Meet Blip Blarp, a galactic overachiever and full-time romantic disaster who lands on Earth with a fairly ambitious to-do list: conquer the planet and produce 1,000 offspring. There is, however, one considerable obstacle standing in the way – dating humans.
Thrown headfirst into the chaos of modern romance, from thirst traps and mixed signals to the dreaded situationship, Blip discovers that seduction might actually be considerably harder than planetary invasion. The premise promises sci-fi absurdity, comedy and burlesque while taking aim at swipe culture and our apparently universal desire to be chosen.
On paper, I rather liked the sound of Blip Blarp: An Alien Love Story. It is quirky, ridiculous and different enough that I wondered whether I might stumble across one of those wonderfully strange, undiscovered gems that the Edinburgh Fringe does so well.
Unfortunately, by the end of the performance, I felt the potential within the original concept had failed to materialise.
Let’s begin with what does work.
Alicia Queen has brought an original show to the Edinburgh Fringe and clearly put a great deal of herself into getting it onto the stage. That in itself takes considerable determination. Plenty of people have an idea for a show; considerably fewer actually write it, develop it, bring it to Edinburgh and stand in front of an audience to perform it.
There are also some interesting visual ideas. Blip’s costume immediately establishes the alien character, and the production makes use of a television screen to display imagery throughout. It is an unusual piece of staging and something I haven’t encountered much during my time reviewing at the Fringe.
There is certainly imagination here. The difficulty is that those ideas currently aren’t supported by a sufficiently developed performance or production.
Blip’s alien voice is deliberately unusual, but the delivery remains at a very similar pitch and rhythm for considerable periods of the show. What presumably began as a character choice ultimately works against the production. Comedy needs rhythm, variation and timing, while storytelling needs changes of pace and emotion. By keeping Blip’s delivery so consistent, potentially funny lines struggle to land and emotional moments have little room to breathe.
It also makes it difficult to connect with Blip as a character.
This becomes particularly noticeable because large sections of the production involve Blip interacting with a disembodied voice played through the sound system. There is nothing inherently wrong with that device, particularly in a solo show, but dramatically it becomes repetitive. With relatively little happening visually during some of these exchanges, the production loses momentum.
The show describes itself as blending comedy with burlesque flair, but I struggled to find enough of either.
There is a dance sequence, although it doesn’t currently have the theatricality, confidence or choreography I would associate with burlesque. Likewise, there are comic ideas scattered throughout the script, but they produced relatively few laughs during the performance I attended. One audience member certainly found considerably more humour in it than I did, which is a useful reminder that comedy is always subjective, but for me the writing and delivery rarely combined to produce the absurd comic energy promised by the premise.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that Blip Blarp feels like an interesting first concept that has reached the stage before being subjected to enough development and outside critique.
The basic storyline is easy enough to follow and Alicia knows her material, but knowing the lines isn’t the same thing as creating a compelling hour of theatre. Scenes need greater variation, the comedy needs sharpening and the central character needs considerably more emotional and vocal range.
At one momentary point I realised that my attention had wandered away from the performance and towards the posters on the venue wall. That’s never something I particularly want to admit in a review, but it perhaps illustrates the central problem: the production wasn’t consistently holding my attention.
Visually, there are moments when Blip Blarp makes an impression. The costume provides an immediate identity and there are some fun sci-fi ideas to play with. I was less convinced by the AI-generated imagery used on screen, which felt somewhat at odds with a production that otherwise depends heavily upon the individuality of its creator.
What is frustrating is that I don’t think the central concept is necessarily the problem.
An alien attempting to understand human dating culture could be fertile comic territory. Tinder, situationships, ghosting and our increasingly bizarre online mating rituals are already fairly absurd without introducing an extraterrestrial determined to produce 1,000 offspring.
There is a show hiding somewhere in that idea.
But it needs stronger direction and further development to find it. An experienced outside director or dramaturg could potentially make a substantial difference: challenging the pacing, developing Blip beyond the central vocal mannerism, strengthening the comic beats and finding more imaginative ways of staging the conversations.
I wanted Blip Blarp to surprise me. I wanted the strange alien I’d encountered at the beginning to take me somewhere unexpected.
Instead, this particular close encounter never quite achieved lift-off.
There is imagination and commitment behind the production, and Alicia Queen deserves credit for putting an original idea onto a Fringe stage. But audiences ultimately have to judge what is currently in front of them rather than what a production might eventually become.
In its present form, Blip Blarp: An Alien Love Story needs considerably more development before its ambitions match its execution.
★★ 2 Stars – A quirky concept searching for the direction and delivery to make it soar.
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/blip-blarp-an-alien-love-story
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