In perfect harmony

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, prophesied WB Yeats. And so it is that the three-men-and-a-lady troupe who first graced the Fringe in 2008 find themselves this year missing a founding member.

"He has gone on to... well, he's gone on to marry an American woman! He left us for love!" laughs Rob Castell who, alongside the now emigrant Tom Sadler, formed Barbershopera. It's a severance that could easily wreck a young group. But, then again, not all groups' opening Fringe salvo involved repeatedly rhyming the name of the Slovenian capital, "Ljubljana" all the while singing close part harmonies a cappella. Barbershopera, clearly, are made of sterner stuff.

"We’ve been writing the new show on Skype and with emails, which has proved much better than I thought, actually," Castell continues. And it's not just the writing team who have pulled through the disruption. "Since Tom’s departure to the States, the faithful core have stayed on. So that’s me, Lara [Stubbs], and Pete [Sorel-Cameron], who has been with us since 2009. And the fourth bloke, just as it happens, has changed for the last few shows. We’ve now got a new guy who’s literally just joined and will be with us in Edinburgh. It’s fun.

"To be honest, it freshens it up. It means that someone brings something different. The vocal blend is slightly different. It just makes it a little more interesting, because the same four people going round and round the country doing the same thing, you know, we could get a little bit tired of each other."

This renewed freshness marks a return following a year's break from the Fringe, brought on because, as Castell candidly admits, "we didn’t really have a strong enough idea."

"Tom was just moving to the States. Also, a bit of it is that you don’t want to stay on the treadmill for the sake of it. I think people kind of see through that if you just cash in on another appearance just because we’ve got a bit of a following up in Edinburgh. So I think it was the right thing to do."

In many ways, it's odd to hear Castell talk so self-critically about an act which is, to all intents and purposes, consciously silly and unashamedly fun. Besides, if this sounds like an admission of a dip in form, Barbershopera's response to a year avoiding the cold north suggested otherwise. Their YouTube postcard, 'Edinburgh (Not Gonna Go)' saw them in typically fine fettle, blending impressive harmonic arrangements with thoroughly ludicrous rhymes.

However, puncturing the rarified—not to mention competitive—world of barbershop singing with couplets such as "Let's live together like two peas in a pod / Let's love each other like the Christians love God" has served to make the foursome enemies as well as friends.

"We’ve annoyed some hardcore barbershop people! They don’t like what we do with the form. Apparently, we’re flippant in what we do, and disregarding in the way we approach the timbre and the voicings and the harmonies. Things like that.

"But it’s not about that. For me, anyway, and I hope for audiences it’s about comedy, and the entertainment factor that you’re having everything sung at you a cappella. The harmony is there. You know, the harmonies are nice and we’ve got great singers in the group. But it’s never set out to be a barbershop quartet. That was just our nice little way of packaging up our little thing. You know, it’s a comedy show."

It's a fair point: it is comedy that has remained the constant through three shows of increasingly eclectic musical adventurings – that and joyously silly plotlines. Since Toni and the Guys (a Eurovision-style barbershop contest victory is jeopardised by the recruitment of a woman into the barbershop quartet), through The Barber of Shavingham (the Shavingham Shantymen find themselves short of a tenor when Johnny Johnson jumps—or was he pushed?—to his death in Norfolk) and Apocalypse? No! (the four horsemen are dispatched; they get lost on the way), nicely-lofted gobbets of satire can't diminish what is essentially a lot of fun. In a slight change of tack, however, their fourth outing attempts an adaptation of The Three Musketeers.

One might reasonably expect, however, a much modified outing for Dumas' heroes: "It’s a much sillier version of that story. But the basics are still in place: you know, D’Artagnan arranges a duel with the other three musketeers; then they get together; then they have to go and save the king; and the evil cardinal’s there. It’s a real joy, actually, doing an adaptation. Really, really fun."

Plus, one presumes, plenty of scope for preposterous French accents? "Well, I don’t want to give too much away," demurs Castell. "We can’t really get away with having the whole show in outrageous French accents, but we wanted to have some fun with it."