Copperdollar have been creating immersive theatrical events since 2008, their work crossing performance and music genres to effectively appeal to the increasingly interdisciplinary festival scene. The Back of Beyond was originally created for Glastonbury in 2011 and is a great choice to open the Fringe festival, plunging its audience into a hedonistic atmosphere that brings together many of the festival’s favourite flavours – cabaret, music, experimentation.
The theme is the day of the dead and we are greeted by a collective host of charming skeletons, who lean insouciantly in effortlessly strange and elegant poses that feel completely at home round the beautiful Speigeltent interior. Other performers have a more battered, steampunk air in aviator hats and tailcoats, all thickly aged with dust and ghostly chalk. All work as charming clowns, greeting us warmly as old friends and inviting us to join in various interactive dances and games. The evening is woven through with fine aesthetic quality: the costumes are beautiful, and featured elements located around the space, like an illuminated shrine and spindly wishing tree, effectively combine Mexican-gothic with sideshow chic.
What drives the night, though, is music, with a set that progresses through a dizzying array of styles: from remixed hip hop through reggae and electro-swing. It isn’t immediately clear that this is the form: there’s an uneasy opening hour or so in which a significant proportion of the audience feel like they are waiting for something more organised – for a show – to begin. Yet gradually, the interactive features build momentum. There are some great collective dance sequences and play with lights and video. Smaller interactive elements – writing letters to someone else in the room, hanging wishes on the tree, some mad bits of play with blindfolds and limbo – transform this into an event we are part of.
From the moment we arrive, audience members are invited one by one to lie in a coffin in order to be face-painted to join the skeleton crew. There’s something quietly brilliant about converting your audience, one member at a time, over the course of the evening. By the end of the night performers and guests feel as one, an effective image of exactly what the event sets out to achieve.