Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews: Imprints / Courier

Imprints, Summerhall ★★★★

Keep your wits about you for this appropriately tricksy, sometimes elusive but beautifully put together show from young company the Palimpsest Project. For a work that’s ultimately about memory, Imprints is just as unreliable, misleading and red herring-filled as its subject matter, and it takes something of a clear head to work your way through its maze of figures, objects and incidents from a barely recalled teenage encounter at a Christian summer camp.

Charlie’s back home from art school, which means awkward conversations with former schoolmates from whom she’s effectively moved on. Among the good-old-days memories that keep the ragtag group connected, however reluctantly, are blurry images of tents, a campfire, a deer, and a mysterious guitar-playing figure: Max.

The Palimpsest Project’s acting foursome – Beckett Gray, Elmira Oberholzer, Leela Villette Gaunt and Sam Critchlow – collide together in-character narration with live cinema lovingly created using miniature desktop models in their fittingly slippery but intricate creation, conjuring often quite magical on-screen images from random detritus – wire figures featuring prominently – as if mirroring a mind searching for sense amid fractured memories. Even their not-quite-literal surtitles get in on the act: it’s hard not to find significance when spoken and written texts slide tantalisingly apart. Enjoyably, the story that emerges piece by piece seems at first a dark thriller, heading towards inevitable violence, only to swerve in another direction entirely in the show’s second half.

Yes, there are threads left untied, and not all possibilities hinted at are thoroughly explored. Likewise, the Palimpsest Project’s actors probably devote more energy to set-up than they do to pay-off, with the result that the show feels somewhat front-loaded. But Imprints is an assured, confident creation, one whose form rewardingly mirrors its themes, and whose storyline – once finally uncovered – is genuinely touching. Amid the take-a-gamble unpredictability of the Fringe, it’s a joy to discover a recently established company with interesting things to say, and clever ways of saying them.

• Until 25 August

Courier, ZOO Playground ★★★

There’s a great Fringe show yet to be made about food delivery cyclists – something hard-hitting about exploitation, desperation, motivation, even a sense of self slowly eroding. Writer/performer Piers MacKenzie’s often chucklesome solo show is none of those things, but then again it never claims nor sets out to be. Instead, he’s Benny, Falmouth’s No. 1 Deliveroo cyclist, and he’s having a particularly eventful day trying to track down an elusive delivery address, involving collisions, missed turns and memorable encounters with flirty nurses, precocious six-year-olds, and a particularly loathesome city boy planning a surprise party for his better half.

If the humour in MacKenzie’s creation remains somewhat on the broad side, that’s maybe an intentional set-up for the play’s final act, which slides – somewhat disconcertingly, it has to be said – into far darker, more challenging territory, and which casts a very different light over all that’s gone before.

In fact, Courier is a somewhat disconcerting show overall, tonally a little short of convincing, but still full of nicely judged gags and memorable if hastily sketched-in characters. MacKenzie is a bustling, bumbling, eager-to-please performer, but he struggles to convey the darkness that would make the show’s conclusion more powerful. There’s a strong idea here, but failing to acknowledge the difficult realities of delivery life doesn’t help to articulate it either.

• Until 24 August
• The Edinburgh Fringe runs until 25 August 
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