The Guardian 14 July 2022

A big plus point in going outdoors to stage Jules Verne’s escapade is you have room aplenty to tether a hot-air balloon. The one that appears here, in the final leg of the global journey of Phileas Fogg, is a plump patchwork of primary colours, looking radiant against a backdrop of trees, hills and a river. It joins an inflatable sphinx and a blow-up elephant on the lawn outside the theatre.

Oddly, our intrepid explorers – Richard Colvin’s Fogg, joined by Blythe Jandoo’s tomboy Jean disguised as Passepartout and Nalân Burgess’s emancipated princess Aouda – make no attempt to travel in the balloon. Rather, they stand nearby, singing a musical-style song. They imply their journey instead of enacting it. [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).