Theatre / 75 min / £10(£8.50) / PG
Showing @ theSpace on Niddry St, until 25 Aug, 16.00
The oddity of British holiday camps is an experience many of us share. And the laughable similarity they bear to totalitarian states was certainly not lost on Joe Orton. Acclaimed theatre company, Fourth Monkey, are staging The Erpingham Camp, in which after a night’s entertainment goes awry, a revolutionary struggle breaks out between holidaymakers and staff. In performing this farce, Fourth Monkey can scarcely be faulted. They keep the tempo of the action dizzying throughout and successfully stage the scenes of bacchic frenzy. Most importantly, the cast delivers the absurdly witty and caustic dialogue with hilarious sincerity, rarely playing for laughs (something which irked Orton). Almost five decades on, Fourth Monkey demonstrate that The Erpingham Camp has lost none of its resonance.