Fantasy themed shows are pretty popular at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. There seems to be a push toward original fantasy stories rather than reheating failing franchises, leaning towards high concept ideas.
Wizards Of Armillaria: The Death Of Magic is a rather bold attempt at epic fantasy. Given the restrictions of fringe theatre, this seems rash, but alas it’s the storytelling, rather than the production that lets it down.
The show opens with an explanation as to how magic came to this world, and how the magical land of Armillaria came to be. This is a bit like the Elvish narrative bit at the start of the Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of The Ring, but with less lighting effects and longer than it needs to be. There’s enough world-building in the first five minutes to be the plot of this 70 minute long show, but alas, we’re only getting started.
After an exciting start we cut back to bar scene, and more world building and plot slowly unfolds. This mushroom-themed fantasy world has a magic problem, with dark forces over-using and over-industrialising the limit resource that is magic. Oh yes, all of this is a blunt climate emergency metaphor as well, because we may as well squeeze as much we can into this already over-stuffed story.
It is ultimately the script that is the problem; rather than trusting the audience to enjoy the many, many puns and fun musical numbers, we get over-explanation after over-explanation. Dense worldbuilding works in novels and video games, but it needs a light and efficient touch for the stage, otherwise it all seems a little bit slow and plodding.
They are some amazing touches; magic is done via stage-hands in dark clothing, so when a wizard casts a spell you can see the ‘magic’ responding. This is a fun touch. The sets are clever and it’s very nicely put together. It’s just a pity that this same attention to detail has also been applied to the dialogue, which is simply too dense.
Under all of the exposition there’s a fun fantasy musical here, but the Dead Parrot Collective need to either strip the setting down or go all in and start their own Critical Role style improv group. Fun, but it could have been so much better.
You can book tickets for the Edinburgh Fringe show here and learn more about The Dead Parrot Collective.
