Burning Down The Horse - Friesian Underbelly Bristo Square - Review

The Trojan Horse is legendary, a mythological tale of trickery, soldiers hidden into a vast wooden horse wheeled into the city of Troy under the guise of being a gift. Referenced on several occasions in tales such as The Odyssey, you would be forgiven for thinking it’s a topic that wouldn’t suit a comedy makeover but theatre company Fishing 4 Chips have taken up residence at the Edinburgh Fringe to prove that soldiers hiding in a wooden horse (that may or may not have had a beak and wings) is exactly the right recipe for laughter.

Burning Down The Horse, calling the Friesian Underbelly Bristo Square home, is an immersive theatrical experience which creates soldiers of its audiences. Odysseus (Freddie Walker) addresses us as his army, sitting inside the wooden horse waiting to be wheeled into Troy, sitting among us are Ajax (Sam Stafford) and Echeon (Sean Wareing), fellow soldiers and second in command Acamus (Lottie Lemoss) is ensuring that we are all following the rules of Odysseus.  But Echeon doesn’t want to fight, and when it is revealed that the horse’s carpenter Epeius (William Huke) has somehow become trapped inside his creation, a desperate attempt to save the soldiers from the dangerous mission begins with hilarious results.

Walker’s Odysseus is power hungry and demanding, bossing everyone around and seeing only success for the Trojan mission, blinded perhaps by his own big head as Walker has the audience laughing throughout. As Acamus, Lemoss walks the fine line between devotion to her leader and being easily lead by the charming Epeius, who plots an escape, trying to remain faithful whilst getting caught up in the plotting.

Ajax, played by Stafford and Echeon, played by Wareing, become audience favourites seated among us from the start and delighting with their attempts to either live up to their names and simply make it of the horse alive. What starts as a meeting of soldiers preparing for war spirals into chaos as Huke’s Epeius somehow leads a strange revolution against the power of Odysseus in a show of democracy as plans to burn down the horse to thrown around and attempts to win over the leader get more and more extreme, and it is all very very funny.

There is something wonderfully horrible histories about this production, myths and legends brought to life in the most hilarious and interactive of manners. The audience are encouraged to join in with the fun, and are easily brought into loving some characters and hating others in your classic underdog versus power story. It is also clear that the cast are having fun and as things become more and more chaotic, laughter raises the roof.

Overall, Burning Down The Horse is an adventure of a production where the audience become entirely involved. The space is used cleverly with characters moving throughout the seating and audience members brought up on stage. It is fun, silly and laugh out loud with the small cast able to bring this story of military uprising against their obsessive leader to life in a highly entertaining way.