When a pair of chalk and cheese pirates are marooned on a small desert island, they can only hope to be rescued, or to find treasure that might assuage their plight. But this might be hampered slightly when they are both slightly daft, and talk almost entirely in rhyming couplets.
The Wreck of the Queen Thomasina is a curious beast of a play, having been tugged all the way from New York City to Edinburgh to blow its load across the Fringe stage. Needless to say, this rhyming farce of tragicomic glee is pretty much everything you could expect or hope for in fringe theatre.
Crumb and Nickel manage to be a perfect pair of characters to bounce off one other. The elder Scots lookout and the young, naïve cook manage to each fall into the other’s folly while spinning their poetic dialogue, sometimes really forcing through a bad rhyme, to brilliant comic effect. The writing here is excellent and delivered in full accent with no small measure of charm and charisma. Even more surprising that, even at the brief 45 minutes it runs, it’s been able to win the audience into feeling genuine emotional connections to the silly pair, as things slide from boisterous bathos into heartstring-tugging, tear-jerking seriousness.
There’s nothing else to say here other than this play is itself a treasure. Catch it before its run ends.