“One of the wittiest, funniest, most enjoyable shows I have ever seen in Edinburgh… This is splendidly sophisticated stuff… exuberantly acted by a company that, to my amazement, turned out to number a mere six at the curtain call. Certainly Lynne Parker’s production merits a wider audience… A show in London for the Donmar or Trafalgar Studios, perhaps, or even the new West End studio to be named the Sondheim.”

Benedict Nightingale, The Times, Five stars

“This pulsating cabaret-style musical by Dublin's Rough Magic company is an absolute gem… Lynne [Parker] directs the multi-talented cast of six with a sure hand, melding song and dance seamlessly with absurdist theatre in a production that fizzes with energy… this is the most fun you'll find on the Fringe.”

Veronica Lee, Evening Standard. Five stars

“The sly, stylish musical “Improbable Frequency” is a beguilingly quirky, linguistically dazzling piece about Ireland during World War II... Truly madly alternative and – yet again – all the better for being unmatchable by anything on film”

Rachel Halliburton, Time Out. Five stars

“Is there is a battier, more wildly inventive show to be found on the Fringe than Rough Magic's musical tale of spies, physics and radio waves set in Dublin during the second world war, which neutral Ireland quaintly dubbed "the Emergency"? I'd be astonished if there is, because this cabaret-style musical, which throws poet John Betjeman, Schrodinger's cat and Flann O'Brien into the melting pot, is like Tom Stoppard's Travesties, but larger, more insane, more colourful and with added song and dance... this show fizzes and explodes like a brilliant, gaudy firework… Lynne Parker's production has an appealing expressionist gloss and always keeps strict control. A splendid cast keep all the balls in the air during an evening which is a theatrical tour de force and quite unlike anything else you'll ever see.”

Lyn Gardner, The Guardian. Four stars

“Rough Magic conjure a wartime masterpiece… There can't be a more ingenious musical in the Festival. Its tunes, by Bell Helicopter, skip and glide, evoking the period of World War Two with enough grit to stop nostalgia rot. And the lyrics by Arthur Riordan are phenomenal. Why isn't this man made a dame? He's about o'million times cleverer than anything you get to hear on the Brit side of the Irish Channel, where the musical is gasping for invention and dextrousness. Someone should sign him up immediately.

Lynne Parker's fizzing production contains a lovely study in woolly pullovered specciness from Peter Hanly as the crossword-solving spy - who when in love is not '2 down' - and a beguiling performance by Lisa Lambe as a colleen ingenue: she sings like a choirboy and looks like an Edwardian fairy crossed with a Bisto kid... Compulsory viewing”

Susannah Clapp, The Observer

“Tom Stoppard's Travesties delights in the coincidence that James Joyce, Lenin and the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara were all in Zurich in 1917. In Improbable Frequency in Traverse One, Arthur Riordan comes close to this with the similar serendipity that found poet John Betjeman, oblique humorist Flann O'Brien and physicist Erwin Schrodinger all in Dublin in 1941, during what Ireland refers to as the Emergency: as a chorus of British diplomats sings, "Is it smugness or insurgency/That makes them say 'Emergency'?/I feel it lacks the urgency/Of World War Two." For Riordan and composing duo Bell Helicopter top Stoppard by making their kaleidoscope of coincidences a musical, whose patter-songs are crammed so densely with puns as to satisfy the most die-hard fan of W.S. Gilbert or Tom Lehrer. The O'Brienesque plot of wartime espionage and an improbable secret weapon conceals an often trenchant study of the ambivalence and calculation which informed the Irish Free State's position of neutrality in WW2. All that?’s missing from the gloriously fizzing mixture of Lynne Parker?’s production for her company Rough Magic is Schrodinger's famous cat.”

Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times

“Splendidly silly… If Tom Stoppard and the novelist Jasper Fforde collaborated on a musical, it might turn out something like this… Riordan’s script has some of the worst puns that have ever reached the stage, and the funniest lyrics since The Producers: lines you are doomed to bore your friends with for days after… The plot, which revolves around a machine that changes the nature of probability, is suitably improbable. The love-story subplot is surprisingly sexy, providing a thunderous climax (in every sense) to the first act, and the cast — especially Peter Hanly, as Tristram, and Lisa Lambe, as his beloved Philomena — are uniformly excellent. But the real joy of the show is the way it hides its smartness. For all the books written on the subject, the love-hate relationship between the two countries has rarely been so well captured.”

Adrian Turpin, The Sunday Times. Four stars

“The award-winning Dublin company Rough Magic has returned to Edinburgh with a fabulously ironic post-modern take on [Anglo-Irish relations]. Improbable Frequency is a dazzlingly inventive cabaret-style musical delivered in ballads, patter-songs and rhyming couplets, with words by Arthur Riordan and music by the duo known as Bell Helicopter; and it's set in Dublin during what the British call the Second World War and the neutral Irish dubbed "The Emergency".

There's no overstating the breathtaking verbal brilliance, wit, and sheer showbiz flair of this show's early tour around wartime Dublin, as its naïve hero Faraday, a novice British spy, wanders amazed among the oddballs, diplomats, poets and occasional Nazi sympathisers of a city he can't quite believe isn't fully backing Britain.

"Is it smugness or insurgency/That makes them say 'Emergency'?" asks the poet John Betjeman, another eccentric presence in the British diplomatic corps of the time. But the truth is it's neither; it's just that time-honoured refusal to define your situation in terms dictated by your oldest enemy, and closest neighbour.”

Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman. Four stars

Posted on: 23/8/2006