The Meeples: XXX. It's fun, it's completely bonkers, and there is nothing else quite like it on the Fringe.
About as wonderfully bonkers as it gets.
*** Three stars
Reviewed by: James Edge
The Meeples: XXX plays at Edinburgh Festival Fringe until 29 Aug, with further info here.
