Edinburgh review: Once (Assembly George Square)

By the end of Once, the stage is littered with stray arrows. He is a lousy shot, Cupid; a tottering, tiptoeing weakling with crumpled wings and a floral thong. Russian clowns Derevo take him to task. Every arrow that misses its target hits some poor heart hard. Each one is a love story that goes awry. Arrows wound after all, and through Cupid’s incompetence, Death finds room to dance.

One wayward shot skewers Anton Adasinsky’s clapped-out clown, a bundle of rags who moons after the doll-like Elena Yarovaya. She daydreams about handsome sailors and suited suitors, and, with his greasepaint beard and beaky red nose, he’s no looker. No matter how he tries to catch her eye, she waltzes past him time and again.

Returning to the Fringe almost 20 years after it set the festival alight, Once shows the lengths we’ll go to for love – the ends of the earth, if necessary. Gorgeously strange, if a little faded with time, it loops into a charred surrealism, as its mere mortals are tossed this way and that by supernatural forces: angels armed with rainclouds; wild policemen in leathers and manic, deathly shamans. That cack-handed cupid too, of course. What starts out cute as a cartoon grows into a wild, nightsweat dream.

Folly leavens its melancholy, and there’s a woozy playfulness in the way painted seascapes come to life and clowns zoom off on shooting stars. But Once is a show with a heavy heart and, as its hapless clown pines his life away, it makes clear both how easily romance can hit the rocks and that we’re all lighthouses on the lookout.

Once runs at Assembly George Square Theatre until 29 August (except 15 and 22).

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