Roll up, roll up for Dusty Horne, the greatest Foley artist you never heard of! And if you’re wondering just what a ‘Foley artist’ is, then you’re strongly advised to go and see Sound And Fury before the Edinburgh Fringe ends.

Well then, a so-called Foley artist is someone who reproduces sound effects for film – so called after it’s creator, Jack Foley, started working with Universal studios in 1914 during the studios silent era… of course, he needed assistants. Travel back to and enter Dusty Horne (played by the show’s creator Natasha Pring) whose mentor was Jack Foley before a fall-out… Now, Dusty is back with a vengeance and allows her audience a peep into her industry trade, aided by bumbling assistant Nicholas (Edmund Digby-Jones). A diva demented, a diva talented, a diva extraordinaire, a diva with unspeakable tantrums and mood swings – take your pick but Dusty will always remain a diva no matter what!
And so she should, after all – here is someone who has worked with all the great directors like Hitchcock and Kubrick, and with the, eh, not so great like Wales and Corman due to an apparent ‘accident’ on Universal’s back lot. Though of course it’s open to debate as to who is really great and who less so.

Over one hour Dusty takes us on a journey through the film archives of yesteryear and by doing so reveals her story as well as some of the tricks of her trade. Using clips from old films projected on a big screen, and surrounded by curious props and b/w movie star portraits (Karloff, Chaney, Lancaster, Olivier, Price, Rathbone etc.) she attempts to re-create certain sounds from certain movies using all sorts of tools and foremost, all sorts of vegetables! Even the crunching sound of a leather jacket and walking in a large flat box filled with gravel comes to good effect, as does a clarinet. For a scene in Hitchcock’s ‘The Lady Vanishes’ she calls for audience participation, and the same goes for ‘The Birds’, which is particularly inspired! Plenty of B-movies as well, from a young Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Dementia 13’ (re-creating a certain death scene her is an absolute riot!) to Roger Corman’s ‘Attack of the Crab Monsters’ or Arthur Hilton ‘Cat Women of the Moon’ (arachnophobes beware, we don’t get to see cute cats but a moon spider!) – Dusty knows how to keep her audience engaged and we delight in both in her sounds and her fury!

The show runs until August 29th at the Pleasance Dome.

LATEST REVIEWS