Words: Elodie Marriott 

4 stars 

Wildly ambitious and impressively executed, Fly, You Fools! manages to condense Peter Jackson’s three hour epic into a one hour romp that loses none of the magic and still finds time to address the eagle in the room… 

The trio play multiple characters, transforming from knee-shuffling hobbits to lumbering orcs in seconds flat. Even the Foley artist is temporarily employed to personate Cate Blanchett’s sexy Galadriel. Despite the speedy role swapping, it’s always easy to differentiate the parts as their qualities are ramped up to a hyperbolic degree. Legolas with his Elvish rolling R’s and elegant leg choreography was a crowd favourite. 

In a deleted scene shown only to the members of Recent Cutbacks, Gandalf’s visit to Bag End sees Bilbo making a meal (specifically a second breakfast) out of a ludicrously elaborate coffee. Other spoofy alterations include dialogue inserts: “Rip him out of the goo sack!” and endowing characters with excessive awareness, having them reference the “trilogy” and “comic relief hobbits”. 

But how can a cast of three achieve a shot-for-shot recreation of a $93 million budget film? The clanks of warring steel are generated by two butter knives, beards on sticks stand in for Gandalf and Saruman’s gravity-defying fight, and the imaginative use of shadow puppets allows the Fellowship to pass through the Mines of Moria. 

The attention to detail in Fly, You Fools is so spectacular, a rewatch of The Fellowship of the Ring is essential if you want to catch all the minutiae the parody excels in capturing. 

Fly, You Fools
Beyond in Pleasance Courtyard 
15:10 
21-25 Aug