Edinburgh Fringe blog: Olivier Martin Salvan on The Ice Hole – A Cardboard Comedy

It’s been 14 years since Pierre Guillois and I have been working together, and we’ve always dreamt of creating a duet. Clowns without being clowns, and inspired more by Anglo-Saxon slapstick, we particularly wanted this project to enable us to reach a wider, more diverse audience.

During the first rehearsal, with cardboard boxes lying around in a corner, we began writing on them with large black markers so they represented the props and sets we imagined for a story that suddenly opened up to infinite possibilities, thanks to this process known since the dawn of time. We wrote the word FJORD on one piece of cardboard, then BIRD on another, and we immediately realised the potential and the power of the imagination, of this ‘poor art’.

Drawing on the experience of our previous success at the 2019 Fringe with Fishbowl, and on the management of props and the poetry we find in them, we have written, step by step, an absurd journey of a man who doesn’t move, but who nevertheless crosses Europe. He will also no doubt tour the world thanks to his colleague who, slight as he is, makes the landscapes, characters and all the elements he meets along the way scroll along behind him.

The show gets its flavour from the contrast between an immobile yet travelling actor, carried along by another performer who is a virtuoso of an uncharted language, and whose overexcited energy is his salvation.

With the idea of this cardboard material at the core of the production, the show then spontaneously takes shape in the spectators’ heads. The entrance into the show is immediate, and the brain miraculously connects the imagination and constructs all of the images. The words and signs on the cardboard immediately establish in the spectator’s imagination, and the images unfold with lightning speed.

After accepting this work of imagination, the audience’s childhood is summoned, and so this show appeals to the audience’s intuition and instinct, from the child who only just knows how to read through to the erudite old man. Everyone has access to this show, with all levels of reading: some will recognise literary references while others will simply enjoy an immobile and hilarious epic.

The Ice Hole: A Cardboard Comedy is at Pleasance Courtyard from 2 to 28 August