I finally completed my 29-show-in-five-nights Edinburgh run yesterday, but it’s not just me who has already moved on from the festival. Press coverage already started trailing off before the middle of the middle week yesterday, with The Guardian the day before running just one theatre and one comedy review in the main paper and nothing at all in G2. Edinburgh features returned yesterday to G2, but by now the hits are already hits and the world is moving on.
Besides, there is a world elsewhere, though it did sometimes seem as if the entire world was in Edinburgh over the last few days. It was difficult to go anywhere without running into people from London’s wider theatrical community, both on and offstage. But already, too, critics are being called elsewhere, and while Peter Hall’s Bath Theatre Royal season yesterday held a press day for a double-bill matinee and evening opening, the RSC have gone one better today and are running a triple threat of openings for three more plays in their ongoing History Cycle.
I was all set to go today (as I mentioned last week in my blog entry on my future schedule), but after three consecutive nights in Edinburgh in which I only got a maximum of five hours sleep each night, I realised that twelve more hours in the theatre – albeit with breaks – would be a marathon too many. And then, in any case, I looked up the schedule to work out when to go instead, and discovered that, after they open today, this particular cycle of productions plays for just two more days – or one performance for each play – before they vanish from the rep entirely until November. So there was no urgency to reviewing them at all, except perhaps for the marketing department’s benefit. I think I’ll wait till the entire cycle comes to the Roundhouse next year….
So I’m back in Borough, SE1 today, though the last play I saw yesterday, Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, put me close to home before I even got there, set as it is in the Elephant and Castle just down the road. I used to live at the Elephant, and when I said as much to a former colleague, he replied gravely, “You obviously know no fear.” It certainly doesn’t get a good press in Walsh’s play. One character asks another to “paint me a picture of this boulevard and its surrounding environs”, and the answer comes back, “On my palate is only grey… Grey and muck. For these are the two primary colours that make up much of the Elephant.” But even if Walsh is clearly not intent on talking the area up, it does have a distinguished theatrical pedigree: in Twelfth Night, Antonio advises Sebastian, “In the south suburbs, at the Elephant, is best to lodge.”
Last year, however, I moved to Lant Street in Borough, and if Sarah Waters’ account in her historical novel Fingersmith is anything to go by, I’ve not much improved my lot. According to a user summary on Amazon, “Susan, or as she is called sometimes, Sue or Sukey, lives in one of London’s more notorious slums, the Borough. Outside of the doors of the house on Lant Street, pickpockets, thieves and prostitutes work their trade, but within, the oddest of families have formed…” It’s not quite like that these days outside my flat, though I’ll leave it to you to judge how odd things are inside it.
