Chris Larner, co-creator of The Right Size (The Play What I Wrote), has a Fringe gem in The Translucent Frogs of Quuup.
It is 1922 and the virginal Anthony (Jonathan Robbins) is a Surbiton bank clerk with a deep interest in all things amphibian; his more knowing bride, Edith (Rosalie Craig), suggests that he takes her up the Amazon on honeymoon, where he looks for the legendary frogs and she gets to know some charming tribesmen.
Larner narrates while Mark Stevens plays piano.
It's all very enjoyable as Larner's bright and inventive script, with frightfully English dialogue and silly songs, sends up theatrical conventions and Brits abroad. It could do with a judicious cut, but for the most part it's a treat.
Urgent & Confidential, subtitled Dean Cameron's Nigerian Spam Scam Scam, is a terrific tale about emails that invite you to invest your hard-earned cash in "opportunities of a lifetime".
Cameron is an American actor who, whiling away the hours on the internet, came across a spam purportedly from a Nigerian widow who needed his help to secure her late husband's assets, held in a foreign bank.
Cameron, of course, was required to send her money first in order to get a share of the loot. It's estimated that spam scams now form the third largest element in the Nigerian economy.
In Cameron's witty take on the hunted becoming the hunter, he replies using an alter ego, a sexually confused Florida millionaire with only cats to lavish his money on.
The epistolary script hilariously recounts the increasingly surreal email exchanges and we enjoy the scammers' growing irritation as they realise their prey is not such an easy target after all.
Victor Isaac, as various Nigerian scammers, and Cameron, as both the millionaire and his attorney, Perry Mason, are excellent.
Both until 30 August. C T00: 0870 701 5105. Pleasance: 0131 556 6550.
