Hidden away in the near impossible to find street of Lochend Close is venue 13 home of One Eye Gone, a production that can at times surprises and at others teeters dangerously close to being one of the most pretentious shows at the Fringe. The concept is a re-imagining of the iconic Japanese atomic bomb allegory, Godzilla, but now rewritten by US playwrite Erik Ehn. It features strange, stilted almost romantic dialogue over a master class in puppeteering.
Your enjoyment all but depends on your ability not to suppress a grin as a man in a pretty low-fi puppet suite roars and gently mimes his destruction of an artificial small town made from recycled cardboard boxes to the endless repletion of the phrase, you are one eye gone. The dialogue is fragmented, the plot is skeletal (involving a giant monster attacking a city and the world forced to use a new weapon of mass destruction upon it) and delivered in a near impenetrable vague manner that frustrates at how overly abstract it attempts to be.
But where it excels is not in the writing but with its stark and powerful imagery and puppetry. Giant rain clouds burst over the city and look incredibly effective as they are only made from cotton wool and tinsel, giant floating jelly fish descend using hanging baskets with torches in them and many other simple tricks almost take your mind of a show that takes itself far too seriously.
2/5 
Martin Miller
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