You can always count on the fact that no matter what you expect at the Edinburgh Fringe, there will be an act that brings something so utterly absurd, experimental and downright bonkers that you can’t help but enjoy it.
Sardinian theatre group Batisfera has brought such a production to the Festival this year in its UK debut with La Grande Guerra Degli Orsetti Gommosi, or The Gummy Bears’ Great War, a piece performed entirely in subtitled Italian by performers Valentina Fadda and Leonardo Tomasi using spotlight lamps, a handful of props and literally hundreds of tiny Gummy Bears telling the tragic tale of the day the Gummy Bear people decided to declare total war upon the nation of the Dinosaurs.
The brilliant lunacy of the piece is how it is presented with a largely unwavering seriousness. The various chapters of the story, narrated with a deep and resonant voice-over, talk poetically about the actions of characters called “Rasperry Red”, or “Lemon Yellow”. The language is poetically phrased in the same sort of sombre tones and diction that Hemingway might perhaps have used if A Farewell to Arms had featured the existential fears of confectionary animals.
That said, the play is massively funny, and definitely more fun when the Gummy Bears are the focus. The Dinosaur nation are played by Fadda and Tomasi in human form as soulless bureaucrats stamping documents and discussing treaties. It’s an interesting idea and a vague commentary on the blithe nature of powerful nations that is somewhat timely, but it just isn’t quite as entertaining as the hijinks of the fatalistic sugar bears.
It’s also a brief enough experience, at a mere thirty minutes, that the joke never becomes stretched too thin. Even if the ending doesn’t quite land with the punch you’d hope, you’ll have a heck of a lot of fun getting there. Just be sure that if you aren’t fluent in Italian, you find a position where you can see the subtitles which are, presumably by necessity, projected in front of the performance table rather than on the wall above. It’s not a huge venue, and being able to read it might make all the difference when trying to understand the great tragedy of The Gummy Bears’ Great War.