Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Exquisite Corpse is the name of that parlour game in which three people create a peculiar portrait, one drawing a head, one the torso and one the legs, all independently.

It’s not just the title of Jonathan Oldfield’s vibrant debut, but a game he plays with his audience, with the comic improvising characters based on the chimera randomly created from the room’s efforts. 

It’s only a small part of the hour, but it displays a well-honed improvisational ability while adding to the sense of fun and spontaneity Oldfield also encourages with numerous knowing breaks in character.

The prepared creations are all brilliantly realised. If there’s a thread to bind them, it’s people struggling to make human connection – but then again what art isn’t about that? Sometimes, too, they have an inner monologue so very different from what’s projected outwardly. 

That starts with the opening character, a hyperkinetic employee of Blockbuster, giving the video rental chain the hard sell while secretly showing a more tender yearning to be a father. 

Ditto the contrast between the outwardly respectable Welsh allotment bigwig and the funky dance fantasy he indulges in while showing the rookies around the land.

Smashing the fourth wall, the puppyish Oldfield has tremendous fun with the tech operator, impishly jumping in and out of the musical cues that trigger the dance, or vice versa. He’s previously directed the likes of Lorna Rose Treen and Joe Kent Walters, who likewise enjoy keeping a permeable line between artifice and what’s actually happening on stage.

Another strong creation is a 13-year-old Wyoming kid who’s had an encounter with an alien. Or at least we think that’s what’s happened, as the teenager loves to lie – a trait he shares to some extent with the mischievous Oldfield.

The characters are broken up with the comic sharing first-hand monologues as himself. The memories don’t immediately feel that important, just moments of relative calmness amid his characters’ good-natured madness – but turn out to provide a through-line to an intense finale, a contrast to the joyful joshing up to this point. It has many in the audience up on their feet at the moment it’s over. Partly, surely, from relief as the tension is broken, but also in appreciation of Oldfield’s undeniable craft, wit and playfulness.

Review date: 16 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard