Make it Beautiful Theatre Company claim in their Fringe blurb that audience members will need to, ‘Buckle in for the hour of your life,’ which is a very bold statement. They absolutely fails to deliver on the promise.

Edinburgh is bursting at the seams with improv and some of it is very, very good indeed. World class in fact.  This does not fall into that category.

Improv needs a gimmick. No one will go to see a bread and butter, ‘improv show’ unless it offers a tantalising USP. In Beautiful Theatre’s case they brandish two: Guest appearances by the likes of Elf Lyons (who had been billed as today’s guest, but couldn’t make it) and a single themed story based on an audience member’s dream.

Today’s celeb is Lorna Rose Treen, who is unquestionably the greatest talent on the stage; the audience dream is shared by a young French woman about a pitch at a senior business meeting in a theme park in Tokyo, on a donut, with board members arriving on Tarzan swings.

Treen is blindfolded and earguarded while the dream is shared, so she’s supposed to be clueless. The trouble is, within about a minute of Treen joining the fray the Beautiful Theatre team have essentially told her what the dream is, certianly enough to allow her to join in with confidence.

The troupe of five (six if you include the sound engineer) include two instrumentalists (keys, cello, violin and bodrum), none of whom greatly contribute. Rather, they provide an amiable soundtrack to proceedings. The improvistas themselves pace the stage delivering a standard fare of their artform that often veers away from the story they’ve been tasked with delivering and, for the last 15 minutes, feels very improv-adjacent to the dream they started out on.

The audience for today’s show were obviously improv devotees and they seemed happy enough with what was on show, but aside from Treen, who added a star to the rating, this was sub-optimal.

The Dream Machine is at Upstairs at Pleasance Courtyard until Sat 29 Aug 2026