If you look hard enough you can find the odd superhero at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. As well as Bat-Fan, James Wilson-Taylor’s comic take on the history of Batman at the Pleasance Courtyard, there’s also Lycra and laughs at Zoo every night in a show called R.I.O.T.
It’s ... Well, what is it? A comic metafiction about fictional heroes. A dance piece. A satire. A feminist rewrite of superhero tropes. A loving tribute to comic books. Yes, it’s all of those. Oh, and you can throw in references to the Street Fighter video game and Kill Bill (Vol 1) while you’re at it.
The creation of choreographer Joseph Mercier and his company Panic Lab, it’s the story of Captain Patriot and his sidekick called Sidekick, and it takes us from camp sixties Adam West Batman jokiness to post Frank Miller nasty realism.
Full disclosure. I don’t have much time for superheroes these days. And the bits of R.I.O.T. that I didn’t much care for – the endless plot exposition; the cardboard drama were the things I hated most about the recent Ant-Man movie too) – were the bits that that stuck closest to the source material. Mercier at least has the excuse that he has to mirror the form in order to deconstruct it, I suppose.
Thankfully, though, the deconstruction is amusing. R.I.O.T. has fun questioning said source material, asking why do superheroines wear high heels (and why should they conform to teenage boys’ idea of “sexiness”) and stating unambiguously that superhero origin stories are “boring”. (Very true. In my superhero reading days first issues were always the ones I was least interested in; Hollywood’s obsession with superhero reboots suggests I may be alone in this).
But the show’s greatest achievement is surely the “fight scenes”. This might not be immediately apparent for anyone used to big-budget smackdowns. And to be fair, they do go on a bit too long on occasions.
But what we have here are four dancers elegantly, acrobatically acting out the pantomime of conflict. The more you tune in to what they are doing the more impressive the achievement is. For anyone sick of the sterile video game aesthetic of contemporary CGI effects, this is a rather wonderful alternative.
R.I.O.T. continues at Zoo (Venue 124), 140 The Pleasance at 8.30pm until August 31 (except Wednesday, August 19).
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