Scotland

REDACTED: The Cover-Up of a Cover-Up of a Cover-Up – Pleasance Dome

Sometimes reviewing at the Fringe is difficult. Sometimes you spend half the walk home wondering what on earth you have just seen and how you are going to write about it.

And sometimes they make it very easy for you.

REDACTED: The Cover,Up of a Cover,Up of a Cover,Up is brilliant.

There is something here that reminds me of the extraordinary Foley work I enjoyed in Fly, You Fools! at the Pleasance Courtyard last year. Voloz Collective take that idea and turn it into something approaching live cinematic Foley, four actors creating an entire visual world while musician Jonny Venvell, tucked into the corner with percussion and strings, does much of the heavy lifting in establishing its sound.

The integration is beautiful. Music, movement, sound effects and physical theatre become almost indivisible.

The story ostensibly follows investigative journalist Marnie Makowski into 1970s New Mexico, Roswell, disappearing bodies and an increasingly preposterous conspiracy. But describing the plot hardly seems the point.

The joy is watching how they are going to do it.

A butcher’s shop becomes an extraordinary piece of physical choreography, slabs of meat sliding beautifully along imaginary rails before being hauled into position. A car chase appears from virtually nothing. We fly. We go underwater. We enter a church. Landscapes, vehicles, objects and entire environments emerge from four bodies continually rearranging themselves into the next tableau.

And after a while you stop wondering whether they can pull something off. You know they can. The question becomes simply: how?

Voloz Collective, Emily Wheatman, Paul Lofferon, Olivia Zerphy and Sam Rayner, trained at the Jacques Lecoq school, and their shared physical vocabulary is astonishingly precise. They move not merely as four performers but as a single theatrical organism, constantly assembling, disassembling and reassembling the world around us.

And their faces!

There is something wonderfully characterful about this company. Faces stretch and contort, personalities appearing almost instantaneously. With little more than posture, expression and movement, one actor can seemingly become someone entirely different before our eyes.

The flying sequences are terrific. The underwater work is stunning. The car chase is beautifully executed. Yet what impresses most is not any individual theatrical trick but the apparently limitless confidence of the collective imagination behind them.

The whole thing apparently began when the company wondered whether four actors could create a convincing plane chase using only their bodies. Having discovered they could, they built a conspiracy thriller around it. That tells you almost everything you need to know about Voloz.

This is brilliantly clever theatre of its time, international, physical and cinematic, yet created using the oldest theatrical equipment available: bodies, faces, sound and the audience’s imagination.

Playing until August 31st 2026, https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/2026REDACTE

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 14th August 2026

North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating: