Z Zamora

This was a great debut for an innovative company at a gorgeous venue. The show excelled when it leaned into the risky and weird, and the audio samples added significantly to the show. Combining classics like Shakespeare with something novel like shibari was a great way to introduce the art form and its potential. I can tell there's deeper potential for this company in the land of the strange & meaningful and would love to see more of this type of work in future Fringes.

I wanted to like this one, and it had some good concepts. Also, the cast was committed and often brave in their performance at key moments. Unfortunately, I struggled a fair bit from an accessibility perspective - the fact that much of the cast was still reading scripts made it pretty hard to hear lines, read lips or tell what characters were responding to from context.

I liked the concept of audience voting, but feel there was a significant trade off when assigning parts meant that actors were relying on scripts, instead of learning a role enough to fully act & react on stage. Especially in a piece relying on a level of audience immersion & participation, I found this a fairly meaningful barrier to following along enough to feel the choices and plot developments were impactful. Some of the layered audio (especially the water) also made it significantly harder to follow, and while the more "performance art" scenes were easier to understand, the overall plot and characterization for 4 out of 6 parts got lost for me.