one4review | On 23, Aug 2025

Cabbage has beautiful make-up, and that’s a trivial comment because the rest of the show, but it really is objectively lovely, and it also enlarges any expression Cabbage has, throws it to the back of the room. Its precision and beauty contrasts with the rest of the costume Cabbage starts out in: an oversized overall more suited to a day of messy redecorating than the hand-crafted clowning with bin bags and podiums we’re treated to. A sharp and whimsical comic sensibility confined in the mundane.

Cabbage is an employee of a multiplex cinema, assigned general dogsbody and, dissatisfied, decides to do some interpretive dance and mad-libs about it. It’s delightful. There’s a love story shimmering in the background, more cult-pop-culture references than you can shake a stick at, and very lovely clowning. The element with the dancing shirt is a particular highlight, but equally delightful – because of the delivery – is throwing bin bags at audience members.

If the make-up is the thing that grabs you, it’s the movement that rounds out the performance: Cabbage clowns – and dances – with their whole self, in and over the furniture, with and within the props. Props/costume is an eliding line in this show, with elaborate outfits so extravagant they function as props, though they’re the finishing sprinkles rather than propping up the performance.

This is a watch-and-wonder sort of show, rather than a belly laughs one. As with anything outwith the mainstream, it will always make a few wonder why they’re there. For the rest of us, playful wonder is fused with adult reality, and we can all escape the world for a while.

Reviewed by Laura
21:45
Underbelly George Square (Buttercup)
Until 25th