Kissing A Fool ★★

Experimental theatre is alive and well at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival! Kissing a Fool is proudly billed as a ‘queer clown-cabaret musical tribute to George Michael’, written, devised and performed by Dylan Aiello and Scarlett Stitt.

The audience are invited to experience a musical journey into the tumultuous creative process of one of the greatest artists of a generation and witness the transformation of grief into transcendent creativity through song.

It’s great to see artists pushing the boundaries of what is possible, and Aiello and Stitt certainly seem to be striving do that, but even the wildest of possibilities need curation and careful refinement when it comes to delivering enjoyable and immersive performance art.

The show fails to present a cogent narrative, and its connection with George Michael is regrettably not what those parting with their money might be expecting to see. There are moments of clever choreography and truly passionate performance energy, particularly from Aiello, but the duo let themselves down by trying to deliver too many things in one 60-minute show.

The opening of the piece is encouraging, with physical theatre dance themes which would have been a brilliantly fresh and exciting way to reimagine the later years of George’s life in a new show, but it soon develops into an amalgamation of other styles which became frantic and confusing almost throughout.

The cast exudes confidence and the show is packed with an array of theatrical styles: clowning, physical theatre, mime, singing and more dance styles than you may recognise, but disappointingly there was a distinct lack of execution in delivering any one individual discipline.