| Saturday, August 14, 2004 |
 | This was never going to be the leisuriest holiday ever, given the need to sort out the flat in advance of the arrival of the landlords for the first time in some years, to sort out the departure of one flatmate and the ingress of another. Lots of cleaning products, lots of black bags. My next holiday will be spent doing my tax return. The fun just don't stop.
However, I did find time to hurtle up to Edinburgh. One night, one day, one morning, six shows. Actually, the original plan was to do rather more, but a series of comic mishaps involving missing not one but two performances of the Women of Troy in quick succession, and being perhaps the first ever to wring a refund out of a fringe box office ("We don't give refunds." "Well, now would be an excellent time to start") and deciding that, actually, popping back to Black Bo's and taking the time for the vegetarian haggis to be home-baked (vegetarian haggis. A vegetarian version of a meal the constituent ingredients of which are pigs and pain. Madness) was a better plan than beating feet to I Fucking Hate my Dad, or indeed I Hate Fucking my Dad (Steven Berkoff's triumphant return to the Fringe). The haggis, incidentally, was delicious.
So, first night we caught Beauty and the Bitch, who will no doubt be performing again in London after the Fringe if you don't get a chance to see them. Everybody is still at the alterations stage with their acts - B&TB have put in a stand-up section to break up the songs which hasn't quite gelled yet, but the songs are very funny indeed. The new tribute to Michelle from Big Brother rocked very hard.
I will fiiiiiiind you,
You'd better sleep with one eye open,
I do...
Sleep, breakfast with our lovely and gracious flat-provider at Spoon, a chance encounter with Louise Welsh, followed by the Women of Troymageddon, which we thought disappointed our hopes of seeing a lead-handed treatment of the War in Iraq. How little we knew.
So, getting into the panic on mode, where it seems inevitable that every attempt actually to see some theatre would end in hideous failure, we finally managed to hurtle, about five minutes late, into Horror Vacui, which actually does itself no favours by playing up the darik part - mainly this is a romp, with some excellent Lecoq sound-mime, clowning and some nice character touches. Not to mention a kick-ass wardrobe - my companion emerged inspired by the eldest sister's librarienne chic.
Inspired by our success, we leapt to the Underbelly and The Best Man, a one-man show of Glyn Maxwell's verse play. Good stuff - it felt idiomatic and smooth, and Maxwell seems to have been taking some tips from Simon Armitage. The plot I was less convinced by, likewise the ending - too neat and too dovetailed - but definitely worth watching, and the room was cool enough to make the next rush, to Boothby Graffoe and the Following People, positively pleasant. Boothby Graffoe remains one of the most adorable and funniest comedians on the circuit - a lot of the songs I had heard before, but his delivery is laugh-out-loud, and he is just so damn likeable. And the space fox routine is a killer.
Hopes high and bellies full of fauxggis, we forged on to Nick Revell - Like it Matters. As a great fan of the Nick Revell show way back when, I was hoping to be a witness at the second stand-up coming of one of the greats of Radio 4. Unfortunately, Revell has reacted to the world going to Hell by working a lot of political material into his act, which really just doesn't work very well. Remember that lead-handed handling of the war in Iraq shortfall? It's early days, but too much of it is loose, self-indulgent and, the cardinal sin of political comedy, badly researched. One whole strand of the evening depended on the suicide bombers/72 virgins canard, but the basic principle and origins of that idea were never questioned. When he's talking about the effects on everyday life - the impact, say, of bomb scares on British reticence - he is funny and engaging, but too much of this show seemed to be short on match-fitness, which is a real shame. Hopefully he will be able to hone both material and performance in the next three weeks - although actually the best-handled part of the whole gig for me was when he realised near the end that he had failed to seed one of his closing gags ten minutes into the show and could not work out any way to ad-lib through it.
Ah well. We were thinking of the Whoopee Club, but were a bit disheartened and I wasn't really dressed for it. So, home to bed.
But what's that I hear? "Please, Mr. Berg, but you've been to the Fringe, and have not seen one production in which a group of drama students smear themselves in jam and roll around under a duvet. What gives?" And quite right that oddly sourceless voice is. So thank God for a quick break in our journey home to see The Duchess of Malfi. No duvet, but plenty of jam, cross-dressing, cantaloupe music and the tiniest Ferdinand ever. Not quite as ground-breaking as the players believe, but rollicking good fun. Mind you, I think you lose a lot of emotional impact when your Duchess covers key scenes as a Barbie on wheels.
And home. Bit sleepy now.
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