Since last filing a blog entry here on Friday, I have seen 20 more shows in Edinburgh; eight on Friday (one up from what I had originally planned, since I found a gap in my schedule and discovered a show to fill it with), and six each on Saturday and Sunday (with a seventh planned for Sunday cancelled, not due to my own lack of stamina, but my failure to read the programme correctly that last night was that show’s night off). What would take you three weeks to see going to the theatre every night in London takes just three days here - but it’s also alarming how compressed one’s life becomes, as the days slip by in a theatrical blur.
Edinburgh is clearly a dangerous place for obsessive-compulsive theatregoers like me - but at least I know I’m far from alone. A couple of theatrically-minded friends flew in - one from France, the other from New York - on Friday for a similarly-obsessive round of fringe going, though as one of them said after we’d seen New Electric Ballroom at the Traverse on Friday morning, “I wish the plane had been late!”
That’s despite the fact that it had only that morning won a Scotsman Fringe First award, and later in the day, both of them went to see another of the winners, Architecting, again at the Traverse, that I had bowed out of after hearing some negative reports - and then had another from them, so am happy to have done so. Of course, as a critic you always want to be able to make your own mind up; but in Edinburgh, more than anywhere on earth, it seems impossible not to be swept up in the clamour of word-of-mouth, hope and hype, so you have to filter it through your own instincts. Mine was not to see Architecting — and though it may be my loss, I trust my friends.
That’s the most scientific Edinburgh ever gets; it remains the most inexact thing of all to try to plot a path through the massive fringe brochure (this year, all 288 pages of it) to find the best shows, and gut instinct is the only way to start. But I’m also always struck by the critical consensus that quickly emerges on what some of them are expected to be, and leads directly to which actually in turn get the lion’s share of national review coverage: yesterday’s Sunday Times had a round-up of nine fringe plays, all but two of which I have also now seen; while The Observer offered six, two of which were the same as those covered in the Sunday Times, and from which I had seen four in all.
But if being swept to the same hit shows diminishes the overall sense of discovery in what we finally see, at least we are guaranteed something of a better time than going off-piste. But it is in making discoveries of one’s own that the bigger pleasures are to be found, and I’m delighted to have made at least two.
Though I typically try to avoid one-man shows in Edinburgh (where there are far, far too many of them), it was the venue PR that steered me to Bully at the Gilded Balloon, and it gave me new faith in the form as its writer-performer Richard Fry steered a darkly poignant tale of violent abuse, both growing up and coming of age as a gay man in unhealthy domestic partnerships. Fry - whom the press notes say only came to acting at the age of 30, after a string of jobs “as a bin man, market trader and wood cutter” - apparently drew on some of his own experiences, but not (fortunately) all; his play mines a vivid imaginative current that connects the actor directly with his audience in a way that makes him seem genuinely vulnerable and heartfelt, yet some of it, at least, is purely imagined (or he wouldn’t be with us here today). But he acts it with such delicate understatement that you believe every second of it.
My other major discovery was a late night musical revue, Edges at C Venue, by two recent University of Michigan graduates, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who at the age of 21 won the 2007 Jonathan Larson Award. Not since I first encountered the work of Jason Robert Brown through via a similar song cycle, Songs for a New World, have I heard a new musical theatre voice that is quite so original or emotionally piercing.
I have had many other pleasures (and some not), over the weekend - but the joys of encountering new talents like these and Richard Fry are what continue to make Edinburgh so rewarding - and so unmissable, as both these shows are.
Leave a comment