In Pursuit of Cardenio

Well, that's never happened before! Sitting in the front row of a Ken Campbell show is, of course, asking for it - but having a sonnet extemporised in iambic pentameter for my wife and I, incorporating our names, our home area and our immediate plans, was certainly a first.

It came as part of Campbell's semi-improvised event that attempts to sort out what Shakespeare's lost play, Cardenio, might have been like. He has a seven-strong company improvise in 16th Century style around the scenes for Don Quixote that probably formed the original storyline.

Now if that's beginning to sound heavy and academic then believe me, it isn't. It's more of an Elizabethan 'Who's Line Is It Anyway?' It's a wonderful mixture of interesting information, skilful wit and sheer silliness.

Where else in Edinburgh this year are you going to hear an actress being asked to speak half in piffle and half in no sense (not nonsense please note, that's something quite different)? Or an actor improvising a song with lines alternately in the styles of John Dowland and Stephen Sondheim? Or the same actor improvising a Shakespearean character seeing his beloved with someone else in the style of Woody Allen, and quite brilliantly too?

Of course you may not see any of these, our host tells us that this is a show that's different each night and that ends when the lights go out - which it does.

And life's not fair is it? For all the undoubted talents and skills on display from the company, and they are many, what you'll take with you as you go into the night is the image of Ken Campbell. As he roves, mutters, fluffs, stalks, wiggles his amazing eyebrows and generally behaves like the most eccentric down-market academic you've ever seen, you'll just thank Providence that the world holds him and you in the same time and place. And who knows, you may have had your own sonnet created for you.