Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Half-British, half-Lebanese Isabelle Farah has turned to ancient Babylon for this show, billed as a sitcom about Nebuchadnezzar The Great that broadcasters apparently rejected for being too expensive to shoot.

They might have been letting her down gently, because this is a weakly imagined story with modern messages artlessly tacked on to the cod history. Imagine a kingdom where there’s no shit in the water and you don’t have bolshy receptionists blocking you from seeing your GP, the 2,500-year-old ruler is told. Do you see? It’s like Britain today. Mind. Blown.

She might get away with this once, but it’s laboured several times, with Nebuchadnezzar apparently inventing the Great British Bake-Off and football, too. The other anachronistic strand is a British civil servant called Jeff, pilfering artefacts like a Victorian imperialist, very advanced for the early Iron Age.

There’s no need to be stickler in a show that freely bills itself as 4.3 per cent historically accurate, but these devices are so clunkily done it’s painful. Just raising well-known pseudo-topical tropes without saying anything about them is vacuous and unrewarding.

Meanwhile, her largely made-up story about Nebuchadnezzar would be considered simplistic for a children’s book, a string of ‘and then this happened’ statements with no sense of actions and consequences unfolding.

And it’s oh-so laboured. For example, Farah contrives to call one room in his palace the East West room, where war with the Egyptians will be planned, and another the West East room for mapping out the Hanging Gardens Of Babylon, heavily winking at us for what confusion might ensue.  But despite having done this painfully unconvincing groundwork for a farce, she then doesn’t bother to pay it off with the scene of crossed wires it seems to set up.

The characters are realised via a box of cheap prop hats, with other people on recorded voiceover. And with 10 minutes of waffly preamble and mediocre crowd work, the story itself only lasts about 40, though it seems longer.

Farah’s a strong performer with a rich voice that ought to be deployed on audiobooks galore. But she’s squandering her talent on such a slapdash bit of half-hearted storytelling. Horrible Histories would do this so much better.

Review date: 16 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Assembly George Square