Tom Kwei
Upon entry to Nathan Penlington’s wonderfully creative Choose Your Own Documentary, each audience member is given a small clicker remote. At various points of his moving and often hilarious tale, Penlington allows a democracy to bloom in the Gilded Balloon as we mere voyeurs are given the opportunity to vote on where we want him to go in the story.
This clever concept is homage to ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books, an incredibly popular children’s series of years gone by, that Penlington contextualises and explains skilfully in the opening moments of the show. Essentially, the books take the reader from the passive observer to the active adventurer, offering up choice and consequence on the turn of every page as the participant makes their own choices in typically fantastical realms.
The meat of the show however is more Penlington’s own personal quest, one in which he is attempting to track down the mysterious owner of a diary found in a used copy of a CYOA book bought online. In the bullied writings of this child Penlington spots a kinship with his own younger self, and wishes to meet the man and discuss the novels as well as his troubled past.
Behind the host, a large screen hangs which plays out the consequence of each choice offered to the audience. At the beginning of the search for example we are asked to choose how the host should go about starting to find the owner, my own audience chose a tarot reading and behind Penlington a clip played of him visiting a soothsayer and gaining advice.
Along with Penlington’s warm stage presence, the slick editing of the various clips that play must also be lauded. There is a genuine documentary aesthetic running throughout the story that only adds to what becomes an oddly compelling story of one man essentially searching for a much younger version of his self.
Obviously to detail the plot any further is arbitrary with the possible 1,566 iterations available, but my own personal journey was a captivating, moving ride – one featuring a delightfully philosophical librarian and a moving paean to childhood love. Where you will go with Penlington is up to the nature of the audience and the roll of the dice, but whatever path you do end up taking in Choose Your Own Documentary, I can guarantee that you will be moved and enlightened.
Nathan Penlington: Choose Your Own Documentary is at the Gilded Balloon (Venue 14) until 25 August. For more information and tickets visit the Edinburgh Fringe website.