By the time father tries to fuck son, Icarus Redux has already left its lasting impression on you. From the image of the fabled wings top-lit in eerie blue inside a cupboard up-centre stage, to Daedalus relentlessly searching the stage for his fallen son with a lantern just before the final blackout, the best of the Fringe this year was undoubtedly this re-imagining of the classic Greek tale of loss, regret, and the yearning to fly.

The first hint that this theatrical event will not simply be the tired telling of an old story is that there is no character of Icarus at all. Beyond the title of the play, the word ‘Icarus’ is never mentioned. Instead, the focus of playwright/director Sean O’Neill’s poignant and eloquent script will be the tense relationship between father Daedalus (Johanathon Whittaker) and Boy (Alex Fiddes), adrift in a murky world between the depths and the divine, the moon and the sun; reeling in the aftermath of the death of a wife and mother. The complicated relationship between the two characters is revealed equally through direct-to-the-audience monologues by both (equally effective and defective) and the distant dialogue between the two (always effective).

O’Neill’s direction was as flawed as it was elegant, his script at times becoming too much of a focal point as during the monologues, the character not speaking would stare in earnest at the speaker. As a playwright first, O’Neill may have been too precious with his text in the direction of the hour-long emotional rollercoaster; the Boy sat in his precious chair for most of the show, Daedalus behind his iron-grey desk. The lack of movement in the piece exhibited the weaker moments of the script; dynamism would have helped significantly. One small complaint that I cannot decide upon: the flight itself was not staged. I both admire O’Neill’s restraint in not choosing to stage such a theatrical moment, it perhaps would have allowed the piece to burst out of the typically-Canadian domestic-kitchen-table-type drama that we have been accustomed to making.

Kasey Hinton and Brendan O’Neill’s sets reflected his architecture training and her time curating art collections; only three colours were used, the major one being grey. The characters wore grey, the tables and chairs were grey, the cabinet was grey. Only the red lamp symbolizing day and night (sun and moon) was a different colour, and the brown belts which figured prominently in the sexual imagery of the piece. The lack of colour was, to me, the obvious choice. In their dull world it seemed to be the easy way out by both set and costume. The lighting was as basic as it gets, through necessity, as the grid in the venue was limited. However the mixture of white, warm hues and the bleak blue of the early morning sky was all that it needed to be.