Facebook fraudsters con Fringe performers
PERFORMERS at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe have been duped out of thousands of pounds by Facebook fraudsters.
At least five people have fallen victim to the scam, in which fake social media profiles are used to contact performers looking for accommodation during the festival.
Two friends were conned out of £950 after a woman contacted them online offering a room, while a theatre company was swindled out of £3,000 in a similar scam.
Ian Fox, a Fringe producer who helps moderate the Edinburgh Fringe Performers’ Facebook page, said: ‘The scammers looked for people advertising for a room, contacted them privately via Messenger, then gave them the details of a B&B.’
One theatre company told The Stage magazine that it was tricked out of £3,000 after trying to book five rooms for the whole of the 2018 Fringe.
Ciara Shrager, a lighting designer, and a friend told the magazine they paid the same woman £950 upfront after chatting to her for a month before the supposed renter deleted her Facebook profile.
Facebook said: ‘We have the tools, technology and people to identify and remove this harmful content on Facebook.
‘We urge people to use our reporting tools to flag content they suspect may be illegal or violate our standards.’
‘Tricked out of £3,000’
SUCH is the quality of work that Berlin-based mask theatre group Familie Floz has brought to the Fringe in recent years (Teatro Delusio, Hotel Paradiso) that there are very high expectations for any new production.
Their expertise at creating physical theatre without dialogue that is both wonderfully precise in its execution and mesmerisingly acute in conveying meaning has made them firm Festival favourites.
The actors may remain silent throughout but their actions are so precisely wrought that they speak volumes – but those expectations are tempered in Infinita.
By any other standards this would be a crowd-pleasing treat. And, indeed, the packed house at the Grand lapped it up.
But by Familie Floz standards Infinita falls short of the levels of emotional engagement or hyper-theatricality of their previous work, relying instead on grandstanding vignettes to draw applause.
This is a soup to nuts tableau vivant look at the first and last steps of life which shuttles back and forth between cradle and grave. We travel on a journey from the clowning playpen antics of toddlers to the equally naughty antics of nursing home residents.
This is bookended by, and peppered throughout with, silhouetted video animations reminiscent of Manual Cinema. The interruptions help fill in autobiographical blanks of grief and loss but remain a distraction, and shift the audience’s focus away from the stage.
It’s a curse of the YouTube age, and an indictment of the show itself, that if you chance to watch the trailer highlights you’ve pretty much seen all that it has to offer.
That said, the four-strong cast approach their task with diligence, and the humorous episodic set pieces are never less than enjoyable.
So we’re treated to the splendid slapstick of wobbly-on-their-feet, babygro toddlers (negotiating an oversized nursery playpen), although the ball-playing interaction with the crowd is a lift from Slava’s Snowshow.
This in turn is mirrored by the equally physically challenged capers of the residents of a nursing home, where the rules of childish one-upmanship remain the same – there is a wheelchair-bound pianist whose life forms the centre of the piece, a pill-popping junkie, and an elderly lothario chasing the skirts of the nurse.
It is the nursing home scenes which provide the most poignant moments – a wonderful radio antennae skit and syncopated rhythm finale are the show’s standout moments, as we witness the codgers discovering a rejuvenating spring in their step that harks back to the vitality of their youth. Pleasance Courtyard, The Grand, until Aug 27