The Ice Hole: a Cardboard Comedy review

Improbable has worked magic with newspapers and sticky tape, and now Compagnie le Fils du Reseau creates an entire show out of cardboard. You might expect it to be rather flat but au contraire: it is fun, and full of gleeful creative flair.

Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan play a self-satisfied actor and his long-suffering sidekick who, with echoes of Don Quixote, set out on an epic journey across Europe in a quest for the meaning of life. In what might be seen as a joke on poor theatre techniques, they have to make something out of nothing – or at least out of the cardboard that litters the stage.

In the theatre you can travel the entire world and that point is made in a nifty manner here as performers and audience are required to collaborate on the joke that bits of cardboard with writing on them can conjure a universe, from a flock of geese to the moon and the stars and an iceberg. Scottish weather comes in for a good soaking.

There are some terrific set pieces – the actor rescued from a sinking ferry by a wind surfer; a flock of geese in an airplane propeller; an Icelandic hut receding further and further into the distance. Better still, when the joke begins to wear thin, the tension is ramped up by the increasingly fractious relationship between the actor and his latter-day Sancho Panza, who must do all the work while the actor leaves a murderous trail in his wake. Broad but clever comedy delivered just so.