Terry Saunders: Figure 8

The clue is in the name: the Fringe Festival is about new and challenging intellectual experiences. Don’t expect to always understand or appreciate what’s going on. Some things will be over your head. But equally, some things will be on the sole of your shoe. Crap is crap, and Terry Saunders’ Figure 8 is crap.

Something unsettling suggests itself to you from the moment you begin navigating the cramped passageways of sweaty rock to the small cave where your day will eventually be ruined. The feeling is confirmed when Saunders comes bounding on stage, looking like he may be doing this to pay for a meal, or a wash. Suddenly your discomfort becomes clear – has this tramp lured you here to expose himself?

Well, sort of. Saunders’ show resembles the primary school show-and-tell of a depressed audio-visual geek, but not a particularly good one. An introductory cartoon played from his laptop stalls repeatedly, and each musical interlude has to be cued up on a hot pink CD player – the kind a 12-year old girl uses to listen to McFly – on stage by Saunders, flicking through every track until he finds the right one. Props are held up for the audience to see – still in their packaging – and the ‘story’ is told by way of stick figures drawn on big bits of card. It’s all got something to do with his favourite singer; don’t ask me what.

Saunders’ delivery, though hardly helped by the frequent technical cock-ups, is embarrassing. He stutters his way through a self-indulgent, incoherent and uninteresting tale whose transparent and mawkish autobiographical elements are announced by conspiratorial nods and hand gestures, as if they weren’t already patently obvious. He repeatedly refers to himself as a storyteller. Is he fuck.