Out of Water

It’s always exciting to be taken out of the city centre. Every year, a few shows kick off with a bus ride to the fringe of the Fringe, and Out of Water promises so much. A performance at the edge of the water on Portobello beach, played at sunrise and sunset like a forgotten ritual. On a balmy evening with the sun on your back, it might be irresistible, but when the skies open and the wind lashes across the sand, the emperor stands naked and shivering in the rain.

When the piquant setting turns on you, what might have been an enchanting walk across the sand becomes a forced march, as the recorded score that’s piped through headphones crackles and fades in the storm. 

The show proper sees a 30-strong community chorus perform a few perfunctory actions (waving, lifting a rope, walking to the sea) against a recorded soundtrack that sketches memories of the ocean awash with clichés. The music is beautiful but the imagery is painfully threadbare – laments of the lost at sea, muted evocations of breathing, ageing and dying.

The chorus is given nothing of consequence to do, with one brief moment of audience interaction and a short song the only moments in which they even register as individuals. The setting is the star of the show, the sea and shore centre-stage; and when they’re having an off night, you’re left with a spectacle that utterly fails to conceal its emptiness.