The Ritual

COMEDY


The Ritual

The Walrus

10 Ship Street
Basement Room: MAY 28-31, JUN 1 at 21:15 (60 min) - Pay What You Can - Tickets from £5
Raised Room: JUN 2 at 20:15 (60 min) - Pay What You Can - Tickets from £5

The Ritual

Prepare yourselves! The Master (Steffen Hånes) arrives, together with his loyal servant Gregor (Gregory Lass) to conduct The Ritual.

The Master will terrify you in extravagant yet charming ways as befits a vampire lord. Gregor lives to serve his master’s will in order to complete their fiendish spectacle.

This is your invitation to revel in the company of vampires - do you dare to accept?

We thirst for your company…

‘Highly Entertaining’

**** The Wee Review

Audience Feedback, The Ritual 2019/21/22

“Spectacular”

“I laughed from start to finish"

“Like Fawlty Towers but with Vampires”

EdHorror Fest 2019/21/22 Sell Out Show

Edinburgh Fringe Festival (PBH Free Fringe)Sell Out Show 2022

Ticket types this year are Paid, Pay What You Can and Free - this is how it works: Paid: The show is fully ticketed and you pay in advance or on the door; Pay What You Can: You can choose to buy a ticket in advanced to guarantee entry and what to pay over a minimum amount OR turn up at the venue to get in for free in any space that is left; Free: The show is free entry and can be ticketed or unticketed. Watch the show, and the performer will ask for donations at the end for those that would like to contribute.



News and Reviews for this Show

Attempts at spookiness make for top clownery

August 27, 2022    The Wee Review

Attempts at spookiness make for top clownery

A performance that strains the comic potential of repetition to its limits, The Ritual is one of those silly, experiential moments that no Fringe is complete without.

A vampiric aristocrat, The Master (Steffen Hånes), is desperate to make a spooky entrance and Gregor, his butler (Gregory Lass), is desperate to provide him with it. Every interruption, every disturbance in the crowd, is a cue to reset and start again. Tonight, his aura’s disrupted by some spontaneous raising of a cross sign, a toilet break, and simple confusion over an audience member’s pronunciation of Kirkcaldy, so it’s back to his shrouded slumber, ready for another go.

The demands made of Gregor by his Lord in order to prepare for his entrance only increase as the hour progresses. He wants spooky lights, he wants smoke, he wants the room cleared of Christians. Eventually he wants the blood of a virgin. And Gregor hands responsibility for securing these demands onto a third party – Emily, a put-upon Scottish techie in plain clothes, completely at odds with the otherwise theatrical Transylvanian vibe.

It’s one-note humour, but brutally and brilliantly exploited. The two Transylvanians are intensely into their parts, which only makes the mask slips funnier, and Emily’s undramatic cameos are all the more delightful for the contrast. They labour the conceit very, very hard, but the audience keep buying into it. In several different spells, Gregor fills minutes encouraging us to clap along with his bodhran, trying to catch us out with his rhythms, but such are his comic facial mannerisms, it somehow doesn’t get tiresome.

It’s pure clowning, thinly plotted but highly entertaining. All it really lacks is the narrative clincher that would lift it from riffing brilliantly off a productive idea to the fully finished product. Click Here For Review



Press & Media for this Show

The Ritual