A clumsily-written farce about modern-day grave robbing
David is a modern-day grave digger, or “covert excavator” as he prefers. He’s spent “5 years at the very top, never caught”. One evening, while working solo on an excavation, an excited man in a Hawaiian shirt turns up wielding a child’s beach spade, perhaps a little too keen to get digging. But he knows the deal, and both are terrified of David’s boss Tony. So they get down to breaking into a grave. Fool’s Gold attempts to build a farce around this strange-bedfellows dynamic, but is too clumsily written to strike paydirt.
Malcolm Webb’s unnamed new grave robber channels Hugo in The Vicar of Dibley: bumbling and buffoonish, but with a warm heart. His chemistry with Ben Whittle’s David ensures a sense of momentum, and this is the highlight of the show. It’s clear that Fool’s Gold desperately wants to be funny, and occasionally achieves it: a headphone-wearing jogger runs right through the grave robbing without realising, in a great piece of visual comedy; a Benny Hill chase scene evokes the golden ages.
But all too often the script mistakes randomness for comedy. There’s little rhyme or reason to these interjections, other than being surprising; often, they’re of a sexual nature. Webb’s character refers repeatedly to being called a “slag”, although there’s no real prompt for this. Nuts magazine makes an appearance for a masturbation joke, but doesn’t make sense in the story. This sort of “lol so random” humour was briefly popular in the early 2010s, but here comes across as lazy and derivative.
All the best farces thrive on intelligent construction: a series of comic set pieces builds towards an ultimately hilarious payoff. But in Fool’s Gold, things just happen one after the other because that’s what it says in the script. A serviceable overarching plot about the diggers’ psychopathic boss, and David’s ex-grave robbing partner mysteriously vanishing, would work if the comedy was stronger. But as it stands, the biggest crime Fool’s Gold commits is its lack of internal logic, in both its humour and its plot.
Late-night shows can benefit from the fact that the audience are likely to be drunk, and Fool’s Gold makes great use of a striking ghost costume to tempt people off the street. This seems to be effective this evening, and an intimate and inebriated crowd genuinely seems to enjoy what unfolds. But a late show also means sober reviewers like me can’t help but think they could have just gone to bed an hour earlier.
A disappointing script and over-reliance on lazy humour mean Fool’s Gold isn’t so much a goldmine, but rather a duffer.
Show Listing: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/fool-s-gold
LISTINGS INFORMATION:
Venue: theSpace on the Mile
Dates: Aug 7th–15th, 17th–22nd
Time: 23:20 (60 mins)
Ticket prices: £12
Fringe box office: 0131 226 0000 / www.edfringe.com