Timonopoly

Aug 6 2025 | By Julia Amour More

★★★★☆ Serious fun

Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30a): Sat 2 – Mon 12 Aug 2025
Review by Julia Amour

Brite Theatre’s Timonopoly show/game/gameshow is a beautiful, bonkers experience playing at the Scottish Storytelling Centre to 12 August. It brings audiences up close to Shakespeare’s thoughts on the root of all evil.

Timon of Athens is one of Shakespeare’s least-performed plays, but its concerns of corrupting wealth and the fickle wheel of fortune have come into their own under late capitalism. Brite Theatre’s love for the language and biting wit bring these themes vividly to life, with bonus party games.

Emily Carding and the Timonopoly accoutrements. Pic: Brite Theatre

Like King Lear, Timon gives away his fortune to an ungrateful entourage and ends up with nothing. But instead of sending him mad, it makes the bountiful idealist into an embittered, vengeful cynic who seeks to destroy all those whose love he could once buy.

Our host (Emily Carding) stalks the room like the MC in Cabaret, a slightly sinister ringmaster in a top hat and Jacobean ruff who reminds us we’re all along for the ride now.

But they are a magnetic and generous presence, pairing impromptu humour with an expert command of Shakespeare’s knotty lines. Gentle audience participation has volunteers assigned roles as Timon’s so-called friends and rolling the dice to discover what ups and downs fortune has in store for them.

satisfying

Director Kolbrún Björt Sigfúsdóttir has crafted an experience that works for Shakespeare nerds and newbies alike – interspersing wordplay and silly games with short extracts from the play, without breaking the immersive mood.

Game design consultant Arlo Howard has also helped the company create a Shakespearean monopoly set-up that balances satisfying gameplay with rigged outcomes, so the story has a coherent if chaotic through line.

Emily Carding. Pic: Brite Theatre

This conceit is an ingenious way to explore Shakespeare in a contemporary context. At a distance of 400 years, discerning the meaning of his lines is going to pose some challenges for all but a few specialists. But focusing in on key themes allows us to reconnect more immediately with his genius for capturing timeless human behaviours with beauty and wit.

This is the third in an immersive Shakespeare trilogy Brite Theatre have brought to Edinburgh over the past decade, alongside earlier shows based on Richard III and Hamlet: about power, identity, money, things that make the world go round then as now.

By the end of the show, entertaining throwaway gags about the penury of freelance artists and how rules don’t apply to aristocrats have morphed into sobering reminders about the numbers currently at risk of poverty and homelessness. This show is silly fun with a serious heart, pointing to human connection as the antidote to faceless capitalism.

Running time: One hour (no interval).
Scottish Storytelling Centre (George Mackay Brown Library), 43-45 High St, EH1 1SR (Venue 30a).
Sat 2 – Mon 12 August 2025.
Daily (not Wed 6): 12.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here on EdFringe.com.