Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Alec Jones-Trujillo’s Old God flew under the radar at CC Blooms nightclub at last year’s Fringe – but somebody must have been paying attention as the clown now has a prime(ish) slot at Assembly.

His image alone will draw people in: white face, right down to the skullcap, and elaborately dressed in doublet and hose and a lacy ruff. He addresses us in rich, deep, eloquent and erudite tones – think Stewie from Family Guy – that suggests mischief and japes afoot.

In front of his inexpertly painted canvas backdrop, the San Francisco-based performer sets out a semi-circle of the stage for his clowning, like the shaman of indigenous cultures. Inside is the sacred space for theatrical mime, outside for chit-chat with the audience, which is plentiful. 

Inside the zone of theatre – a boundary that’s scantily adhered to, to be honest – he uses pantomime to share a day in the park and expose Jeff Bezos’s ‘dirty little secret’, an absurd satirical exaggeration. We are promised – threatened with, maybe – a full recitation of T.S. Eliot’s seminal 434-line poem The Waste Land, but only after Old God tells us an ancient fairytale of merchants and their lives upended by a monster in the mountains. It’s almost certainly a metaphor.

The premise is that our jaunty host as old as time and has seen all manner of chaos, though weighty themes are rather lost in the charming set pieces and the playful way Jones-Trujillo interacts with the audience, especially after a dramatic change in focus about two-thirds in that it would be a spoiler to reveal. Suffice to say it throws up some questions about the nature of performance, while continuing the playful to-and-fro with the audience. (And don’t worry Jones-Trujillo does almost all the work)

Some of the interviews he has done around this show have been deeply analytical and pretentious. But on stage he’s fulfilling the clown’s essential purpose, to provide a distraction from the horrorshow outside. In his witty, always unexpected way, Old God achieves that, with a memorable performance to talk about.

Review date: 5 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Assembly Roxy