The One Couple Show
★★★☆☆ Original
ZOO Playground (Venue 186): Sun 11 – Sat 17 Aug 2024
Review by Florence Cruickshanks.
The One Couple Show is an autobiographical love story between Pirita Tuiski and Thabo Mokolobate, detailing their lives before and after they met, playing ZOO Playground for the first two weeks of the Fringe.
Tuiski is a dance artist who works with movement and storytelling, Mokolobate is a spoken word artist who works with music and poetry. Having collaborated together for the last five years on various projects, the One Couple Show has provided them with the opportunity to display the full range of their skills in physical movement, singing, comedy and word pictures.
Thabo Mokolobate and Pirita Tuiski in The One Couple Show.
It’s a lot to cover in a performance of this length, especially when some comedy and (gentle) audience participation is thrown in at the start. These admittedly multi-talented performers are accompanied by an evocative soundscape by Nik Paget-Tomlinson.
The couple come from very different cultures – she is from Finland and he is from South Africa. And although the tone of the performance is generally upbeat, they reveal that they both had childhood problems. Their life together has not been free of stress, either, due to initial prejudice, the restrictions of the Covid lockdown forcing them to get married online, and their traumatic attempts to obtain Visas.
impressively performed,
The One Couple Show is funny, sad, and impressively performed, but maybe the skills of both performers are spread too thinly in this production. No-one is credited with any overall direction of the piece, which means that it never quite knows what it doing with all that talent.
Indeed, the challenges of displaying such a wide range of skills in such a brief performance have not been met – so the surfeit of ability simply tends to detract from the overall effect. It is nevertheless an enjoyable, engaging and thought provoking offering, an original, which is in contrast to much of the entertainment provided by this year’s Fringe.
Running time: One hour (no interval)
ZOO Playground (Playground 1), High School Yards EH1 1LZ. (Venue 186)
Sunday 11 August – Saturday 17 August 2024
Daily: 5.45pm
Details and tickets at: Book here
Website: www.piritatuisku.com
Facebook: @PiritaT
Facebook: @tmokolobate
Instagram: @pirita.tuisku
Instagram: @thabo_mokolobate
Linktree: @piritatuisku
ENDS
