SHUNGA ALERT
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★★★★★
“Ridiculous? Entirely. Entertaining? Absolutely.”
Inventive. Collaborative. Comedic. Physical theatre and clowning tangled together with illustrations that leap from paper to projection to full three-dimensional mischief. This isn’t so much a performance as it is a cheeky carnival of images, bodies, and imagination.
Early on, we’re tipped off by a “Shunga Alert”—a polite but mischievous warning that explicit Japanese erotic art is about to appear. We’re told we can cover our eyes… but really, where’s the fun in that? “Look out—pleasure is about to happen!” the show teases, and sure enough, it does.
Five performers shuffle on in a slow procession, noh-like, along the hashigakari—that magical runway bridge later adopted by kabuki theatre to become the flower pathway between audience and stage. A lone white bloke and four Japanese characters appear, though very quickly the boundaries dissolve: three emerge as physical theatre clowns, two as puppet masters, all slipping between shadows and silhouettes with gleeful abandon.
Projections blossom across the walls. Shadows wriggle into life. A document projector—the sort most of us remember from classrooms—is turned into an instrument of alchemy. It’s lo-fi, yet dazzlingly clever: by turns profound, then gloriously daft. And then, just when you think it can’t get sillier, a puppet launches into a dance routine to Pink Pony Club. Ridiculous? Entirely. Entertaining? Absolutely.
This choreography of paper, bodies, and beams of light is whimsical, inventive, beautiful—and, rather sneakily, meaningful. It feels like the true spirit of the Fringe: unpredictable, non formulaic, and nothing like anything you’ve seen before. Imagine Charlie Chaplin colliding with Japanese manga, with art history poking its head round the corner, and the whole lot tumbling together into a madcap cocktail of sexy, surreal fun.
A magic hammer appears, and suddenly the clowns—Kayo Tamura, Nono Miyasaka, and Ryo Nishihara—set off on an odyssey equal parts Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz. They’re on a quest to rescue an art form, become better lovers, crack the password to unlimited power, and (crucially) remember the pleasures of the night before. Along the way, the mysterious Shunga Alerts keep popping up, reminding us that even the “explicit” can be, in the end (full pun intended), just “so sexy.”
This is collaboration at its best: Book of Shadows teaming up with Theatre Troupe Gumbo. Seri Yanai provides hundreds of drawings—traditional yet contemporary, including ukiyo-e woodblocks alongside shunga, as well as inventive shadow puppets and mischievous illustrations—while Daniel Wishes weaves the narration. Every ingredient is vital, every element perfectly seasoned. It’s less a collage and more a feast.
Theatre Troupe Gumbo, true to form, brings pleasure, pain, and mayhem in equal measure—utterly charming and impossible not to love.
And in the end, the work leaves us with a final, unapologetic truth: art is truth. Life shouldn’t be censored. Sex is fine. Love is love. And pleasure? Pleasure’s worth savouring—and remembering in the morning.
SHUNGA ALERT
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Reviewed on 21st August 2025 at Big Belly at Underbelly, Cowgate
by Louis Kavouras
Photography by Robin Mair
