SHOCK AND AWE | August 18th 2008

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The Edinburgh Fringe festival is famous for shows that shock (or die trying). Amid all the clowning and lewd puppetry, there's even a play that turns Auschwitz into interactive theatre ...

I wake up, eat a quick breakfast and leave my flat to go to the gas chamber: just another day at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, the biggest live-arts festival in the world.

The Fringe is famous for plays that attempt (sometimes strain) to shock. The menu this year includes titles like "Gentlemen and Strippers" and "Shitty Deal Puppet Theatre Company's Complete History of Oppressed People Everywhere!" But the show getting the most attention for pushing the boundaries of good taste pulls off an impressive feat: it finds a new way to exploit the Holocaust.

"The Factory," mounted by the Badac Theatre Company, a producer of plays "based around human rights issues," turns the death camps of Auschwitz into interactive theatre. "Tony N' Tina's Wedding" meets "Schindler's List".

The papers have been full of preview stories, and the critics have generally praised it, raving about the intensity of the experience. The Guardian even promoted the piece with a flattering profile only one page after a review that lambasted the moral purpose of "Charlie Victor Romeo," a skilfully produced docudrama based on black-box transcripts from real plane crashes.

"The Factory" has only one commercial problem: there's another show called "The Factory," an avant-garde multimedia dance piece, playing a few blocks away, leading to some unfortunate misunderstandings. When I attended the dance-theatre version of "The Factory" last week, a bespectacled hipster, standing in front of me in line, shouted jokingly "To the gas chamber!" before entering the theatre, making him, I would guess, the first person to ever be disappointed that he didn't wind up at Auschwitz.

Anyhow, there's no dancing at the other "Factory," but the audience seemed equally enthusiastic. My wife decided to stay at home, so I stood next to a cheerful Scottish tour guide who told me, "I fancy seeing the reality of it." Before entering the dank basement, where we were to meet our end, an usher broke the mood by asking gently if any of us were claustrophobic. No, we're fine, but thanks for asking, said a very game middle-aged woman. These Nazis were very polite.

Inside the dark, cool basement was the kind of stylish industrial lighting that you might find at a New York coffee bar. Banging on metal plates like members of "Stomp," several angry, scowling Nazis, repeating a few obscenities in a stylised shout, herded us into rows. We were yelled at and pushed around a little, sent into increasingly smaller rooms of this cavernous brick underworld. But the actors playing Jews got the worst of it, dragged several feet, bullied and forced to strip. One actress, dressed in dusty stripes, looked around at the audience, imploring us: "We must do something. What do we do--walk to our death?"

Minutes later, the guard took her down the stairs and into another room. She continued to wail, talking to herself about the need to "die with dignity." One audience member teared up and for some, it was clearly a gruesome, ugly sight, but I couldn't help but notice that behind her on the wall there was a white sign that read "No smoking."

After being gassed by the Nazis, I thought it would be uplifting to then be entertained by some Israelis, so I walked a few hundred feet away to a different theatre in the same complex, the Pleasance Courtyard, to see "The Aluminium Show", a spectacle so mindless and insubstantial that it could have only been created by a people secure in their future. Following in the footsteps of "Blue Man Group" and other such international wordless entertainments, this show features a team of athletic puppeteers who manipulate a variety of shiny wormlike tubes which flop, dance, fall from the rafters and pop out into the audience.

The aluminium is also put to use as couture clothes in a fashion show and turns into a cannon that fires sheets of foil into the audience. Pillow-shaped and round aluminium balls levitate on stage and join together to form a giant puppet monster.

The makers of the show ran out of good ideas about 30 minutes in (how many clever things can you do with aluminium, for god's sake?) but judging by the reactions of the kids in the audience, chances are the show will transfer to London, then Off Broadway and keep running to the delight of tourists--Jew and gentile, black and white, child and childish--until the end of time.

Photo credit: Dick Penn/flickr

(This column is part of a week-long diary about the Fringe festival, published on Economist.com.)