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	Assembly George Square (venue website) Theatre 6-26 Aug, 11:00am-11:00pm Reviewed by Mathilda Gregory
Recommended for age 14+ only.

After success last year with a similar set up, Peep are once again presenting sex-themed short plays in a rudimentary peep show – this year in George Square. Sitting alone on a rickety stool, in a private, anonymous booth, is an odd way to watch a show. And as it turns out, it’s mostly an unsatisfying one. It’s just not comfortable; surely everyone is well aware that the reason peep shows were designed that way wasn’t because it was a great way to watch something.

So I was uncomfortable, my view was restricted, and what I could see was glimpsed through a dirty screen. I was hoping that what I was going to watch would justify all this. Unfortunately, it just didn’t. Perhaps if what I was seeing was particularly challenging or taboo it would all make sense, but Luke Barnes’s Lobsters turned out to be a confusing physical theatre show about long distance romance.

A couple have a one-night stand, and then the guy moves to Australia. I don’t know why he did that. He seemed unhappy about it. I thought maybe that was his home, but at one point during a fraught Skype conversation his abandoned girlfriend claims he has ‘run away to Australia’. If the couple are unhappy to be apart, they seem even more unhappy to communicate. When they reunite briefly the woman makes a baffling announcement, that is hard to understand without more information. It’s consistently hard to follow, and at points I wasn’t even sure if the man had gone back to the other side of the world or not.

To be fair, Peep offer a programme of shows throughout the day, and this was just one of the offerings. Perhaps to get the full experience I would need to see more – but do many Fringe punters have the time or resources to do this?

Peep seems to want to get the frisson of retro-sex work into their shows, without really doing much to justify why. This could have been an interesting concept with more thought, but I was left baffled by almost all of it.