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Looking for Paul
Creative floundering … Looking for Paul. Photograph: Steve A Gunther
Creative floundering … Looking for Paul. Photograph: Steve A Gunther

Edinburgh festival 2014 review: Looking for Paul – lewd Santas, pickles and public art

This article is more than 9 years old
Summerhall, Edinburgh
Dutch theatre company Wunderbaum test the audiences' limits in this layered piece that asks who should pay for public art

The woman standing in front of us giving us a slide show of her native Rotterdam is apparently a bookshop owner named Inez. Inez is angry: the square where she lives and works has been invaded by a massive bronze statue of Santa Claus, by the artist Paul McCarthy. Santa holds a bell in one hand and what is supposed to be a Christmas tree in the other, but it is so suggestive that locals have christened the sculpture "the buttplug gnome". What really riles Inez is that, as a taxpayer, she has paid for this public art. (The Dutch theatre company Wunderbaum have got funding to make a show in LA where McCarthy lives. Maybe they can take Inez to LA with them, and make a piece about her getting her revenge on McCarthy.)Set against a background of swingeing arts cuts in the Netherlands – where rightwing politicians, like their Tory counterparts in the UK, increasingly point to the US as the way forward when financing the arts – Looking for Paul is a multilayered consideration of the function of art, of who pays for it, and whether we have to like it at all.

The final third of the evening takes the form of a live version of McCarthy's video work, and references everything from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Beckett and Hollywood. It features copious amounts of ketchup, chocolate sauce, faeces and dill pickles.

It spares us nothing, but then the company spare themselves nothing, either. The middle section uses scripted email exchanges to expose egos and obsessions as they flounder creatively amid the conspicuous consumption of fancy meals and swimming-pool dips. With boldness and humour, Wunderbaum remind us that the only art worth making is that which disrupts, challenges and tests artists and audiences – sometimes to the limits.

Until 23 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000. Venue: Summerhall, Edinburgh.

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