Show name: The Collaborator
Performers: Alex Harvey and Charlotte Mooney
Venue: Pentland Theatre at Pleasance at EICC
Date and time: Friday 14th August, 5pm
Ticket prices: £21.50
Rating: ★★★3/5
Reviewer: Sarah Turnbull
The Collaborator was not what I was expecting. Ockham’s Razor offer an unusually intimate
experience: a small audience, the duo greeting us as we file in, continuing to rig, set and
even change costumes in plain sight. Performed by married couple Alex Harvey and
Charlotte Mooney who first met in circus school 24 years ago. Charlotte gives us a
thumbnail biography as if we’re old friends dropping by. There’s no big “tada”; the show just
sort of begins around us.
The premise is disarmingly personal. As Charlotte tells it, the show began with a casual
question from a friend: had they retired from performing? After years away raising a family,
the answer wasn’t obvious. The piece becomes a return to the stage, a last look back at two
decades of circus work and collaboration. The programme doubles down on that framing,
positioning this Fringe run as a farewell and sketching Ockham’s Razor’s ethos:
contemporary circus that privileges the human over the superhuman, where recognisable
emotions eclipse mere feats.
True to the company’s ethos, this isn’t circus as superhuman spectacle. The programme
talks about making work that is “human and real”, and the show sticks to that. What we get
is a string of scenes about love and partnership, each one introduced by Charlotte before
the movement takes over.
Early on we watch “two strangers” learning each other’s rhythms—acrobatics peppered
with deliberate clumsiness and little comic mishaps (yes, including an accidental foot to the
face). It’s sweet, and the room laughs in recognition. Later, there’s a long passage about
ocean waves and energy—think mini physics lecture—used to frame how two lives
combine, clash and cancel each other out. The metaphor makes sense, but it’s explained at
length; the images that follow do the job with more grace as the pair drift apart, collide and
settle into a new balance.
Other moments land beautifully. There’s a run where they move in perfect unison until one
drops pace; the other hauls the weight so they can keep going together. There’s resistance
that loosens into dancing, flares into wrestling, then softens into quiet peace. And the most
memorable image: a river of sand pouring from the rafters, time made visible.
The craft is never in doubt. The acrobatics are exact without feeling showoffy. The music
breathes with the bodies. The lighting gives the simplest images real depth. When the
talking stops and the movement leads, the show can be properly moving.
I did sometimes feel like a stranger gatecrashing a farewell party. You can sense the history
in the room—24 years together, two decades of collaborating —and you feel the emotion,
but you don’t always have the shared story to plug into it. Add in the occasional
overexplained metaphor, and a few passages feel heavier than they need to.
Still, The Collaborator is a genuine, tender look at how two people learn, fail, carry and
continue. Even when the words get in the way, the images linger. As a curtain call from a
married pair who’ve built a company on making circus feel human, it’s a warm and fitting
goodbye.
