Nothing, it seems, works faster than word-of-mouth in Edinburgh when it comes to hot shows. On Saturday morning, I experienced this first-hand when, in the space of 20 minutes, two people I was separately speaking to – and had never met before (the first hiding from the rain under a Pleasance courtyard umbrella, the second in a Pleasance queue) – both recommended the same show, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, playing at the Underbelly. I duly scheduled it last night, and found both Ian Shuttleworth (now up from 33 shows when I first met him on Friday to a score of 47) and The Observer’s Susannah Clapp there. With 2,050 shows to choose from, you’d have thought that the chances of running into fellow national critics would be slim, but we, too, follow where others lead, and the talk of the town is difficult to avoid. This extremely original, quirky piece, combining live action and music with animated film, is just the sort of discovery that stands out from the crowd in Edinburgh.
There’s been a lot of talk, too, for Scarborough, a short, intense and almost unbearably intimate and poignant bedroom encounter between a schoolboy, about to turn 16, and his nearly 30-year-old gym teacher in the bed-and-breakfast bedroom that she has taken him away to on a weekend to celebrate his birthday. What makes it even more shocking, however, is that we’re put into literally the same tiny room as them, voyeurs and eavesdroppers amongst the crumpled sheets and torn birthday present wrapping paper. It means that only around 20 people per performance can actually see it, but this is a play that burns itself onto your conscience. And it boasts a performance from James Baxter as the boy that is the best I’ve seen all festival, combining a quite astonishing mixture of vulnerability and maturity. The play’s author, meanwhile, is Fiona Evans, a former press officer of the Assembly Rooms, and it must be wonderful for her to be experiencing such great reviews for a show she’s written, not just representing, there. Press offices are often a good training ground for theatre artists. I well remember the days when David Grindley used to run the Pleasance press office!
But in the midst of so much new work, where we’re all chasing the next thing, I did something that perhaps I should not be allowed to: I went back to see something I’d already seen – just two days earlier! Sometimes a fringe discovery is so exciting that you just want to make it again, even if it means sacrificing the chance of making another one. The show is called Seriously, an Australian theatricalization of the pop repertoire of the Pet Shop Boys, and it simply blew me away — twice. I met its director and conceiver David Knox before the show last night, and he asked me if I was already a Pet Shop Boys fan. No, in fact, I replied – I thought his cast sang the songs far better than Neil Tennant does! And if I know their work at all, it is mainly thanks to the Liza Minnelli album, Results, that was produced and arranged by the Pet Shop Boys — he replied that that was one of his inspirations for doing the show!
