Leo Still Dies In The End is a one-woman show that dissects the popular 1997 film Titanic. That film has a running time in excess of three hours, but, being an Edinburgh Fringe performance, this show has a running time of a mere sixty minutes. Writer and performer Alice Fishbein has condensed Titanic to its core, iconic, and sometimes questionable moments.

This is a show that you could imagine as a PowerPoint presentation that has got out of hand. With sometimes chaotic visual aids, and an incredible enthusiasm for and minute knowledge of the original film, Fishbein knows her subject, inside and out.

Having introduced us to the concept of what we’re about to see, we then get the first half of the show. This involves choosing which scenes from the first half of the film will be performed, verbatim, by Alice, to the audience. There are some critical points here: the wheel used to choose the scenes has ten options on it, but only around four are performed. This is, we suspect, for the copyright reasons hinted at in Fishbein’s introduction.

What this wheel of chance means is that no two performances of this show can ever be guaranteed to be the same. I’m sure either Fishbein or someone on her team has done the maths on the probability of two shows generating the same scenes, in the same order, but those must be incredibly long odds.

The scenes are chosen, then performed, meaning that the narrative of this first half of the show is not linear. You might see a scene from an hour into the film’s narrative, before looping back around to the start. It’s to Fishbein’s immense credit that she can not only recall all ten scenes, but can also contextualise them in relation to what you’ve already seen.

It is really going to help if you’re familiar with the original text, but, as Fishbein has outlined the basics in her introduction, you’ll probably manage to find your way through the performance if James Cameron’s epic tale on a big boat has somehow escaped your attention up until now.

The second half of the show is more linear, although again, for reasons of a lack of time, significant cuts have been made. Fishbein acknowledges that her focus is the love story between Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), and that the rest of it is just some historic stuff happening on a ship.

Fishbein’s choice of scenes allows her to critique the more questionable aspects of the film, including the enduring question: was there room on the door for Jack? She also takes to task Cameron’s script, and some of the narrative elements. This is all done at a riotous speed, and with various facts about the film, the production process and, in particular, the score, added into Fishbein’s performance of the scenes.

The whole thing is incredibly frenetic. Fishbein works the audience well, and whilst there has been an obvious attempt to anglicise some of the script, there are a couple of places in which it would be helpful to have an understanding of specifically American terminology, because there were a couple of moments that required thinking about what Fishbein was trying to say, and which flattened the atmosphere in the room slightly as a consequence.

There’s a small issue, which is specific to how shows are staged at the Edinburgh Fringe, that means that you aren’t guaranteed to get the same technician at each show, and the unknown nature of the first half of this show can mean that sometimes lighting cues are slow to follow Fishbein’s lead as she utilises the full width of the stage in the Dram at the Gilded Balloon Patter House. But Fishbein’s love for the film shines through, and her enthusiasm obliterates any tiny niggles which might affect the performance, or the show overall.

This is absolutely a love letter to an epic film which has gone down in cinematic history for many, many reasons – some good, some bad, some just controversial, and some, like aspects of the plot, just confused. Fishbein is not afraid to confront the film’s faults, but does so from a place of such obvious love and warmth that you want to watch her perform the entire three-plus hours of the film so that she can tell you everything about every tiny moment.

Epically funny and brilliantly conceived, this is an iceberg-sized amount of fun for anyone who loved something as a kid and wants to still love that thing now.

Leo Still Dies In The End continues at Dram in the Gilded Balloon Patter House at 22:00, daily until 15 August.

Images provided by KablamoEntertainment.com (Caeli Smith)