Mock Tudor @ Pleasance Courtyard

If Mock Tudor were a school play and your child were in it, it would be a charming thing to see on a Tuesday evening. As a play about present-day Tudor impersonators at Hampton Court Palace presented to the masses at the Edinburgh Fringe, it’s a painfully unfunny comedy populated by uninteresting characters.

For its humour, the piece incessantly tries to exploit the gap between the era the actors are dressed for, and the era the play is set in. But as it turns out, you can eat Jaffa Cakes while wearing a stomacher, and pair glasses with a kirtle without anyone being deeply confused, and its entertainment value quickly wears off.

Dressed in aptly ill-fitting Elizabethan garb, a History Fan Girl/Anne Boleyn, a Shy Sensitive Lad/Henry VIII, the Woman from the Gift Shop/Catherine of Aragon and an Overenthusiastic Aspiring Actress/wench face their Sleazy Manager and his plans to make them all redundant. Technically, Mock Tudor ticks all the boxes. It has a central central conflict (the Tudor impersonators are to be replaced by Google glasses!) a budding romance (Henry VIII x Anne Boleyn) and some hurdles along the way (Henry kisses the wrong girl! His dad recently died!). It is exactly because of this box-ticking, however, that Lily Bevan’s piece feels so unimaginative. So when the central conflict isn’t resolved to the good guys’ advantage, it doesn’t come across as an interesting narrative choice but merely highlights that no one in the audience actually cares.