For An Eye? ****

Will Oliver has the hallmarks of genuine Fringe discovery in For An Eye?. His sophomore surrealist horror returns to the Dundee Fringe following runs at Edinburgh and Dundee in 2025. Following a shopkeeper selling miscellaneous junk, the play quickly turns from an absurd examination of suffering a landlord’s wrath into a familial body horror of Oedipal proportions.

This is a show with a demonic energy. There is a delicious evilness to all of Oliver's concoctions, logical steps and mutilations. Sometimes the show gets so excessive that it becomes funny, always deliberately so. It's a piece which relentlessly demands and keeps your attention. Its violence is chillingly deliberate; it is a familial violence wrapped up in cycles of cult and abuse. It's as if Cain killed Abel, then Eve blinded Cain, then Adam told Cain to blind Eve whilst the uncle owned a camera shop. 

Will Oliver is a remarkable performer. There's a self-insert in this I thought he would do more with as he is totally different to the strange characters he portrays. These are brilliantly constructed grotesques, straight out of the filmic languages of twentieth-century surrealist horrors that informed the strangest corners of the internet in YouTube's early days. The humour is certainly as left field as viral sensation Salad Fingers and the image as consistently grotesque. 

Oliver's design is multi-layered and stellar, although he does give himself too much work. He should not cut a single element of his design, rather expand the show to streamline all the juicy concepts he has so much fun presenting. A second performer that functions as a stage manager would greatly help here, or a production where the objects are slightly more reliable. Then again, no matter how large the show gets, it should never lose its off-kilter fringe feeling. If anything, it should double down on the symbols it so richly evokes – what does blindness mean to Oliver? What does gutting mean to him? These are essential questions to a draft even richer in symbolic resonance. 

Make no mistake, this is an astonishing DIY effort. Oliver is wonderfully creative and this unconventional show really is a gem. It deserves a substantially bigger audience and has the potential to be a Fringe horror cult classic. Will Oliver is brilliant, and I look forward to seeing the next step on the journey.