The Ritual
In the darkness of the Banshee Labyrinth in Edinburgh’s historic old town, riddled with crypts and underground passages where generations lived and died in squalor, to the broken beat of the bodhran and with the rattle of metal gates it begins, the summoning of the Master to find his chosen victim, the single most terrifying being in –
What do you mean, he’s locked out and can’t get in without an invitation? Fortunately, the capacity crowd in the basement room are already tipsy enough to fall for the lure, though they require some coaxing to be sufficiently coordinated to conduct the first steps of The Ritual, performed by Steffen Hånes and his enraptured acolytes, Living Smoke Machine and Little Tech Booth Drummer Boy.
Spooky and a little bit camp in his high-collared black velour cloak, red-lined and with plenty of swish, demonstrated repeatedly to the accompaniment of his overture when anything seems to be flagging in the show, like Pavlov’s dogs the audience cheer the antics of running up and down the aisle, demonstrating that a conditioned and inebriated audience might not be the best judge of merit.
The eventual completion of The Ritual akin to the always-imminent arrival of Godot, it is a long time coming for little payoff, a holding pattern of juvenile antics and a dozen lines repeated over and over, the slow death of contemptuous overfamiliarity without progression, a spectacle mesmerising only in the astonishment of how little creativity or actual material is required to stage a performance which masquerades as a show.
The Ritual continues at the Snug at the Banshee Labyrinth on Niddry Street until Sunday 24th August
