Festival Frolics

 The last time I was at the Edinburgh Festival was 21 years ago. I was only there for a week and I spent the evenings wearing Victorian female dress.  I was doing a show, although it is by no means essential to be appearing in a theatre to don strange garb during the month of August in Edinburgh.

As regular readers of my blog will know this year I've had the joy of directing “Wedding Band" a play by the comedian Charlie Baker.  I paid a very quick visit to Edinburgh at the beginning of the month in order to get the play on, but this weekend Richard and I had the joy of returning for a weekend at the festival to see the play and lots of other things besides. A hugely enjoyable time.

Arriving on Friday evening around 8 o'clock we dumped our bags at the hotel (a quick phone call to reception  got us a much better room than the one they bundled us into on the 4th floor to begin with) and we were off. 1st stop was the Gilded balloon, in the same venue that my own show is playing to see the magician Ali Cook. A great show, very entertaining, and a good introduction to the delights of the festival.

A quick trip across the road took us to the Pleasance Dome  where on the recommendation of a colleague of Richard we saw Gregory Charles,  a guy from Canada who had  encyclopaedic knowledge of music (supposedly) and could play lots of tunes with his band on request. I just didn't get it. If I'd wanted to have seen a group of musicians who half knew the tunes and words of a load of songs, I'd have gone to see The Monkeys comeback tour.

 Saturday morning we took a gamble and went to see “Bette and Joan" at the assembly  venue 1. It was a gamble that paid off in spades. A great short play about the relationship between the film stars  Bette Davies and Joan Crawford  based around the  filming of “Whatever happened to baby Jane ?".  Highly enjoyable, well acted, and it made me want to see the film again.

On into the afternoon and some colleagues of Richards joined us to see “Wedding Band" I haven't seen it since the first afternoon when I watched an audience of 25 people politely giggle their way through what is a very funny hour. Since then they've been selling out and the actors have really grown into the play. Though they said it was not one of their best performances (being an actor I know that actors always say that to the director on the afternoon he's in!) It was highly enjoyable and they deserve the success they are having.

Richard in Mirazozo

A couple of bottles of champagne, a cracked iPhone, and an hour of mutual congratulation later we had some supper  after a visit to Mirazozo,  a huge inflatable structure lit by natural light,  into which you enter shoeless and spend half an hour wandering around, lying on the inflatable floor and generally enjoying the rather bizarre enviroment. After supper we went on to see “Dave Gorman's PowerPoint presentation" brilliantly funny, flawlessly put together, thought-provoking and hugely exciting-a great hour. Now it was time to start the taxicab dashes. Huge queue at the Edinburgh International conference Centre for the sell-out  show that is Jack Whitehall. The material probably wasn't as sharp as Gorman's,  but Jack White all is a hugely engaging persona-a cheeky mix of flirty English public school boy, camp court jester,  and outrageous juvenile. Another great hour - the joke about Anne Frank's parents is still making me smile each time I think about it.

Then it was another taxicab–back to the Spiegel tent to see Charlie Baker guesting in The Horne section,  a late-night jazz, comedy, quiz show medley that proved highly entertaining. Charlie was the best of the 3 guests and the fact that during some hilarious Morris dancing the bands trumpeter had to be carried off with a damaged knee joint added to the bizarre quality of the evening. We repaired to our hotel around 1.00am thoroughly exhausted.

 After a leisurely breakfast on Sunday morning  we left the hotel and strolled up and down the Royal mile where actors, musicians, dancers, illusionists, jugglers, fire eaters, balloon modellers, and far too many a cappella groups  were all endeavouring to attract audiences to their shows by working in the street. This to me was the essence of the festival. The huge parade of colour, and talent of varying degrees, bringing people together to make them think, enjoy, and feel better.

Our early afternoon show was “ How Steeples Sinderby Wanderers won the cup".  I thought this was going to be in the mould of the 39 steps with a couple of actors playing lots of parts in a Boys own type yarn. It was in fact a one-man show,  and as such it took me a little bit of time to get into it. It did however prove rewarding, and in the end hugely enjoyable. A little light lunch and a stroll round the square then took as to our final show, an award-winning musical from 2010 “Fresher the musical"  a cross between Friends and Glee, it purported to tell the story of freshers week in a University where 5 people came together to share rooms for the 1st time.  I suppose it's a mark of the infectiousness of the fringe that this piece which I thought dreadful still didn't offend me. Under cast and under sung  I still left with a smile. And that's how it should be.

Throughout our visit we just met happy people. The people who were flyering for their shows —  no problem when we didn't take a flyer from them, they just wished us well and hoped we had a good afternoon. Lots of drinking of course and I'm sure there are pockets of trouble as a result of this, but we didn't see anything -just a huge carnival mentality which made us feel better and better.

If you've never done Edinburgh, do it. You can't bottle the feeling, it's unique, its special and it's probably one of the biggest arguments against devolution that I can think of