It was only last Saturday that I was writing here of going to Usher Hall for the first time in the 23 years I have been coming to Edinburgh, and last night I did another first: I stepped inside the Fruitmarket Gallery on Market Street, behind Waverley Station, for the first time, too! And although they’re currently hosting an exhibition of the work of contemporary artist Alex Hartley, naturally it was a theatre piece I was actually attending: Tim Crouch’s latest playful experiment in theatrical form called England, which bills itself specifically as “a play for galleries” as it is intended to be performed within them, has Crouch and another “guide” talking us through a story of art, commerce and organ transplant as they walk amongst the exhibits.
I also ended my evening somewhere different, too, paying my second-ever visit to McEwan Hall in Bristo Square – an area that has become the epicentre of the Fringe now, with venues all the way around it from the Gilded Balloon (installed in what those of us who have been coming to the fringe for a while remember as the Fringe Club) and Pleasance Dome to the giant purple tent of the Udderbelly in the middle of it, and George Square just around the corner with the glorious Spiegeltent once again housed in its gardens. A couple of years ago there was a show at McEwan’s Hall that took us on a guided tour of it, which was one way of seeing inside this imposing building; but this year it is the home of the Silent Disco – an amazing interactive nightclub experience which in a stroke solves my main problem with clubs (now that my other main problem with them, smoking, has been banned), namely the noise. Here each visitor is equipped with their own set of headphones, and clubgoers can listen to their own choice of one of two DJ sets that are being spun live. The room, meanwhile, is entirely silent, except for the occasional cheer or whoop.
But if the silent joys of Silent Disco are one sign of me showing my age, another is the sense of déjà vu that inevitably hits you as shows you saw when they were new receive revivals. In the last few years, this has happened to me regularly on Broadway with shows like 42nd Street, Nine, Into the Woods and even Big River coming back there in new productions from the originals that I first saw them in, but now its started happening on the fringe, too. One of the biggest hits of this year’s festival is Tracy Letts’ Killer Joe (at the Pleasance), with Phil Nichol in yet another of his (dis)guises, but I remember seeing the original, and far more galvanising and dangerous, original production at Traverse 2 in 1994, before it transferred to the West End’s Vaudeville Theatre the following year.
I also feel like I’ve been seeing Bob Downe, the brilliantly cheesy Australian lounge act creation of Mark Trevorrow, forever, too, ever since I first saw him at Edinburgh in the 1990s. This year he’s back yet again, and since he was appearing at the Spiegeltent, I couldn’t miss him. I seriously think that this wooden, mirrored circular auditorium could well be the world’s most beautiful theatrical container – as opposed to fixed building – and have loved visiting this travelling space ever since I first encountered it perched on top of the shopping centre over Waverley Station on the Edinburgh Fringe more than a decade ago. It’s a near-perfect space for cabaret performance, too, creating an atmosphere and rapport with the audience that a performer like Downe then feeds on effortlessly.
