Edinburgh review: Where Do All the Dead Pigeons Go? (Summerhall)
© Christopher Bishop
There’s a small but growing subset of Edinburgh Fringe shows in which a performer sits talking at a table loaded with electronic equipment of some sort. But none is likely to be as offbeat or simply peculiar as this strange bit of storytelling, part art-project, part-performance art, from Scott Turnbull.
He sits at the desk accompanied by a projector, the kind teachers used in days of yore, where the drawings you make on transparent plastic sheets are beamed up onto the wall behind you. And he draws, in simple strokes that create a whole world.
The idea is that he is Darren Smith, from Redcar, the north-east’s first man on the moon. We see him taking off in cartoon strip of a rocket sailing through space and arriving at a space station that looks remarkably like a Redcar two-up, two down. Then we see him standing in front of us, in NASA T-shirt, addressing us via space link – "I’ll start by saying hello, Stockton," he announces, deadpan – and telling us about the life of extreme boredom he now lives.
In the gaps between what he says, the dysfunctional life he has left emerges; this is a man without a girlfriend, without love, for whom the companionship of a roughly-drawn robot named after the former Middlesborough captain Tony Mowbray seems enough. His mother rings him on the mobile, worried.
It’s hard to convey the sheer oddity of this show, which veers constantly into the surreal, as Turnbull’s drawings – which sometimes move by the primitive device of putting two plastic sheets over each other and wiggling one of them – conjure the faces of members of the audience, of two foxes mating, or of life on the moon. The question in the title is never, as far as I could see, answered. Nor is the question of whether he has truly left Redcar, or whether he is lost in the space of his own mind.
It’s all mildly diverting, but then suddenly – towards the close – the character’s life spins out of control and he gets back into his space capsule. The conclusion is extraordinarily moving – all the more so because the manner of its telling is so original. A man drawing at a desk to music. A real one-off.
Where Do All The Dead Pigeons Go? runs at Summerhall at 10.05pm until 27 August (not 17 or 24).
