Murmel Murmel at Edinburgh festival review – boisterous comic elan

Dieter Roth’s 1974 text, Murmel, runs to 176 pages and consists of that single word repeated: murmel, the German verb, to murmur. It should be impossible to stage, but limitations become a liberation in Herbert Fritsch’s production, the final flourish in an Edinburgh international festival programme that has put itself firmly back on the theatrical map under its director, Fergus Lineham.

This is 80 minutes of farce that has more silly walks than Monty Python and more pratfalls than Buster Keaton, yet for all its boisterous comic elan, it offers a textured commentary on the spectacle of theatre and life, the presentation of self and the way we all make fools of ourselves. The joke is on the audience, and although the studied idiocy is definitely not to my personal taste, I found it gripping and surprising. It is like watching somebody’s repressed unconscious run riot.

Delivered by a crack ensemble, the word murmel becomes a cry for help, a shout of protest, a sigh of orgasmic joy, a yelp of nervousness, a screech of horror, a question, a statement of intent and much, much more. But the text always plays second fiddle to Ingo Gunther’s playful score; Fritsch’s brightly coloured design of telescoping flats and moving curtains that have a cheesy, acid-trip quality; and a staging that has its own distinct rhythms and is so cleverly structured it almost feels sculpted.

You could read Murmel Murmel as a comment on a world in which there is too much noise but little meaningful is said. But that would be too literal an approach to a production that has a particular resonance in a UK theatre culture so enslaved to text, and yet has a far more universal appeal as it investigates how we constantly see the world as a stage on which we are in competition to grab the spotlight or cowering from its merciless gaze.

Or, indeed, falling off the stage. This is a world where everyone colludes in their own potential downfall, the human punchlines of a great cosmic joke in which limbs suddenly refuse to work, the spotlight moves, the scenery takes on a life of its own and you trip as you strut. There are frequent casualties as the performers tumble. One knocks fruitlessly on the stage’s invisible fourth wall, demanding to be let back in. The zaniness may sometimes irritate, but the execution cannot but be admired and applauded.

The curtain call is a sublime minidrama all of its own; don’t hurry away.

• At King’s theatre, Edinburgh until 30 August. Box office: 0131-473 2000
  

A sub-editing error resulted in this article incorrectly stating that the ensemble were called the Volksbühne, Berlin. This is actually the theatre where the production was first staged and not the name of the company.