Breaking News[author-post-rating] (3/5)

We live in a world, so they say, far too full of information. As we all try to come to terms with the biggest shift in knowledge dissemination since the invention of the printing press, the best minds struggle to understand how it is affecting our behaviour. In Breaking News, a collaboration between the National Theatre of Iceland and Va Va Voom, director Sara Marti imagines a fantasy where this world comes to breaking point. It’s an intricately created piece of puppet theatre, but seems to focus too much on the printed word and news.

Breaking News is split into three broad sections, each of which follow the story of a red dressing gown as his/her world becomes crowded with information. At the start, the dressing gown (operated by two women, each with an arm through a sleeve) sits at a breakfast bar switching between the radio, the ‘Banana’ laptop, the ‘Banana’ phone, the TV and the newspaper, becoming overwhelmed by news stories. We then watch a miniature version of the figure go gallivanting around a pop-up newspaper world before heading home for breakfast.

The problem is, it doesn’t really make a point beyond “too much information is bad”. It all looks pretty enough (including intriguing projections from Pierre-Alain Giraud and Ingi Bekk) but doesn’t offer any kind of alternative and isn’t nuanced in its condemnations. This dressing gown is lonely, but there’s seemingly no way out.

By mainly using the written and printed word in the pop-up version of the world and subsequent projections, Marti limits the scope of the piece so that images, videos and pretty much the entire internet are sidelined. This is probably down to necessity of making the piece work, but they do feel conspicuous by their absence.

S. Sunna Reynisdottir and Irena Stratieva do a job job of emoting with only a dressing gown, but sometimes the gestures and movement do feel a little unsubtle. They are accompanied beautifully, however, by Soley Stefansdottir’s music and soundscape, which keep in time perfectly with the events on stage and add an extra layer of melancholy. But though Breaking News is well orchestrated, it sometimes feels like the simple narrative and subject matter would be more suited to the realm of the short film rather than the urgency of debate afforded by the theatre.

Breaking News is at Summerhall until 25 August. For more information and tickets visit the Edinburgh Fringe website.