It is always good to find something utterly different in Edinburgh and ¡El Conquistador! is a long way from the traditional well-made play.
Its solo stage performer, Thaddeus Phillips as Polonio, is an ordinary countryman in Colombia who decides to travel to Bogota with his best friend, a pot plant. His plan is to make a fortune by becoming the star of one of his beloved telenovelas. As he explains, these are Latin American soap operas, popular around the globe with the notable exceptions of the UK and USA.
Once he hits the city, this innocent finds a job as a doorman at a swanky skyscraper. This throws him into a society that mirrors the one that he watches on TV every day. There are romance and glamour, drink and drugs and even a murder.
The story shows this latter-day Columbus becoming a crutch on whom the residents rely and also an unlikely figure of lust for no fewer than three women simultaneously.
Where ¡El Conquistador! is at its finest is in the mix of live acting and film. Polonio regularly disappears from his booth and apparently walks straight into the screen. He also makes great and excessively meticulous use of some adaptable props designed around a single rectangular frame.
All of this is pretty effective up to a point but at 100 minutes, what had originally seemed highly inventive outstays its welcome by half an hour or so. This is a pity since, with greater focus, the piece would have been infinitely stronger.