Les Amis D'Onno's Vintage Cabaret @ Summerhall

Les Amis D’Onno are a small amateur company, full of skilled performers with undoubtedly unique skills. They hail from the Borders, and the dedication and work they've put into this show is apparent, as is the lively beating heart of community that is best demonstrated by the easy banter had between performers.

The company have won awards for their work in the past, they're family run, and the pull of small theatre companies doing independent projects is like a theatre fan’s catnip. It's these kinds of projects that keep innovation in performance alive and well, and Les Amis D’Onno possess a markedly unusual set of talents that is unequivocally rare in the Edinburgh theatre scene.

The show is an auction of an adventurous gentleman’s esoteric items, the curios of a Captain Cuthbert Cruikshanks, but the planning of the show itself was little more than a shoddy outline, into which the real performances were shoved haphazardly. The sword throwing was great, as was the escapology, and the band played some really good tunes, but in the context of the show, very few of the acts made complete sense, thus rendering the auction aspect entirely pointless in the first place. The saving grace of the auction part of the show was Antoine, bringing the comic relief to the main auctioneer's straight man,

It also doesn’t hurt the appeal of Vintage Cabaret that the magician/lead singer/guitarist of the house band resembles the unborn love child of Orlando Bloom and Alfie Allen, and that the Roman riding performance is mind blowing, nerve wracking and very smooth. Yet Vintage Cabaret is a performance in desperate need of a re-draft, and as it stands, would be more at home at a county fair or a town hall than in one of the premiere spaces for new theatre in Edinburgh.