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Inside... Adam Buxton David Sedaris John Lloyd Kate Tempest Holes by Tom Basden Nirbhaya La Clique Les Enfants Terribles
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Comedy, theatre, music and more: Your complete guide to the Edinburgh Festival
‘asTounding’ Brisbane Courier Mail ‘an acrobaTic and eroTic
masTerpiece’ B.Z. Berlin 5.00PM (6.00PM)
31 JULY - 26 AUGUST 2013
‘TiTillaTes as much as iT enTrances, and amuses as much iT inspires’ Rover Montreal
Sean Young Photography
Underbelly Productions presents
Underbelly ProdUctions, AirnAdette corP And 2 for the roAd events Present
hAPPening, ‘PArt Postmodern k’ GQ PArt totAlly berser 8.50PM (9.50PM)
31 JULY - 26 AUGUST 2013
Drella Forever
‘the sPoof roc rock yoUr soc k bAnd thAt’ll ks off’ Téléram a
Les Petits Theatre Company, Underbelly Productions and Greenwich Theatre present
A brilliant new kids show from the team behind LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES
TAGE S N O E LIV
3.00PM (4.00PM)
31 JULY - 26 AUGUST 2013
LAUGHING STOCK PRODUCTIONS AND UNDERBELLY PRODUCTIONS PRESENT
TIME MACHINE
BEST. PARTY. EVER. ‘Hot Dub guarantees an awesome night out’
HHHHH Adelaide Advertiser
00.15AM (02.45AM)
2-3, 8-10, 15-17, 22-25 AUG 2013
8.45PM (9.45PM) 31 JULY - 26 AUGUST
FEST IS YOUR FREE GUIDE TO THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL
festcontents page 10
Independently minded
Fest publishes the definitive festival guide every Tuesday and Friday throughout August. Pick them up from venues across Edinburgh.
The year before Scotland votes on its political future, the Fringe has barely even touched the issue. We ask why? page 14
PUBLISHER
Sam Friedman
EDITORIAL Editor
Ben Judge
Features Editor
Yasmin Sulaiman
Comedy Editor
Lyle Brennan
Theatre Editor
Joe Spurgeon
Kids Editor
Caroline Black
Production Creative Director
Matthew MacLeod
Photo Editor
Claudine Quinn
Events & Marketing Hannah Putsey Web Editor
Kickstarter Revolution Funding an Edinburgh show is tough. Fest investigates the ways in which young theatre companies are bringing their productions to the Fringe.
Money Money Money page 30
Your New Favourite Comedian Fancy yourself as a cutting edge comedy fan? We line up the best new comics to help you stay ahead of the curve.
Dan Heap
page 68
Sales team Lara Moloney, George Sully, Tom McCarthy, Hannah Putsey The small print Published by Fest Media Limited, Registered in Scotland, Company number, SC344852 Registered office 3 Coates Place, Edinburgh, EH3 7AA Every effort has been made to check the accuracy of the information in this magazine, but we cannot accept liability for information which is inaccurate. Show times and prices are subject to changes - always check with the venue. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprodiced in whole or in part without the explicit permission of the publisher. The views and opinions expressed within this publication do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the printer of the publisher.
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Traverse at 50 Edinburgh’s finest theatrical institution celebrates its half-centenary. We speak to those who were there at the beginning.
Fest supports Amnesty international at the festival Amnesty International is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights for all.
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festcontents page 8 Cover Feature Alexei Sayle’s firebrand political comedy led the alternative comedy charge in the 1980s. He returns to the Fringe for the first time in twenty years, and finds a much-changed comedy landscape.
page 16 comedy 18 The New Alternative Examining the state of alternative comedy in 2013
22 Adam Buxton With radio’s funniest double act on hold, the allpurpose buffoon boots up a laptop full of fun
40 John Lloyd The QI impressario explores the wonders of Liff
page 49 Theatre 49 The Shawshank Redemption Omid Djalili makes a splash in this big budget adaptation
56 Nirbhaya Making sense of the harrowing rape and murder of an Indian medical student
61 Holes by Tom Basden Taking a dark turn into a world where society has broken down, and people have to do all they can to survive
page 72 International 72 Out of This World Scotland’s pioneering site-specific theatre company create a brand new human colony in outer space.
74 LA Dance Project The Californian contemporary dance company set to make a big impact in Edinburgh this August
page 76 Music & CABARET 78 La Clique The Fringe favourites make their return to the World Famous Speigeltent for their ten-year anniversary show
Page 91 FEST DIRECTORY
Don’t know your Old Town from your New? No idea what time the one o’clock gun goes off? We’ve put together a handy selection of top fives and top tens of all things Edinburgh and Fringe-related to keep you on the straight and narrow. Here’s how to navigate it: 91 Catriona Knox gives you the lowdown on Edinburgh’s best cafes. 92 Keith Farnan and Shirley and Shirley give you the guide to the top bars and pubs. 94 There’s so much fast food at the festival. Carey Marx knows what’s what. 95 Looking for love? Check out David Quirk’s guide to the city’s romantic hotpots. 96 Take a break from the choas, with New Art Club’s suggestions for a perfect day out. 97 Too much beer and junk food? Time to run it off with Lee Camp. 98 Kirstin Innes takes you out for the evening with her guide to Edinburgh nightlife.
80 Glasgow Improvised Orchestra Fusing jazz and classical music doesn’t sound like it should work, but it does
page 82 Kids 84 Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs Les Enfants Terribles make their debut in the Kids’ Fringe
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86 Howard Read Big Howard and Little Howard are back at the Fringe, and Little Howard is alive and fully interactive!
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Advertise in fest With over 125,000 copies, Fest is the biggest and best magazine at the Festival Contact sam@festmag.co.uk for more information
edinburgh festival preview guide 2013 fest 5
The Godfather Part Two In the early 1980s, Alexei Sayle stormed the Fringe with a groundbreaking new approach to standup. After 17 years away from the stage, he tells Sam Friedman how he’s returning to reinvigorate the legacy of alternative comedy. 6 fest edinburgh festival preview guide 2013
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festfeature Photos: Steve Ullathorne
A
lexei Sayle looks pleased with himself. He’s just analogised the Fringe as a comedy warzone. Princes Street is no man’s land, he tells me, with Stewart Lee and “The Stand Radicals” firing artillery at “all the others” over in Bristo Square. Leaping into animation, he fires an imaginary machine gun at me, chuckling at his own surreal vision and showering me with remnants of his sfogliatella pastry. The godfather of alternative comedy will, of course, be siding with the Radicals for his first Fringe show in 20 years, playing a late run of 14 nights at Stand 3. “Stewart [Lee] said I couldn’t go anywhere else,” he deadpans. “No, really, he emailed me and said, ideologically, I couldn’t go over to the ‘other side’.” We’re sitting in Sfizio’s in Camden, a proudly ungentrified Venezuelan-Italian café that sits unassumingly on Theobald’s Road amid a sea of trendy gastropubs and soulless chain eateries. Sayle’s been coming here for years and the owners clearly adore him, humouring his pidgin Spanish and eagerly showing me the articles he’s written for them in the local press. “That was complete nonsense,” he confides with a grin as the waiter dutifully decodes his Spanglish coffee order. Sayle once famously remarked that “you can’t do comedy with a beard”, but today I’m finding it hard not to notice the elf-like silver goatee that he’s cultivated into a neat arrow formation, and which rises and falls in a not-uncomical fashion as he speaks. He has just finished a run of early Edinburgh previews at London’s Soho Theatre, the first time he’s performed live in 17 years. Things nearly went terribly wrong, he tells me. On the press night, riddled with nerves, Sayle lost his voice and then, in the opening minutes, told the same joke twice. “At one point I thought of saying ‘look, I can’t do this’, and just walking off.” Happily, the Liverpudlian collected himself and the show was largely wellreceived by the critics. But the fear that he might have been about to debase his own legacy clearly got to Sayle. “I suppose the older you get, the legacy is all you have,” he says. “When you’re younger you think ‘well, I can build another one’, but at my age I don’t have time so it all gets a bit scary. That’s probably one of the reasons that performers stop taking chances. Because it’s easier to stay in a comfortable rut. But equally, when people try to replicate their glory days they invariably fuck up. So the only way to be free, I think, is to face that challenge.” Taking chances is something most people associate with Sayle. Brought up by Communist parents in Anfield, Liverpool,
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he went on to pioneer the alternative comedy boom of the early 1980s. Frustrated by the casual bigotry of the 1970s club comics and the hackneyed light entertainment of TV sitcoms, he and others such as Malcolm Hardee, Tony Allen and Ben Elton championed a kind of post-punk political comedy that aimed to galvanise leftist activism and hone in on the escalating social divisions being cultivated in Thatcher-era Britain. More than just a political project, though, alternative comedy was also united by an experimental aesthetic that attempted to push the boundaries of the art form. Sayle’s standup epitomised the alternative style, his ranting and relentless
Alexei Sayle The Stand III, 6pm–7:05pm, 13–25 Aug, not 19, £12
speed of attack demanding a constant intellectual participation ranging from Sartre references to Brechtian theatre. “For me it was always a way of making interesting art,” he says. “A kind of bloody-mindedness to push, to not settle for the ordinary, to always include the erudite reference. Not art that has some kind of didactic political purpose, but art that engages people and contains some truth.” Watching one of Sayle’s previews at the Soho Theatre, it’s clear he retains a
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festfeature commitment to pushing boundaries. Particularly exciting is the quality of the satire. There is a tangible bite and clarity in his political commentary, particularly when he lambasts the reproduction of class privilege and the myriad triumphs of our recent crop of Old Etonians (“Maybe we should just hand back control to the upper class completely”). It’s a refreshing change from the limpness of much contemporary political comedy, I tell him. “I think there’s just a refusal in Britain right now,” he agrees. “I mean you can do the ‘John Prescott’s a big fat idiot’ thing, but otherwise you have to go deeper and that’s hard. I think a lot of comics go with the path of least resistance.” Alternative comedy undoubtedly transformed British comedy, particularly at the Fringe, where Sayle’s 1980 latenight double bill with Tony Allen is widely considered the precursor to the now ubiquitous Fringe “hour”. Yet, the cultural stock of many alternative comedians fell dramatically in the 1990s. Some were accused of de-radicalising and assimilating into the lowbrow mainstream, a process epitomised by the trajectory of Ben Elton. Elton’s populist novels and musicals were roundly derided by artists on the left (including Sayle) and he was famously labelled the “biggest sellout of his generation” by writer Toby Young. Interestingly, Sayle survived this backlash with his credibility largely intact. This was perhaps because in 1996, when the commercial juggernaut was beginning to envelop comedy, he quit standup and focused on becoming an author. Yet, considering his enduring appeal, one of the most admirable aspects of Sayle’s show is that he doesn’t attempt to bask in this reputational glory. On the contrary, he happily questions his legend, acknowledging that he too is not a wholly uncompromised figure. In one memorable skit, he inverts a rant about Elton by pondering his own participation in a number of lucrative voice-over ads. “It would be easy to elide certain subjects,’ he reflects. “But I don’t want to pretend. Me doing voice-overs should really make you question my political pronounce-
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“Me doing voiceovers should really make you question my political pronouncements, because I’m clearly a hypocrite”
ments, because I’m clearly a hypocrite.” Again the infectious laugh, again the inevitable deluge of flaky pastry. But it’s not just Sayle that has changed since he last performed live. The British comedy audience has also altered immeasurably. He says that when he started doing comedy in 1979, “no universityeducated person went to see standup”. Instead, most of the early alternative comedy audience was much like Sayle himself – young, radical and working-class. And Sayle says he still identifies strongly with the working class, despite his own upward trajectory. “If you take a strictly Marxist sense of class, there’s three classes: the bourgeoisie, who own everything, the petit bourgeoisie and the working class. And I’ve always accepted those distinctions. Those are the objective economic classes you are in. And I am petit-bourgeois in the sense that I own my own means of production. Culturally, of course, the petit bourgeoisie can go either way — you can be a shopkeeper in Knightsbridge, where you’re serving the bourgeoisie, or you can be a shopkeeper in Hartlepool, where clearly you’re not. So I’ve always understood my-
self to be petit-bourgeois, self-employed, but I’ve always seen my cultural allegiance with the working class.” The irony of this, of course, is that Sayle and the alternative comedians were instrumental in transforming British comedy audiences. Borrowing from high-art traditions to inform their style, they helped rehabilitate comedy and in so doing attracted a new generation of middle-class audiences, many of whom will be clamouring to buy Sayle tickets in Edinburgh. Unwittingly then, does that mean the petit-bourgeois Alexei Sayle of 2013 may actually be serving the Edinburgh bourgeoisie rather than the working class? Sayle smiles at this, but carefully sidesteps the provocation: “I don’t really mind where the audience comes from, to be honest. Audiences definitely seem better behaved now. They will sit and let complex ideas be related. And I suppose in the past I would have turned on them for that, but I let it stand now.” This seems to epitomise the contemporary Sayle. While in the past he might have mounted a snarling counter-attack, today he seems more forgiving, more mellow. Gone, it seems, is a lot of the anger and bile, and instead there’s a thoughtful, self-reflective tone. “My impetus before was always to kill it, smash everyone else out of sight, be the greatest. I really had quite a malevolent streak. But I’ve worked really hard to get rid of that. And that’s a lot of what the show is about, about trying to project that idea, that attitude of forgiveness, understanding and acceptance.” Sayle says he’s not going to Edinburgh with any ulterior motives of career kickstarts. He doesn’t want a return to TV or radio, or to release a Christmas DVD. “I just want to do this. If it works, great, if it doesn’t, it will just be some sad old man capering around. “Although you never know,” he says, suddenly grinning gleefully, seized by another mental vision. “Maybe I’ll end up on 8 Out Of 10 Cats or team captain for some Channel 5 panel show.” If only.
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Destination:
FASHION
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Scotland the Brave?
Scotland stands on the brink of a historic referendum on national independence. But why, asks Ben Judge, are there so few Fringe shows discussing it?
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W
hen August draws to a close, Scotland will be little more than a year away from making the most important political decision in its history. It is a decision that will have significant long-term ramifications—irrespective of the outcome—for the way the country is governed, its presence on the international stage and the welfare of its people. It is a decision that will see millions of Scots wrestle with the highminded philosophical ideas of democracy, self-determination and national identity – as well, of course, as the slightly more prosaic matter of how much money they’ll have in their pockets after the dust has settled. It is strange, then, that at the world’s most famous arts festival, taking place in the heart of the Scottish capital and comprising some 2,871 different shows, it requires work and patience to find any indication that the independence referendum is a mere thirteen months away. Indeed, it is possible to count comfortably the number of independence-minded productions on the fingers of one hand. So why is it that Scottish artists, comedians and playwrights seem so disengaged—at least creatively—from the debate? Tellingly, the only serious, high profile production tackling the issue of Scottish independence comes from a Welsh playwright, Tim Price, whose play I’m With the Band opens at the Traverse this month. At a superficial level, Price’s play follows the travails of a fictitious rock band—aptly named The Union—and is inspired by recurring tales of squabbling superstars and of band members casting off to begin their own solo careers. But scratch a bit deeper, says Price, and “it’s a metaphor for the break up of the United Kingdom. If you’re interested in the Scottish independence debate, the question so often seems to be ‘Can Scotland survive?’ But that’s quite a myopic way of looking at it. Another way of
“
It’s embarrassing! This is the most important constitutional moment this country has faced and we’re not even talking about it!
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“
looking at it is to ask can the Union survive Scottish independence? What happens to the other countries? That’s all contingent and that’s a story we haven’t been told yet.” Although Price sympathises with some arguments in favour of independence, his concern with I’m With The Band is to remind his audience that Scottish independence won’t impact on Scotland alone. “This is the kind of thing that keeps me standing in bars at 3am. It’s not just about Scotland! And that’s why it feels like a family breaking up.” Or like a band breaking up. “That’s part of the reason I wrote I’m With The Band, because there’s no discussion about the rest of the Union in Scotland; they’re just not interested in talking to each other about it. For example, independence will have a huge impact on Northern Ireland and no one in Scotland seems to care about that!” But for Scots trying to make up their mind about independence, the impact it will have elsewhere is not the core issue. And to this end, Price is baffled by the absence of any Scottish voices on the matter. “If you compare the cultural infrastructure of Scotland and Wales, Scotland is like a super-state. You’ve got so many theatres here from the Oran Mor to the Tron to the Traverse. The National Theatre of Scotland is huge compared to National Theatre Wales, a behemoth! And you’ve got the world’s largest arts festival on your doorstep yet you can’t find the voices to debate each other? It’s really strange.” Others are more damning in their assessment. “It’s embarrassing!” says Keir McAllister. “This is the most important constitutional moment this country has faced and we’re not even talking about it!” McAllister—a comedian whose double act alongside fellow comic Vladimir McTavish is, for the second year running, the only comedy show at the Fringe explicitly exploring the independence referendum—is a Scottish independence supporter and vocal advocate of the importance of artists getting involved in the debate. He argues that comedy serves an important democratic function in speaking truth to power and causing trouble, but that in Scotland it doesn’t live up to that aspiration. “I know some Scottish comedians feel that you can’t do a show about Scottish politics. And I think that Scottish comedy, like other things, suffers from a lack of aspiration sometimes. I think there should be more Scottish comedians taking a look u
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t at the Scottish Parliament and I think its a signature of our lack of confidence as a nation that this doesn’t happen.” But McAllister doesn’t think it’s fair to lay the blame for this exclusively at the door of Scottish comedians. In his own show this year, he and McTavish have had to expand their remit to include Westminster politics as well as Holyrood. In part, this is because the pair believe that the UK political situation is important to understanding the context of the Scottish independence debate, but there are more basic concerns too. “It means we have a few more-recognisable targets. One of the things we found about doing Scottish
Above: Keir McAllister
The Events Traverse, times vary, various dates between 1 and 25 Aug, £13–£20
Vladimir Mctavish And Keir Mcallister Look At The State Of Britain Stand Comedy Club III, 7–8pm, 1–25 Aug, not 12, £8–£9
I‘m With The Band Traverse, times vary, 2–25 Aug, not 5, 12, 19, £13–£20
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political comedy is that there’s a large proportion of the audience who had no idea who the politicians we were talking about were! “I mean, I do a joke about when BBC News stopped a guy in George Square in Glasgow and asked what he thought about independence and his response was: ‘Are we still going to get Eastenders on the telly?’ It’s so frustrating that that’s the level of the debate.” But one Scottish artist who isn’t too concerned about the absence of independence-themed productions at the Fringe this year is David Greig, one of the country’s finest playwrights. For Greig, it’s not that Scottish artists are apathetic about independence—indeed he believes that there is a majority support for independence among Scotland’s artistic community that isn’t reflected in current polling of the wider public—but that they’re involving themselves in different ways, at meetings, conferences and on the campaign trail. More than that, though, he’s not convinced that political work made in the heat of the moment is the best way of conducting the debate. “If I have a message, I’ll send
it in the post. I don’t use my plays to tell people how to vote, I do that on my Twitter feed or—nearer the time—I’ll write essays and so on. But my plays need to be plays.” In that sense, Greig hints that the artist’s true role is deliberative, helping us explore how we got here as a society, not to tell us where to go to – or at least not to do so bluntly. “I’ll tell you when a lot of art will be made about Scottish independence, and that’s after the referendum. If the referendum is defeated, there’ll be an unbelieveable amount of plays being made because there’ll be a lot of processing being done, and a play is a good way of processing that... The thing is, whatever happens, we’re going to have to live together afterwards. Scotland will have made a momentous decision and there will be some for whom that’s a painful thing. It might be me and my friends, it might be Alistair Darling! But one way or the other, there will be some people feeling sad, loss, uncertainty, all of those things. And that’s when the art will truly emerge – as we process those feelings. “In advance of the referendum, though, all you can do is propaganda.”
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A S S E M B L Y
P R E S E N T
Lady Rizo ladyrizo.com
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Money Money Money It’s an expensive business putting on a Fringe show. Ed Ballard meets some of the festival producers leading a funding revolution.
O
ne day last December, it occurred to Paul Flannery that it would be fun to devise a nostalgic Fringe show based on one of the TV programmes he loved as a child. Flannery—actor, sometime Fringe comic, part-time chef—weighed up the pros and cons of The Crystal Maze and Fun House, two old favourites, but decided in the end that they wouldn’t work for one reason or another. Another show seemed temptingly feasible, however. Knightmare was a deliriously silly puzzle-solving game for children that ran from 1987 to 1994. One contestant (“the Dungeoneer”) had to negotiate a series of tasks in a virtual reality castle. The Dungeoneer wore a helmet that prevented him from seeing what was going on; the other kids had to call out instructions as they watched their friend on a screen, where he (it was usually a he) would be projected into the mysterious castle thanks to the magic of the green screen. “The more we thought about it, the more we thought we could actually make this work,” Flannery says. He pitched the idea to Tim Child, the creator of the TV show and the owner of the rights. He loved the idea. With that seal of approval, there was basically no way that Flannery wasn’t going to do everything in his power to produce a live-action version of Knightmare. He and his team just needed a venue, costumes, transport, props, and some marketing money. And a set that can be tweaked to look like different rooms in a fantasy castle. And somewhere to sleep. “You can’t do it on the cheap,” says Flannery, whose Highgate flat is now covered in glue and fiberglass and bits of puppet. “It’s got to look right. It’s got to live up to what people remember.” Like many people going to Edinburgh in the hope that the power of
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the Fringe will transform a bright idea into a life-changing one, Flannery was resigned to losing money on the show, but he and his co-producer couldn’t provide enough by themselves to make it work. Like an increasing number of Fringe performers, they turned to Kickstarter, a website that lets you raise money by pitching your idea to the generous but fickle population of the internet. Twenty shows are currently raising money for the Fringe this year on Kickstarter alone, up from six last year. And though Kickstarter is the biggest crowdfunding platform by a stretch, searching on rival websites reveals dozens more shows raising cash. When I speak to Flannery in early July, Knightmare Live has raised about two thirds of its £6,000 target with a week to go. On Kickstarter, hitting the target is a requirement if you are to receive any of the money pledged. Miss the target and donors’ money goes back into their accounts. Flannery, preparing for a final push on social media, is confident that the rest will arrive. Susie Riddell was also pleasantly surprised by how many strangers and minor acquaintances have given money. Her theatre company, Bristolbased Idiot Child, turned to crowdfunding to raise a planned £4,500 to help pay for their show, I Could’ve Been Better, a one-man play about a peculiar 33-year-old who wants to win a school swimming competition. “Having the Pleasance say ‘we want your show’ was so exciting, but we needed to pay for it,” she says. At Edinburgh, that gets harder with every year that goes by. “I hadn’t produced at Edinburgh for nine years. It was very expensive then, but now it’s just crazy.” Like Flannery, Idiot Child reckoned that they needed about £15,000 to produce the show, which is around the Fringe average. People raising
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festfeature Knightmare Live Gilded Balloon Teviot, 5:30–6:30pm, 31 Jul – 25 Aug, not 14, £11.50
I Could’ve Been Better Pleasance Courtyard, 1:15pm – 2:15pm, 31 Jul – 26 Aug, not 12, 13, £11
Top: Knightmare Live Bottom: I Could’ve Been Better
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money on Sponsume, the website Riddell went for, get to keep all the money people pledge (apart from the slice kept by the people who run the website), regardless of whether they hit their target. As a result, Idiot Child are assured of the £1,800 the campaign has already raised when I speak to Riddell. The money will allow the company to bring a level of polish to the show that it would otherwise have lacked, she tells me – for instance, they can now afford to bring their own lighting designer up to Edinburgh. Unexpectedly, though, the money isn’t the first thing Riddell mentions when I ask her what led Idiot Child to try a crowdfunding campaign. What caught her attention in the first place, she tells me, was the potential publicity value. “It was in the back of my mind last year that it would be a good way of getting buzz,” she says. In particular, this led the company to pour a lot of effort into their promotional video. Many crowdfunding hopefuls produce a video pitch; but while the pitches of many theatre companies feature a line of bright young things chirpily asking for your money, Idiot Child’s is polished and sharply written. It doubles up as a trailer for the show, introducing the play’s strange protagonist and his peculiar quest. Riddell hopes that some of the people who see it will come to the show, even if they don’t hand over any cash. In fact, it’s clear from talking to Riddell that while the money is extremely helpful, it’s far from the end of the story. What she speaks about with most enthusiasm is the feeling of moral support: a crowdfunding campaign showed her small but ambitious theatre company that they are on the right track, that they have won the approval of a considerable network of unknown enthusiasts. “We’re all more relaxed now. We’re saying to each other, ‘Guys, people like us!’” In the past, Riddell has often pledged money to other theatre companies’ campaigns for just this reason. “It’s a really great way of investing in people I respect,” she said. On its own, a fiver doesn’t buy you much in terms of lighting designers, but even a fiver is a valuable vote of confidence. Riddell points out that although the technology is new, crowdfunding is really a new form of a very old idea: patronage, which for thousands of years has allowed artists to survive by getting rich people to subsidise them, either out of the goodness of their hearts or in exchange for flattery. The advantage of the new kind of patronage—maybe it needs a Web 2.0 appellation, like Distributed Patronage—is that crowdfunders don’t demand that you cast their image in bronze, or compose an ode to their magnificence. Crowdfunding won’t turn Fringe theatre into a moneyspinner, but hopefully it can help make up for a reduction in the state’s budget for arts funding. It will mean both of these shows are better than they would have been otherwise; and that, the reasoning goes, will help them stand out among the Edinburgh horde, giving them a better chance of a prolonged life after the Fringe, maybe even a profitable one. Most importantly, it helps people carry on doing the worthwhile but unprofitable things they are passionate about. “We’re not getting paid to do this,” says Riddell. “We’re doing it because we love it.”
edinburgh festival preview guide 2013 fest 15
Comedy
Highlights Pop Philosopher
Take a chance
Sara Pascoe Assembly George Sq, 8pm, 31 Jul - 16 Aug (not 13), £12
Not many acts are worth seeing year after year, but Pascoe’s evolution makes her an exception. Her drift from the surreal to the personal means that where once there were only flights of fancy, now we get her own life through the lens of Nietzschean perspectivism. Not as abstruse as it sounds, but still headspinningly ambitious stuff.
Quite a character
Dividing lines
Will Franken
John Kearns
Pleasance Dome, 5.40pm, 31 Jul - 26 Aug (not 14), £10
Voodoo Rooms, 5.05pm, 3-25 Aug, not 14, Free
Look sharp — flamboyant shapeshifter Franken melts between characters at one hell of a lick. His shows have the feel of a comic strip whose panels bleed into one another, motoring from one wackjob parody to the next by way of some outrageously contrived segues.
We could list a hundred caveats about what a polarising force Kearns is, but it seems a waste of time. He will be taking risks: join him or don’t. His comedy is ridiculous, disorienting, tense and obscene, performed in character, a monk’s tonsure and fake teeth. You’ll have no obligation to pay, and potentially a lot to gain.
once, twice…
All the rage
Thrice
Bridget Christie
Underbelly Cowgate, 7.50pm, 1 - 25 Aug (not 13), £10.50
The Stand, 11:10am, 3-25 Aug, not 12, £10
Few things make as much sense as the unholy union of Nathan Dean Williams and twisted sisters Lizzie and Sarah Daykin. As a depraved character comic meets the sadistic duo known as Toby, we anticipate a sketch act even crueller and more grotesque than the sum of its parts.
False vitriol abounds in standup, but here’s some genuine righteous fury. Her surrealist bent cast aside, Christie powers through a cogent teardown of what passes for feminism today, decrying misconceptions of what the cause means. We’ve got a long way to go, and she may be the one to take us there.
Meaty standup
Baconface The Stand II, 1.20pm, 3-25 Aug (not 12), £5
A mystery, wrapped in a luchador mask, wrapped in bacon. Canada’s most enigmatic export claims credit not only for his homeland’s entire comedic output, but also for inspiring Stewart Lee’s shtick since the beginning. His rambling first hour might make sense of that assertion. It might not.
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it’s a steal
Joke Thieves Laughing Horse @ Espionage, 10pm, 1 - 25 Aug (not 13), Free
Comics are still scrambling to prove themselves at the improvised standup night Set List, but here a new format arrives. Each guest performs a short set, then the crowd decides who is performing whose material. Unpredictable, most likely ramshackle, but undeniably intriguing.
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festcomedy
Safe bets
Classical comedy
Austentatious
Laughing Horse @ Counting House, 1.30pm, 1 - 25 Aug (not 13), Free
The concept—a Jane Austen spoof, improvised—sounds like just another gimmick, both restrictive and smugly intellectual. In another reality it might be just that, but the crack team known as the Milk Monitors achieve a balance of sophistication and silliness that gives this wide appeal. Miraculously, it’s still free.
Twilight zone
Claudia O’Doherty Pleasance Courtyard, 9.50pm, 31 Jul - 26 Aug (not 12), £9-11.50
Last year The Telescope was a skilfully orchestrated portrait of a performer being eaten alive by her own malfunctioning show. There’s not much to indicate where O’Doherty will go from there, but you’re in good company with an eccentric, adventurous Aussie who undercuts her faux grandiosity with a lo-fi aesthetic.
sweet dreams Grumpy young man
James Acaster Pleasance Courtyard, 7pm Jul 31 - 25 Aug, £9-12
What a wonderfully sullen creature he is, all gangly limbs and sensible knitwear. It’s a joy to see Acaster take a hopelessly obscure topic and flesh it out under the gaze of his pernickety fantasist persona.
Pajama Men Assembly Roxy, 9pm, 1-26 Aug (not 12, 19), £13-15
Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez are masters of their craft. Having flexed their improv muscles, they revert to scripted character comedy — which is an inexcusable understatement their prop-free feats of imagination. Watch in awe as each absurd thread of a wildly intricate epic careers to a point of collision.
Hate maIL
Rhyming couplet
Pleasance Courtyard, 7.15pm, 31 Jul - 15 Aug (not 12), £8-10
Gilded Balloon Teviot, 10.40pm, 31 Jul - 26 Aug (not 12, 19), £14
Joe Lycett Despite his youth, impish Lycett feels like a safe pair of hands. His greatest strength still lies in recounting his petty acts of defiance against those who have slighted him. He’s not the first to antagonise companies with timewasting correspondences, but he might be the best. Someone toss the man a book deal.
Rubberbandits Limerick’s premier hip hop collective bring the ruckus once again, still sweating into rancid plastic bag masks and belting out wrongheaded anthems. The simple decision to do away with seating makes for a riotous ‘proper gig’ atmosphere.
Live wire
Glenn Wool Assembly George Sq, 9.50pm, 31 Jul - 26 Aug (not 12, 19), £12.50-14
Everything we’ve been told about drink, drugs and hard living is wrong. How else can this proudly degenerate Canadian still be pumping out some of the most potent, clear-eyed comedy around? Wool is blessed with the apocalyptic howl of a preacher, the chuckle of a dirty little man and a gift for gripping, sordid standup.
Dapper duo
Max & Ivan Pleasance Dome, 8.20pm, 31 Jul - 25 Aug (not 13), £9-12.50
Few sketch groups have such an instinctive understanding of what you can do with an hour. This duo use it to weave another turbo-pastiche narrative — this time built around a school reunion that warps the conventions of a corny teen romance. They also run The Wrestling, which you of course are going to.
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edinburgh festival preview guide 2013 fest 17
festcomedy
The A word It’s fetishised by some, cringed at by others, but what, asks Si Hawkins, does the alternative comedy label really mean today?
H
uddled in the corner of a London café, within spitting distance of The Comedy Store, John Fleming is pondering what alternative comedy means to the general public. “It’s Ben Elton in a sparkly suit on Channel 4 doing political jokes,” he says. “They ignored working-class Malcolm [Hardee] down in Greenwich, showing his bollocks, but I would argue that bollocks are much more alternative.” Fleming knows a bit about comedy’s extremities. He runs the Fringe’s annual Malcolm Hardee Awards, which commemorate the aforementioned legend by celebrating “bizarrely original” acts, as he puts it. Memories of Hardee—who died in 2005—can make even the most wizened comic wistful. If Alexei Sayle was the embodiment of 80s alternative comedy, peddling both politics and mayhem, then Fleming’s old mate was the underground antagonist, encouraging lunatic stunts and no little nakedness. But what would he make of alternative comedy today? According to one Hardee Award winner, the original scene was a lot more interesting. “I remember going to see Julian Clary and Malcolm Hardee, and I assumed it would still be like that, that’s what I assumed people did comedy for,” says Edward Aczel. Now a Fringe stalwart, his crowd-dividing ‘anti-comedy’ emerged in response to the mid-noughties status quo. Aczel won the Hardee Award for Comic Originality in 2008, three years after visiting a comedy club for the first time in aeons and finding it disappointingly traditional. “I was shocked by that, so many people were doing such textbook stuff,” he says. “You go to The Comedy Store now, which was the home of alternative comedy, and you find it’s much more conventional than you’d imagine.” So is he an alternative comedian? “Alternative comedy is quite a loaded word,” muses Aczel, talking to Fest during his dayjob lunch break. “It became mainstream. Mainstream comedy now in some ways has more in common with the ‘70s comedians.
There was something punk about the 80s.” Bob Slayer also has issues with the ‘A’ word. The former rock ‘n’ roll road manager runs Heroes of the Fringe, hosting acts who dare to be different. Until this year, it was called the Alternative Fringe, but that word is “dated” and “could become a millstone”, announced Slayer. And who needs millstones these days?
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Above: The Alternative Comedy Memorial Society
“Alternative comedy was a moment in time,” he says, “a reaction to everything that was going on: old men in suits doing racist jokes, Thatcher and all that gubbins.” The Alternative Fringe was a response to the industry that subsequently arose, making a particular splash in 2011, when Slayer and musical comedian Kunt and the Gang won the Hardee Cunning Stunt Award for put-
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festcomedy festcomedy The Alternative Comedy Experience The Stand Comedy Club, 10pm–1am, 12 Aug, 19 Aug, £10
The Alternative Comedy Memorial Society The Stand Comedy Club, 11:30pm–2am, various dates, £10
Lewis Schaffer Is Better Than You Heroes @ The Hive, 8pm–8:50pm, 1–25 Aug, not 7, 14, 21, £5
Edward Aczel - Lives In A Meaningless Shed Underbelly Cowgate, 6:10pm–7:10pm, 1–25 Aug, not 12, £11
Bob Slayer: Worldwide Bawbag Heroes @ Bob’s Bookshop , 4:45pm – 5:45pm, 1–31 Aug, not 21, 27, 28, £5 Left: Edward Aczel Below: Lewis Schaffer
ting penis stickers on big companies’ posters and being threatened with legal action. Unabashed, he insists that “independent is the new alternative. Acts that refuse to buy into the pay-to-play model are developing their own ways to do the Fringe.” That said, at Edinburgh’s most established venue, The Stand, you’ll find two ‘alternative’ showcases during August. The performers booked for the second series of Stewart Lee’s Alternative Comedy Experience are an interesting selection of what currently constitutes ‘alternative,’ several of them—Kevin Eldon, Hattie Hayridge—already familiar TV faces. Ask comics about modern alternative acts and different names tend to crop up, one in particular. “That other comics think I’m ‘alternative’ is really nice to hear,” says Lewis Schaffer. “Tell that to the producers of Stewart Lee’s Alternative Comedy Experience! I haven’t been asked to be on that show.” Another Cunning Stunt winner (for announcing that he’d sponsored the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2009), Schaffer’s onstage style is “all over the place,” says Fleming, “constantly telling the audience how shit he is.” Shit, maybe, but alternative?
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“I don’t see myself as alternative, not in the way the word is used in the UK,” says Schaffer. “I associate alternative comedy as worthy and earnest. Not my favourite style of comedy.” Also at The Stand are nine editions of the much-loved Alternative Comedy Memorial Society, which actively encourages acts to try out odder stuff. Nadia Kamil is on the society’s ‘board’ (whose meetings are apparently set to be filmed by Channel 4), and will also be doing her first solo show: Wide Open Beavers! So where do the ACMS hierarchy stand on that contentious term? “I would definitely define myself as alternative, mostly because I don’t ever want anyone coming to see me and for them to be baffled or furious that I’m not like Michael McIntyre or Jimmy Carr,” Kamil says. Covering both angles of the 80s alternative ethos, Beavers! mixes “very silly whimsical stuff and quite a bit of politics, specifically femi-
nism,” she explains. “I’m getting to a point where I feel irresponsible if I don’t use my platform as a comic to talk about things I really care about.” While traditional standup is still heavily skewed towards white males, alternative comedy is clearly fertile ground for the fairer sex. Half of the ACMS board members and ACE series acts are women, with Josie Long the most obvious heiress to the 80s agit-comedy crown, while the likes of Lou Sanders, Bridget Christie and Claudia O’Doherty have made waves with wonderfully inventive Fringe shows in recent years. But then many genuinely alternative comics weren’t ever really aiming to be standups. “The best comedy I saw last year was actually in the [Fringe] cabaret section,” admits John Fleming. “People come from different backgrounds—acting, theatre—and this can influence the way that they perform standup,” agrees Sam Deards, whose club night Twice as Nice is at Dropkick Murphy’s throughout the Fringe. The weekly London version mixes big headliners with brand new acts, who veer from quirky gagsmiths to the sort of loons Hardee would approve of. Ignoring the textbook might be a decent career move, given the increasingly competitive open-mic circuit. “It is often the comics with a difference that get noticed,” says Deards. With independent promoters and clubnights offering a welcome stage for weird performers, a new alternative wave could well be brewing. We’ll just need someone to write a Young Ones-style TV vehicle to show them off. Perhaps not Ben Elton this time, though.
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festcomedy
Sound&Vision As Adam and Joe’s hiatus drags on, the cult duo’s hairier half is seeking the right use for his talents. Lyle Brennan listens to Adam Buxton as he contemplates beards, honouring his heroes, and the breakdown he’s pencilled in for next year.
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C
reativity is a slippery sort of concept. We talk about it in relation to everyone from Da Vinci to Chanel, in fields from baking to genetics. There’s no doubt Adam Buxton has it – it’s there in everything he makes, as plain as food in his beard. Granted, in his case, it does take some pretty odd forms. On the day he speaks to Fest, Buxton turns up lugging a Barbie-pink Brompton bike, his helmet highlighter-yellow and his shoes electric blue. He’s in London for what’s billed as a creative symposium, placing him alongside luminaries of print and illustration, film and fashion. So where does he fit into all this? “I don’t really have anything to say beyond my normal crap,” he shrugs. “I’m not like Brian Eno, I don’t have a talk I can do about olfactory science or whatever.” Recent years have seen this allpurpose buffoon flit from radio DJ to filmmaker to actor to presenter. He’s a self-confessed dilettante, but for today’s purposes he makes songs – daft ones, touching on such pressing issues as sushi, Stephen Fry and something called a “poo poo party.” Rashly, he has set himself the challenge of composing one on stage in just 30 minutes, armed with only his ever-present laptop and a puerile sense of humour. The latter has served him well, from the days of The Adam & Joe Show—the late-90s Channel 4 series that made cult heroes of him and school friend Joe Cornish—to the BBC 6Music slot that, until 2011, saw the pair compete for listeners’ votes in their long-fought Song Wars feature. But the pop pastiches they wrote were real labours of love, so Buxton isn’t relishing the prospect of going against the clock. “Broadly speaking, the rules are that if you want to encourage creativity of any kind, then you shouldn’t be tense and you shouldn’t have time pressure... doing it live in front of an audience is absolutely guaranteed to produce something terrible.” It’s just as well, then, that he’s become accustomed to crowds of late, thanks to warm-up gigs for his bite-sized Edinburgh run, which he describes as four nights of “sketchy odds and sods” loosely themed around his relationship with his computer. It will be the first time the Fringe has seen a brand-new solo project from Buxton since 2005, when his character comedy I, Pavel found him under the guise of a deranged Slavic filmmaker and eight months’ worth of facial hair. The show was a success, even if the beard got bad reviews. James Nesbitt, of
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festcomedy The Hobbit and Yellow Pages ad fame, was among those who took exception. Buxton still remembers their encounter at a BBC3 shindig: “He was having a pee next to me—I’d never met him before then—and he looked over and just went: ‘Jeeesus, that is a horrible beard!’ I was quite offended, but it was a very frightening-looking piece of furniture on my face. It just looked like my face had exploded.” The whiskers, since domesticated, have become a permanent fixture. Buxton calls it vanity, a convenient mask as the years add wrinkles and chins. The topic of age crops up a few times during our conversation. He says nurturing an online following is “a young man’s game”. He can’t keep up with a generation who grew up around the editing software he’s slowly mastering. He wants to cast his friends in films, the way Edgar Wright and Seth Rogen do, except they’re all too busy or distant, and he says: “I’m too old to wangle my way into someone else’s gang now.” Buxton is, of course, no codger. But he’s impatient to create some sort of magnum opus, complaining that, apart from the Adam & Joe Show best-of DVD, “everything else I’ve ever done has just vanished into the ether.” That’s not strictly true, thanks to a vast online repository of blog posts, taped TV spots, snapshots and that 1990 footage of him, Joe Cornish and documentarian Louis Theroux dancing like the gawky young fools they were. Yet with his comedic other half sadly lost to Hollywood screenwriting for now, it’s understandable that Buxton wants to get his teeth into something more enduring. The one constant in his career these days is hosting BUG, the regular music video showcase in which, since 2007, he’s been mocking rabid YouTube comments and dropping in his own lovingly crafted, shamelessly stupid clips. Despite an eightpart adaptation on Sky Atlantic last year, it’s not enough. “I mean, I love doing BUG but there’s a slight anxiety that I could do that for the rest of my life,” he says. “I think I’m going to take a bit of a sabbatical next year and force myself to do a couple of different things.” Buxton spends his workdays cloistered in a home studio outside Norwich, trying to explain to his wife why trawling through teenagers’ internet tiffs means he’s too busy to take their three kids to school or walk the new dog he wasn’t allowed to call Boggins (non-fans, consult your Adam and Joe glossary now). Although he has the time, space and desire to attempt a career-defining
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Adam Buxton: Kernel Panic Assembly Hall, 10:30pm – 11:30pm, 2–5 Aug, £16 oeuvre, he’s wary. What if the idea’s a dud? “It’s dangerous, but I’m due for a midlife crisis anyway,” he reasons, thinking of others he’s seen charge down creative cul-de-sacs. “I’m going to go totally Joaquin Phoenix.” Buxton doesn’t say quite what form this work would take, though creating the right vehicle for his acting is one option. Then there’s his fantasy about making a Talking Heads biopic like the stop-motion toy movies he and Cornish used to do: he’s visibly delighted at the prospect of shopping for “a weird, long-necked chicken” to play David Byrne. It’s clear the fervent fanboyism that has fuelled so much of his output is still at work today. And with growing success, he has made the shift from devotee to collaborator, directing promos for Pixies frontman Frank Black and Radiohead.
What’s more, his obsessions have earned him authority: this year he was commissioned to make a 6Music documentary on his resurgent idol David Bowie, which he says, at just two hours, demanded some agonising pruning of his knowledge. Though his work has brought him closer to his heroes, he remains in awe of them – indeed, as he talks about what a comedy geek guitarist Jonny Greenwood is, he is wearing a Radiohead T-shirt. It’s safe to assume he’s joking, then, when he says ‘Party Pom Pom’, his jungle-style banger about Nintendo-addicted brats, is “obviously as good as anything on [Bowie’s 1977 classic] Low”. Back to the task in hand, it’s time to plug in and put those songwriting skills to the test. Buxton takes off for his symposium and later a glance at the online reactions suggests his ad-libbed tune brought the house down. One witness relays his boast that “creativity comes out of me quickly and easily, like a healthy turd.” Is it any wonder Joe lost Song Wars?
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festcomedy
The year from Hell A year ago she was barely on her feet, bombarded by tragedy after tragedy. Today, though, Tig Notaro is one of US comedy’s hottest properties. Lyle Brennan finds out what happened.
T
he night of August 3 2012 was Tig Notaro’s toughest ever gig. It may also have been Bill Burr’s. It fell to the latter, a colossus in his own right, to pick up the mic after what Notaro today describes as “a bizarre performance.” She is talking, of course, about the now-legendary set in which she somehow carved laughs from four months of unimaginable bleakness: pneumonia, a lifethreatening intestinal infection, the split from her girlfriend, her mother’s fatal head injury from a simple fall at home and then, just days before the show, her diagnosis of cancer in both breasts. Notaro staggered from the wreckage and straight into the spotlight, delivering an ad-hoc confessional that was frank and raw, enthralling mainly for its bravery and novelty, but at times laugh-out-loud
Tig Notaro: Boyish-Girl Interrupted Gilded Balloon Teviot, 6:45pm–7:45pm, 16–25 Aug, £14–£15 funny. Caught between gallows humour and numb, directionless shock, for 30 minutes she marvelled at something so brutal it went almost beyond tragedy and into the absurd. As the resulting live album shows, the crowd at LA’s Largo were in ruins by the end, exhausted by their own panicked laughter, bellows of encouragement and lumps in the throat. And up next, ladies and gentlemen, Bill Burr. Notaro recalls: “As I was walking off stage and he was walking on, he had already pressed record on his phone to record his set when we passed each other
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and shook hands. He has the audio of him saying ‘How am I going to follow that?!’” That night in August sparked a frenzy of press attention and would later become her second album recording. But quite apart from that, she ploughed on with writing sketches for her friend Amy Schumer’s Comedy Central series, she immersed herself in her chart-topping podcast, Professor Blastoff, and recently toured it with co-hosts David Huntsberger and Kyle Dunnigan. That’s not to mention the late-night talk show segments, the forthcoming feature films, the documentary, the book deal... “I get bored and I want to keep moving,” she explains. “The cancer diagnosis was the fifth thing in four months that broke my back, but it also propelled me.” Now, aged 42 and into her 16th year in comedy, she still has that momentum behind her. Next on the agenda is her Edinburgh run, a UK debut spread across ten nights that have long been circled in the comedy nerd calendar. Most of those planning to catch Boyish-Girl Interrupted will have discovered Notaro in the wake of her personal hell; she refers to this demographic, alongside fans of her first album or TV work, as “people who know me from cancer.” The more intimate side of Notaro’s comedy might never have left the club in LA, were it not for the encouragement and patronage of an army of allies. Among them were standup deity Louis CK, who persuaded her to let him distribute the recording via his website, and National Public Radio host Ira Glass, who suggested his regular guest take her story to the stage in the first place. When CK urged her to release Live (as in ‘to live’ – the recording of her infamous set), she says, “I thought he was out of his mind. There was no way... It was so new and raw. My material in the past I’d worked on for years, honing that to eventually record it for a CD or a late-night show.” But the gamble yielded a new level of exposure, and reviews that she found surprisingly generous. She reflects: “I feel tremendously lucky. I was so caught up in the eye of the storm, and there were so many people around me that had a little more clarity than I had at that time.” Back then it was a matter of ceding control in a time of chaos, of going against her perfectionist instincts for the sake of authenticity. With the dust since settled, though, she is able to look to the future. “I certainly don’t want to spend my whole life and career talking about cancer or my story,” she says, “but I understand that people have an interest in it. I appreciate that it’s been helpful to people.”
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festcomedy festcomedy
Rock ‘n’ roller
He pioneered stadium comedy and has been a household name for decades, but David Baddiel still can’t make sense of his own fame, as Julian Hall discovers.
D
avid Baddiel and Rob Newman will both be performing at this year’s Fringe. Not together of course, and there’ll be no reunion or poignant photo op for the two men who ushered in an era of stadium comedy in the 1990s, before they split among reports of acrimony. “We did fall out badly,” admits Baddiel, “but it is all fine now, and when I do see him I very much like him, and I’ve seen his shows and I’ve liked them. I don’t hang out with him, it’s true, but Rob’s always been a bit ‘off the world’ and difficult to get hold of.” Prior to his recent return to the stage, Baddiel himself had been largely off the radar. Now, back at the Fringe after 15 years (the last time was with Frank Skinner with a show that became Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned), he will deal with the disconnection he feels from the idea of his own fame. “When you are in the public eye—or have been—notions of who you are are reflected back at you and you are represented as something that isn’t quite you. It looks like you, sounds like you but it isn’t quite you.” “All fame is mistaken identity,” he contends. But sometimes these contortions come in the shape of good oldfashioned mix-ups rather than projections of celebrity, examples of which will pepper this new hour.”Steve Hall [of We Are Klang] told me that when he came to see my work-in-progress show, he was in that bar afterwards and a woman from Avalon—our management company— said to him ‘Great show, David!’” Initially the subject matter for a TEDstyle talk, Baddiel’s riff on fame struck him as the grown-up way back into performing standup. He’s not sure that this Fringe foray will necessarily lead on to more live performing, however.
David Baddiel - Fame: Not The Musical Assembly George Sq, 7:30–8:30pm, 31 Jul – 11 Aug, £7.50–£17.50
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“We’ll have to see about that. I basically write films and books now, that is my job. I hadn’t really thought about this as a career move, I don’t imagine that I will be doing Jongleurs with it.” “Besides, standup tends to blow everything out of your head. If you’ve got a gig that night or the next day, that is all you can think about, which is kind of hard if you are writing three films and a musical and fuck knows what else.” The films Baddiel mentions include one with Bwark (who made The Inbetweeners), a Hangover-like project “about a British guy who goes off to America on a kind of sex quest” and a US film called Paramount. “If I talked through all the ideas, a) I would get into trouble and b) it would seem like I was lying,” he says. “Film is a weird thing. I’ve got people backing them and I am getting paid to do them, but you still never know if it’s ever going to happen. It’s a kind of a miracle that films get made.” Also in the pipeline is a musical version of The Infidel, his 2010 film starring Omid Djalili about a Muslim who discovers he is Jewish, and a sitcom Baddiel is developing for Channel 4 about the internet. “I noticed that the internet is always represented big on film and TV, stuff like The Social Network and Black Mirror – all brilliant, but missing out how most people interact with the internet, which is in a very mundane way.” The show, provisionally called sit. com, is being developed with standup Barnaby Jones, with whom Baddiel plays football. Much of their research for the project has included watching standup clips on YouTube, which may in part be responsible for Baddiel’s tentative comeback. “I didn’t watch much [standup comedy] for a while and then recently I saw Josh Widdecombe, Paul F Tompkins, Russell Brand and Omid Djalili. “I’ve seen a couple of arena shows too — Billy Bailey, Eddie Izzard. It was a fantastic experience.” But, he adds, “I can’t imagine doing it now. It feels like there is a grandiosity to it that I don’t want. I want to be talking to people in an intimate way.”
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festcomedy
There’s something about David Cult essayist David Sedaris is back at the Fringe. Arianna Reiche catches up with him.
A
t 56, he really should know better. But it would seem no one is safe from David Sedaris’ mischief. “When you go on a book tour, you usually have a ‘media escort’ in the United States,” he explains. “It’s usually a doctor’s wife type. She picks you up at the airport and takes you to all your appointments and to the bookstore and back to the airport the next day. And these people know to expect anything from writers. “So one time I get to a city on my tour, and there’s this doctor’s wife waiting for me with this sign in her hands. I walked up to her, took my suitcase and threw it on the ground and said ‘Pick that up!’, and kept walking. “I turned to look behind me, and she’d picked it up and was trotting after me! I said ‘Oh God, I’m just kidding!’” After years of one-off appearances at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Sedaris is no stranger to Scotland’s capital. But when he spoke to Fest from the West Sussex home he shares with long-term boyfriend Hugh Hamrick, he seemed ambivalent about his identity as a comedian. “I never think about the way that [the show] is framed, because I’m not doing anything different from what I’d do in the US. I’m just reading out loud and answering some questions,” he says. “An American producer who does a lot of my shows in the US just said to me a couple of years ago, ‘Oh do you wanna try doing something at the Fringe?’ and I thought, ‘Oh... okay!’ Just like that,” he laughs. “But I don’t think of myself as a comedian.” Sedaris’s autobiographical vignettes have been a staple of the modern reader’s bookshelf since his essay SantaLand Diaries was read on National Public Radio in 1992. But in his new book, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, he takes a partial departure from examining his own life. In recent years, Sedaris has become, perhaps grudgingly, sucked into politics. In a 2008 interview, he claimed that he and Hamrick were “the sort of couple who wouldn’t get married”, regardless of legislative changes in the US and Europe. The moderate backlash Sedaris felt from the gay community is perhaps the very thing he has always intended to avoid; his monologues, he insists, are useful vehicles for conveying social messages without getting preachy. “Usually when I go on tour—which I do twice a year in the US, every Fall and every
David Sedaris - An Evening With David Sedaris Venue150 @ EICC, 6:30–8pm, 17–24 Aug, £20
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Spring—I bring a little piece of political satire with me. Something relevant to what’s been happening in the news. But with issues like gay marriage – I don’t want to write an essay about it, right? I feel like my audience voted the way I did. I didn’t want to be preaching to the converted. But sometimes you can just write something satirically that communicates ideas about politics.” But, as ever, Sedaris’ real focus is on the poetic comedy of experience. And today, a recent 62-city book tour seems present in his mind.
“As a writer,” he says, “you can be a baby if you want. In bookstores I’m always shocked because I’m always willing to sign stock. I’ll sign as much stock as you want me to. Like at the end of the night they put dozens or hundreds of books in front of you, and you just sign your name. It doesn’t take any time at all. And people are terrified to ask you to sign stock! They think you’re gonna have a fit!” “One night on my last tour in the US I signed books for nine-and-a-half hours. That’s not even including the reading, that’s just sitting on my ass and signing books,” he says, with that now-legendary deadpan tone. “And I never once said I was exhausted.” Proof, perhaps, that Sedaris has the stamina needed for his Fringe transition.
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festcomedy
We can still be friends Deal with your heartbreak through standup... then join your ex on stage: it’s all in a day’s work for Jigsaw. Jay Richardson hears how two former lovers and a third wheel keep the awkwardness at bay
“Y
ou have to be so, so careful if you’ve any sort of relationship with someone who airs their thoughts publicly,” muses Nat Luurtsema. “Ideally, you want to be in a situation where you’re a comic, and they don’t get to broadcast their feelings.” That was unquestionably the scenario when the comedian published Cuckoo In The Nest last year, a memoir of her reluctant move back in to the family home at 28. Also portrayed in the book was fellow comic Tom Craine, her then boyfriend. And unlike Luurtsema’s parents, he has a platform to offer his side of the story. “A few months ago, we realised that if either of us was going to do [an Edinburgh] show, it would be quite heavily influenced by our breakup,” Luurtsema explains. “And then the other probably thought: ‘Well stuff that, I want right to reply!’” So while Craine reflects on a “good” and “healthy” split in his patheticallytitled show Crying on a Waltzer, Luurtsema is considering the same fond moments in Here She Be. “We’re vultures, feeding on the corpse of our love,” she shrugs. Of course, over the last three years, there’s been another comedian in their relationship, Dan Antopolski. Following strong 2012 Fringe reviews and acclaim for their recent Radio 4 series, the trio are returning as sketch outfit Jigsaw, promising another pacy, 50 or so “get to the gag and fuck off” skits. Except with more “silly musical pieces” this time. But rather than ignite the lingering sexual tension between his colleagues, the intimacy even proved beneficial. “Every once in a while, they have a little bicker as if they’ve forgotten that they’re not going out together anymore,” Antopolski reveals. “But we all just laugh about it. When we first got together, the fact that they could insult each other without causing grave offence saved lots of time for the three of us getting to know each other.” Each piece of Jigsaw fits into their
Jigsaw - Jiggle It Pleasance Courtyard, 4:45–5:45pm, 31 Jul – 26 Aug, £12
Here She Be Laughing Horse @ The Counting House, 2:45pm – 3:45pm, 2–26 Aug, free
Tom Craine: Crying On A Waltzer Pleasance Courtyard, 8:20–9:20pm, 31 Jul – 25 Aug, £10
28 fest edinburgh festival preview guide 2013
quickfire sketches with minimal fuss. But surely, they must be tempted to write humiliating, painful or awkward scenes for one another? “This is something we discuss at length,” Antopolski affirms.”It’s good for an audience because you get a cumulative effect of us having meta-roles within the show. But you walk a line with creating stereotypes. It’s kind of annoying when ‘the short one’ in a group is always treated a certain way. We’ve got Nat, so we have to think about gender politics a little bit. You’ve got to be careful that you’re neither sexist, nor scared of having any fun.” Even so, he adds: “It’s an advantage if the same member of Jigsaw can occupy the same role more than once. It’s like a callback, it gives the show coherence and there’s a bigger laugh. Of course, it’s a short step then to Tom perpetually getting a custard pie in the face. Which is the epitome of shit.” Craine chuckles. “Cue plenty of bits now with me getting a pie in the face!” If Jigsaw’s sketches feed upon an intimate shared history, then Craine and Luurtsema’s solo shows are looking to the future. “I don’t think we feel any poison towards each other,” says Luurtsema. We can have a hundred little bickers a week but we’ve never had an argument in our lives.” Becoming platonic friends “and what that actually means” is “something we’ll both be talking about in our shows,” Craine adds. “And then, at the end, I will read out extracts from her private diary.” Waiting for him to confess that he’s joking, Luurtsema admits: “We’re definitely not double-dating with new partners or anything, we’re not quite that superhealthy yet. And in fact, I have a bit in my show where I outline the sort of girl I’d like Tom to meet. “Honestly, it’s really bitchy. It’s funny. But probably very unwise psychologically.”
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festcomedy
The Apprentice
For comedians, the Fringe is the biggest job interview going. Lyle Brennan and Gemma Flynn sift through the latest batch of applications from those vying to become Edinburgh’s next top comic. 30 fest edinburgh festival preview guide 2013
Aisling Bea
ng here. Today A trained actor, no less, but there’ll be no thespi resolved to She mode. p standu full we find the Irishwoman in stints on some of make a good go of it only last year, but before tive, not ours) TV’s better comedies, Wee Miss Bea (her diminu extinct Dead Cat dealt in sketch with the boys from soon-to-beshe promptly stormed Bounce. Upon re-entering the fray in 2012, easy to see why. The it’s and — tition compe the UK’s top new act Kildare skitter along biographical babblings of a hip hop kid from candy floss, the in blades razor like that, nce ebullie with such in. sink to nt sharp edges take a mome (she’s the second ever woman to do so) ∞∞ Won So You Think You’re Funny last year o in Cardinal Burns ∞∞ Got her face licked raw by the office lothari ∞∞ Dances like a woman possessed
What’s your biggest weakness?
with every fibre of my being, my selfless want My giant heart, ability to care and love people on the and maybe gambling my mother’s jewellery to make people laugh and give them joy — greyhounds.
mer?
How would you deal with a difficult custo
of the neck while holding a stapler in my other I would just calmly... grab them by the scruff and ask them if they woke up this morning squint hand, humbly look straight into their eyes, with the sole purpose of shitting up my day. , 31 Jul – 26 Aug, not 13 Aug, £5.00 – £10.50 Gilded Balloon Teviot, 6:30pm – 7:30pm
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festcomedy Liam Williams
Philip O’Shea
dThis gloriously alternative, whimsical up-an away comer is a treasure of the Free Fringe. Holed in some of Edinburgh’s worst venues, O’Shea stood out in his formative years thanks to his on a wild unique standup voice and an assured take absurdist assortment of topics. Recently his brand of a Island, e’s Anatol in shine to e humour got a chanc whimsy Channel 4 animated short. If you want to see done well, track him down.
of the Year 2012 ∞∞Runner-up, Leicester Square New Comedian hy, making him the Timot Sir sor Profes chair y Societ ∞∞Son of Fringe prince of the festival ∞∞Topics covered will include trumpets and eggs
What’s your biggest weakness?
references. Also I I feel I do not make enough obscure pop culture nt of myself in interaccou good a give to lt difficu ibly incred it find views. Also I don’t know when to stop.
What transferable skills do you have?
g around. Fiddling with Speaking. Use of the voice. (Bad) mime. Walkin just started working on have I ce. audien the at g Lookin stand. mic the reveal too much at this a technique involving torches (don’t want to sure you’ll agree it has a stage, but come and see the show and I’m
You don’t have to be old to be worldweary. Williams still qualifies for a young person’s railcard, yet he’s already cultivated an air of modern ennui, weltschmerz and other such brands of continental moping. With his introspective focus, poetic delivery and deft logical twists, he makes youth and big city life seem really quite bleak. If that sounds a little deflating, he also has a knack for ingenious set pieces that show off a more obscure , imaginative side. In previous Augusts he impressed as one third of grammatically suspect sketch act Sheeps. This time he’s utterly alone.
∞∞Runner-up in So You Think You’re Funny and Amused Moose in 2010 ∞∞Has two ‘Liam’s in his name
What’s your biggest weakness?
Difficulty engaging with interview questions.
Describe a tough decision you have had to make.
range of applications).
When faced recently with some interview questions, I had a difficult dilemma: should I enter into the spirit of the exercise and abridge a little anecdote in a bid to seem fun (if a bit lame), or just concede nothing and give glib meta-answers? In the end, I took the easy way out. Again.
e Inn, Scottish Comedy Festival @ The Beehiv 3:30pm – 4:30pm, 2–25 Aug, not 23, 24, free
Just the Tonic @ The Tron, 10:20–11:20pm, 1–25 Aug, not 13, £9.50
Jamie Demetriou Having extricated himself from the much-maligned world of student sketch, character comic Demetriou springs forth with a clutch of creeps and wellintentioned morons. He was up last year for some work-in-progress tinkering, and this time the Invisible Dot mother goose takes him under its wing. The production idiosyncratic stable’s got form when it comes to offbeat, A. Early previews character acts — Nick Mohammed being Exhibit ingly decent singing voice. revealed an endearing dopiness and a surpris and later bared a single Plus he got frighteningly close to a Fest staffer of thing. bruised buttock. Maybe you’re into that sort
∞∞Leicester Mercury Comedian of the Year finalist ∞∞Strong eyebrows
2013
ess; it is an idiot. It has a My body would probably be my biggest weakn me to be graceful and for lt difficu it makes that massive womanly bum of having hair on its head, buy men’s jeans. It’s started to grow weary on my hands. Its brain is terbut has taken a keen interest in growing it y. And its nose is prone to comed slick with rible at efficiently coming up fungal infections when exposed to heat. Idiot.
people.
at Waitrose. I was left in I used to work on the fruit and veg section to sell a fennel. boy a ted motiva charge one Saturday and I Aug, not 12 Aug, £10.50 Pleasance Courtyard, 7–8pm, 31 Jul – 26
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Didn’t anyone tell her? Musical comedians don’t have to be good singers. Consider it a bonus, then, that this one can really carry a tune. Parris is quickly building a reputation for her well-crafted and witty numbers, with lyrics that strip away a wholesome surface to reveal desperate. So something grim, grimy and altogether more ? Glue-huffing? what’s she hiding? Hairy palms? Kleptomania hing amiss... somet be to got there’s this, like talent With
s, including ∞∞Strong showings in four major competition s second place in the 2012 Musical Comedy Award i-dah Lah-d t. clarine and hone saxop ∞∞Handy on the piano,
What’s your biggest weakness?
What’s your biggest weakness?
Describe a time when you have motivated
Rachel Parris
into a psychoticMy weakness is that my face naturally falls insane unless I and sad am I think people so frown, g lookin ry. contra the to effort make a huge facial
What other careers have you considered?
I thought waitWhen I was small, I wanted to be a waitress. ton Abbey, and resses all wore outfits like the maids in Down this I have about ioned disillus being Since had a nice time. consider bestruck it off my list and would now more readily . dandy ce freelan a or r, worke factory ing a , Laughing Horse @ The Counting House 4:00pm – 4:55pm, 1–25 Aug, not 13, free
edinburgh festival preview guide 2013 fest 31
festcomedy Pat Cahill
minute Real pick ‘n’ mix standup, this. One edly unjittery Cahill is reeling off some decid nonsense gangsta rap, the next he’s spewing bled philosophy or rattling through scram t party self-help platitudes. His scattersho lull you into pieces and dense wordplay will absurdism, It’s t. men baffle of a pleasant state some knowingly wacky broadly speaking, but instead of tone of a man who thinks he’s presentation it’s delivered with the ’s been stewing for a while — all hour t debu This . talking perfect sense wait. signs point to it being worth the
ew Act of the Year (ex∞∞Took Chortle Best Newcomer and N 2012 in ire) Emp Hackney edy award ∞∞Finalist in the 2011 BBC New Com erous dog clip can elicit retch∞∞The bursting pustules in his canc ed) verifi ing (personally
What’s your biggest weakness?
hot babes, miaow miaow, food I’ve got all the usual weaknesses... tattoos, gum disease, Brian Cox, l facia ning, garde ry, bigot , blogs , British wine, hope, electricity, trust Crocs, deep vein thrombosis, fire, burpees, , food um muse , glass ered Batman, cricketers, hunks, temp ations, pop, dogs, cartridge scurvy, birthdays, mouth sleep, stayc original 53] his from ged paper and feelings. [abrid
?
How do you fare under pressure
ie’s ‘Under Pressure’. Mercury’s I just think back to Queen and Bow n of the working man. So if eratio desp the up ed summ truly scatting st the wall, just remember: again up back your you’re ever stuck with bum da de / Um ba ba be bu bu Um Mm ba ba de / Um bum ba de / de da de da de... [that’ll do, da ee ts, stree on le Peop / be / Um ba ba Pat — Ed.] £10 –6:45pm, 31 Jul – 25 Aug, not 12, Pleasance Courtyard, 5:45pm
Michael Che That sound you hear? That’s New York native and open mic wünderkind Che sweeping in on a tsunami of hype. He’s already won over US crowds with his contemplative observational material and subtly political provocations, having transitioned at breakneck speed from selling T-shirts in Lower Manhattan to guest writing for Saturday Night Live and spots on the most coveted TV showcases. More experienced contemporaries talk of him tones of envy and admiration; Hannibal Buress, a fellow NY scenester and past conqueror of the Fringe, gives his seal of approval. Good enough for us.
∞∞One of Rolling Stone’s 50 Funniest People Right Now (number 50, but still) ∞∞Left the US for the first time ever to play in Egypt last year ∞∞Named after Che Guevara; his full name is Michael Che Campbell
What’s your biggest weakness?
My biggest weakness is my attention span. I abandon a lot of fun ideas simply because I’ve lost interest too quickly. I gotta work on focusing, but it’s hard when there are so many mediums to work in. I feel like a kid in a candy store with $1. I don’t know where to start.
What motivates you?
My age [30] motivates me. I always feel like I’m too old to get good at something completely new. That motivates me to capitalise on every opportunity, ‘cause this business has to work for me. It’s either this or something desperate and illegal. I’d rather it be this. Assembly Rooms, 10–11:00pm, 31 Jul–25 Aug, not 1, 12 Aug, £10
Thünderbards
a sketch duo debut. Hoping Standup and improv multi-taskers Glenn Moore and Matt Stevens join forces this year for bring some noteworupstars young likeable these show, free-flowing fast-paced, their with attention your to grab stream of joke-heavy with impressed already they’ve role job-sharing this In table. thy previous experience to the consciousness sketches, recently landing runner-up in London’s inaugural Sketchfest.
∞∞SYTYF finalist 2012 and Chortle Student Competition runner-up 2011 (Moore) ∞∞Seasoned Edinburgh improvisers — both were in The Shrimps in 2009 and 2010
What’s your biggest weakness?
others): Coke, dandelion Truth be told, our biggest weakness is probably our allergies, which include (amongst and burdock (fizzy), SodaStreams, mazes, patronage and heavy gusts.
What can you do for us that other candidates can’t?
audience waiting for no Our show is packed with an unnaturally large amount of jokes, and we try to leave the or pauses between blackouts with away done also We’ve punchline. next the before seconds few longer than a a joke. Also, Matt’s resketches, so at any point in the show, you’re either watching a sketch, or you’re hearing ally good at Microsoft Excel. Gilded Balloon Teviot, 1:30pm – 2:30pm, 31 Jul – 26 Aug, £8
32 fest edinburgh festival preview guide 2013
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festcomedy
Something old, something new From religion to race, comedians peddle the same topics every Fringe. We spoke to three who are, on paper, stomping into a minefield of cliche, but in the right hands, says Stevie Martin, even the hoariest of subjects can feel fresh.
I
want to tell you a little bit about my dad. Or my girlfriend. Or my kids. Or the fact I had kids with my girlfriend and am now a dad. If that sounds like the harbinger of tired gags to you, consider Mike Wozniak. This year he’s going turbo-hack with a show about his mother-in-law. “The reason I’ve been driven to it is just
life and circumstance,” he says. “I live with my mother-in-law, which was not Plan A.” He’s momentarily drowned out by his child screaming down the house he currently shares with his wife, the aforementioned toddler and his wife’s parents. He’s been there for the past year. This cosy arrangement has forced
34 fest edinburgh festival preview guide 2013
Wozniak to performing what he acknowledges to be “an hour-long mother-in-law gag.” But while Les Dawson associations have occurred to him (“I bloody love Les Dawson,” he deadpans – it’s hard to tell if he’s serious), he’s not fazed: “There are certain kinds of hack that are still prevalent. Differences between men and women are still always being talked about – it’s less about the subject, more about what you’re doing with it.” Tom Rosenthal (as seen on Friday Night Dinner and Plebs) agrees that it’s all about the approach. In fact, he originally intended to do a show about religion, and the way it’s become an easy target for lazy comedians peddling “Hey, I gave up my imaginary friend when I was six” gags. “Religion is hack, but that’s only because we see the same shit about it all the time,” he says. “I thought I’d write about the benefits of religion, and how it contributes to society but everyone would still roll their eyes and go ‘Oh, you’re doing a religion show. How... interesting’.” It turns out that, after filming Plebs in
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festcomedy Photos: Idil Sukan / DrawHQ
Mike Wozniak - Take The Hit The Stand II, 12:10pm – 1:10pm, 1–25 Aug, not 12, £8
Nish Kumar - Nish Kumar Is A Comedian Underbelly, Bristo Square, 8:10–9:10pm, 31 Jul – 25 Aug, £11
Tom Rosenthal - Благодаря
Pleasance Courtyard, 8:15pm – 9:15pm, 31 Jul – 25 Aug, £12
Bulgaria, the country affected him to such an extent he couldn’t write about anything else. All thoughts of exploding the religion show stereotype vanished, and Blagodarya (this year’s offering which translates as “thanks” in Bulgarian) became, broadly speaking, observations on travelling abroad. On paper, it sounds less ambitious and perhaps open to similar assumptions — but in execution, it’s full of potential. “It’s not about the material, but the way you treat it,” he reiterates. “Of course I was worried about things being hack, because I suppose some people would say a storytelling show is hack. Provided you’re not telling jokes you’ve heard before, or copying someone’s style directly, what you add to the story skeleton can still be exciting, original or creative.” Young comics can get bogged down agonising over originality, but the adage “write what you know” holds true. And Rosenthal knows about Bulgaria. “I did go to Bulgaria and it was amazing. So that’s what I’m going to talk about.” Fair enough. Nish Kumar points out that, at a glance, even the most respected standups can sound like nothing special: “Louis CK just talks about being older and having kids.” His show Nish Kumar is a Comedian is comprised largely of anecdotes revolving around the fact he’s British-Asian. Again, such a description doesn’t do his style of sharp, articulate standup justice. He does it from a unique vantage point – his own.
Left: Mike Wozniak Right: Nish Kumar Below: Tom Rosenthal
“Obviously originality occurs to you when you’re talking about race as a nonwhite comedian, but I try to avoid the broad brushstrokes of ‘oh, Asian people do this, white people do this’ because I have nothing interesting, new or funny to add.” He cites Goodness Gracious Me as having that market cornered, so focuses on offence (often anchored in race, but not exclusively) and how people tend to deal with it, while staying as personal as possible. “I recently found out I’d become an internet meme, which isn’t something most people can talk about,” he says, referring to an old flyer photo of him that somehow started doing the rounds on social media under the (ill-informed) legend “confused Muslim”. “It’s all about giving your own perspective — if it’s located at such a specific point, it’s impossible to be hack or generic.” By the same token, Wozniak’s motherin-law can’t be pigeonholed as the typical mother-in-law trope. “It’s original because it’s based on what is actually happening, rather than a sort of imagined dragon. Which she isn’t. She’s her own unique entity and has her own special way of causing chaos.” His feelings towards her add to the originality: “I love this woman, she’s incredible. But I also often have murderous intentions towards her.” Rosenthal was worried about stereotyping— especially considering he’s mining comic generalisations of Bulgarians at times—but, by grounding it in a more intelligent context he escapes appearing tired. Or, y’know, racist. “Everyone stereotypes, and I acknowledge this in the conclusion. Yes, I went to Bulgaria and made some generalisations. But they’re my generalisations, and I’m using it to show how we all can’t help but paint people in a broad way at first – if I’d stayed
longer, I’d probably have picked up on more of the nuances.” It’s not rocket science: a hack topic is “done” because it’s so relatable that lazy comedians rely on its familiarity alone to generate laughter. Imaginative comedians don’t; we’ve all got a weird family member, we’ve all travelled abroad and been fascinated by another culture, and we all know what a delicate subject race can be, but nobody’s telling it quite like they are. As Rosenthal puts it: “I think good comedy comes from deep feeling rather than the topic you’re discussing.” Wozniak remembers, as a younger comic, worrying unduly about being hack and experimenting unsuccessfully with different styles of comedy in an attempt to avoid it. At this stage in his career, he doesn’t really care about finding untouched territory, and why should he? Last year, two silent clowns (Doctor Brown and The Boy With Tape On His Face) won two of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards and another trained clown, Daniel Simonsen, bagged Best Newcomer. Living proof that, when all’s said and done, it’s just about being funny. “I used to try all sorts of things that weren’t really me,” Wozniak says. “I tried that observational stuff but I was pretty crap. I went through a one-liner stage, but was crap at that, too – I can only come up with one good one-liner a year. I tried not to write about my mother-in-law, but have not succeeded.” And what was his great oneliner of 2013? “I don’t have one. But last year’s was: “Why should you not put fruit in a potato gun? Because it jams.” Thank god for the hour-long mother-in-law gag.
festival preview guide 2013 fest 35
festcomedy
Making feminism funny Sick of seeing crowds switch off at the mention of women’s issues, Mary Bourke is seeking ways to smuggle the cause back into the clubs. As Si Hawkins finds out, it’s all in the name.
“F
eminism is so toxic now,” muses Mary Bourke, in her disconcertingly distinctive manner: a calm, quietly-spoken but fiery-eyed fury. “So much toxic baggage, that word.” We’re on a plush sofa in a posh private members club in Soho, a slightly odd setting for a conversation about a cause that once elicited hunger strikes and the burning of public buildings. Just to emphasise the anomalous air, sitting behind us in full “mwah, darling!” mode is Davina McCall, presenter of primetime reality television and ads for grey-concealing hair dye. “She has got lovely hair,” Bourke confirms, having snatched a quick peek. Again, it’s not the sort of thing you’d imagine from Emmeline Pankhurst. But then we’re in a very different era. The Dublin-born comic is here to discuss her new Fringe show, Muffragette, which promises to give feminism an accessible, post-millennial makeover. How does Muffragettism differ? “No difference,” she readily admits, it’s just “a really crass rebranding” – but one that might just be welcome.
Mary Bourke: Muffragette The Stand Comedy Club III & IV, 5:50pm – 6:50pm, 31 Jul – 25 Aug, not 1 Aug, 12 Aug, £8
The concept came to Bourke last November, after she read a contentious interview with food writer Mary Berry. Asked about feminism, the Great British Bake Off judge scoffed at the notion, then offered some curious business advice. “This awful stuff about ‘never hire women, they always get pregnant, they always leave,’” Bourke recalls. “And that feminists shout at men.” Actually Bourke’s comedian husband, Simon Clayton, will be making a cameo each night, and the couple will then do their own show, Bourke and No Hair, an hour after Muffragette ends. It all sounds fairly harmonious. But the comedy scene itself is also culpable. “The misogyny on the new act circuit is just abysmal,” she says. “What happens, is all the open micers just play to each other. And when you
36 fest edinburgh festival preview guide 2013
play to other comics, you try to shock them.” It’s a sort of self-perpetuating ring of misogyny? “It’s a rape circle!” But didn’t Bourke used to do a rape joke too? “I had a great rape joke,” she concurs, “a brilliant rape joke, thank you very much. A feminist rape joke.” Search for her name on YouTube to hear what one of those sounds like – and she’d probably be happy to discuss it with you afterwards, as an advocate of confronting comedians. “I will always pull people up on stuff if it’s misogynistic, and just ask them why they do it. Not the joke itself, but what’s the motivation behind it?” Presumably to shock, primarily? “Yeah, and is that enough? People are really surprised [when I complain], but if you put it out there you should be able to defend what you do.” Also increasingly infuriating for Bourke is girl-on-girl negativity, the “Daily Mail takedown” as she puts it. “Very depressing,” she says. “Someone like Liz Jones has a go at Rihanna and you think ‘Oh, Rihanna just does what Rihanna does.’ It’s nothing.” “I’m always amazed when people say they’re not feminists,” she says. “People obviously have answers like ‘I’m a girly girl’ or ‘I like make-up’. But no, I think something happened in the 1970s where feminism got derailed, it took a bit of a strange turn and left the mainstream.” “At the beginning of the show I always ask ‘how many people here are feminists?’ and in all the previews I’ve done so far, I’ve had maybe two people put their hand up.” That’s not uncommon, I venture — ask how many people are human beings and you’d probably only get half the hands up. But chatting to those audiences has confirmed her belief that the concept of ‘feminism’ is now almost counter-productive. “I couldn’t get a show off the ground if I put ‘feminist’ in the title,” she says. “People look at that and think ‘oh, some dreary woman shouting at us’.” As we prepare to head off I suggest that she pops over and gives a promotional badge to Davina, perhaps get it in the papers. “Too shy,” she says, tactfully, but clearly has her own plans in place. The Muffragette movement starts here.
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Winner of The Comedians’ Choice Award Melbourne International Comedy Festival '13
AN IMPROVISED MUSICAL FOR KIDS OF ALL AGES (AND ADULTS WHO ACT LIKE KIDS)
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AS SEEN ON CBBC!
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What adventure do you want to go on today? Gilded Balloon Teviot, Bristo Sq - Fringe Venue 14 2-13 Aug 2pm www.theshowstoppers.org Tickets 0131 622 6552 www.gildedballoon.co.uk
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edinburgh festival preview guide 2013 fest 37
festcomedy
Here comes
trouble
To fans, he’s a true iconoclast. To promoters, a liability. Absent since the mid-90s, the virulent Ian Cognito once again marches on Edinburgh – and as Jay Richardson learns, he’s got some scores to settle.
“T
here’s no doubt I’m one of the best comedians this country’s got, and I don’t get the recognition I deserve,” Ian Cognito growls. “It’s the comedy business’ loss. They don’t want to admit this geezer exists, under the radar or playing the game differently to everyone else. And I have to believe that, otherwise I’d fucking top meself.” Cognito is championed by comedy’s cognoscenti as the most ferociously brilliant, self-destructive, self-pitying standup never to get a chance to disgrace himself on television. The combustible cockney literally wrote the book on pissing away your talent and pissing off an entire industry. He originally published his compelling memoir A Comedian’s Tale via his website in 1995, the same year that the 54-year-old infamously made his last appearance at the Fringe — it ended when his drunken abuse of comic Ricky Grover’s wife in the Gilded Balloon led to the hulking ex-boxer punching him out and Cognito schlepping back to London. Since arriving at his stage name, in a moment he likens to Dr Jekyll begetting Mr Hyde, Paul Barbieri appears to have signed a Faustian pact whereby the more ruinous his behaviour, the funnier he is. His signature routines include drilling a hole in the venue’s wall so he can hang up his coat; successfully blackmailing a well-known computer manufacturer by threatening to smash their malfunctioning crate of diodes to smithereens everywhere he played; and habitually exposing his penis — whether performing in a dress, at high society orgies, or once, incredibly, before the Japanese ambassador to China. “He laughed ...” Cognito recalls. “Maybe he had a bigger cock than me, but that wasn’t the premise we were working on.”
He became a standup in 1985, and quickly fell out with the Jongleurs chain and London’s Comedy Store, after relaying to management precisely what he thought of them. He’s still banned from, or at least persona non grata at, more comedy clubs than any other headliner. His view of the current booking system is: “There’s a lot of begging to be done and to be quite honest, I wouldn’t be Ian Cognito if I did too much crawling up people’s arses. So that’s why I’ve got a pretty empty diary for the next six months.” Having spent the morning putting his dismantled ukulele back together, he explains that he’d rather not be back in Edinburgh, notwithstanding “laying some ghosts to rest and laying some non-ghosts too”. “But if I let this fucking business keep ignoring me, that’s exactly what it’s going to do. And if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then we shall kill the fucking mountain!” He intends for his memoir, which he’s finally printing and publishing as an e-book for the first time, to be part of a trilogy chronicling his arrests, his breakdown circa 2000—“I actually remember gigging in 2000, so I must have flipped out before that”—and life on the road. “I’ve got some funny old fucking stories, I’ve had experiences with people you wouldn’t believe but I’ll try not to grass anyone up.” In a new preface he writes: “I considered killing off Ian Cognito after several near death experiences, and I’m not talking about stage dying. Trouble is, I quite like him. He’s interesting, honest, ornery and unusual.” In Edinburgh, he “left behind several grand and a polished bit of floor in the bar of the Gilded Balloon, and exchanged this for the solemn promise never to return. But I’m
38 fest edinburgh festival preview guide 2013
Trouble With Comedy Laughing Horse @ City Cafe, 10:30–11:30pm, 2–26 Aug, not 12, free
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festcomedy back and this time I’m angry.” Returning as part of the Free Fringe— “busking it, don’t forget to put some money in the bucket”—his show is simply titled Trouble With Comedy. In part, this reflects disappointment with his 28-year career. But it also refers to standup generally, its commercialism, caution and thrall to television’s obsession with demographics. “Personally, I would have thought an older person has more to say than a younger one, but we’re living with a cult of youth, aren’t we?” he says. Cognito admits he struggles to watch DVDs by Rhod Gilbert and Tim Minchin and at one point barks out: “Fuck Alexei Sayle! I just read his book, it’s bollocks, boring”. Belittling Russell Brand for his supposed daring and cancelled Middle East shows—“I like to think I was one of the first to have a pop at Islam”—he bitterly reflects that he couldn’t get anyone famous to pen the book’s introduction. “Your Brands, Baileys, Locks and Davis’s’s [sic] have all moved on, changed their phone numbers and frankly, I think they find me to be an embarrassment. Well, fuck ‘em. I’m still here. As schizophrenic and fucked up as ever.” He’s also suspicious about the UK’s influx of Canadian standups: “I think they’ve dug a
fucking tunnel from Vancouver.” He retains an uneasy regard for Jerry Sadowitz as a kindred spirit of anti-politicalcorrectness, notwithstanding the Glaswegian’s accusations of him copying his style. “I told him, I didn’t see you for the first two years of my career and I’d already begun to burn bridges...” And he fantasies about “taking on” Michael McIntyre in a standup contest. “I’d blow him off the stage,” he maintains matter-of-factly, before lamenting that “they’d never allow us in the same room now.” Although it’s by no means a given that he’ll complete his festival run, newcomers seeking something distinct from television’s familiar faces will discover that on his night, no-one holds a candle to Cognito’s scorching gags, rants, songs and audience intimidation. “The stage is my natural habitat,” he enthuses. “I like people laughing and being able to have a go at the biggest bloke in the room without him punching my lights out.” His son is currently shooting a concert film of him and he’s almost finished writing the trilogy’s second instalment. The Re-Cognition starts here. Signing off, he chuckles: “Don’t make me look too much of a cunt will ya? Because I can do that on my own!”
frOm ThE UnDErBElly
2-25 August 1.20pm daily Thurs to Sun Cowbarn, Underbelly, Bristo Square, EH8 9AL Tickets £7 Box Office / 0844 545 8282 / www.underbelly.co.uk/secret
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Julian Clary (exclusively in Edinburgh for this show), Ed Byrne, Jo Caulfield, Christian O’Connell and Alan Davies host an array of top comedy names from this year’s Fringe in our sizzling podcast shows. Check daily line-up on www.underbelly.co.uk/secret
Follow us www.twitter.com/secretpoliceman
edinburgh festival preview guide 2013 fest 39
festcomedy
The Facts of Liff John Lloyd steps into the spotlight after decades setting the agenda in TV, with tales of Blackadder, definitions for life’s inarticulable moments, and reasons why a grain of rice is the most interesting thing in the universe. Oh, and he’s funny too, finds Edd McCracken. Fact #1 – Everything is interesting. Everything. To spend any time with John Lloyd—comedy producer extraordinaire, QI midwife and compulsive neologist—is to be basted in facts. Over the course of our 45-minute conversation, ostensibly to talk about his first Fringe show in 37 years, I learn that female kangaroos have three vaginas, that Chelmsford is home to Europe’s largest burns unit, and that the genome of a single grain of rice is twice as long as a human’s. “You see, nothing is dull,” he says after dropping his basmati bombshell. “This is the core, heart and soul of the show. Rule one, the core mantra, is that everything is interesting if looked at long enough, closely enough or from the right angle.” Fact #2 – John Lloyd and the Fringe are the two most influential forces in British comedy in the past 30 years. Granted, this might be conjecture dressed up as fact, but Lloyd’s track record is formidable. Ever since migrating from comedy performance to production in the 1970s, he has been the force behind The News Quiz on Radio 4 (which morphed into Have I Got News For You on TV), co-wrote the first series of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy with his flatmate Douglas Adams, and produced Not The Nine O’Clock News, Blackadder, Spitting Image and QI. Only Dame Judi Dench has won more Baftas. When Danny Boyle wanted to display a distinctly British sense of humour to the world during last summer’s Olympic opening ceremony, he turned to Rowan Atkinson. Lloyd got there decades before. He came across the future Mr Bean at the Fringe in 1975. Atkinson was performing with Four Weddings and a Funeral scribe Richard Curtis as part of the Oxford Revue. “And I just thought, I am in the presence of genius,” says Lloyd. As a BBC
producer he went on to give Atkinson his big break in Blackadder. But when presented with this proposal of his godfather-like influence, Lloyd waves it away. Opinion has no traction with a lover of facts. “You can’t possibly put me in that corner — it’s ludicrous,” he says. “I’m flattered and humbled but there’s plenty of things I’ve done that have been unsuccessful. I tried to start the world’s first 24-hour comedy radio station in the 1990s. I’ve been fired from four movies. I created the website Comedy Box in the mid-noughties [like a proto Funny or Die] but it was underfunded. When I look at my life backwards, all I can see is the huge failures in between glittering moments of Blackadder or the best bit of Spitting Image.” Fact #3 – A potato has two more chromosomes than a homo sapiens. His last appearance at the Fringe was in 1976 with his friend Douglas Adams and One Foot In the Grave creator David Renwick. It was a time and a place when a chromosome-rich potato would have been considered a delicacy.
“We liked the ropey nature of it,” he says. “There was a bit of pride in the fact that Edinburgh had the worst cuisine in western Europe. Lunch was a hot bridie that would squirt gravy down the shirt front.” Aside from keeping the city’s laundrettes in business, Adams and Lloyd would go on to create something even more satisfying. In 1983 they published The Meaning of Liff, a collection of words to describe experiences in life that don’t have names. For example, abilene is the cool reverse side of the pillow. Lloyd still rates it as the best thing he has ever done. It is also what has brought Lloyd back to Edinburgh with Liff of QI. Last year, to mark Adams’s 60th birthday (he died in 2001), a party was held at the Hammersmith Apollo. In front of 3,000 people Lloyd took to the stage and for 15 minutes shared some new words he had coined to bring Liff into the 21st century. For example, clavering is the action of pretending to text when alone and feeling vulnerable in public. “It was fantastic,” he says. “Thousands of people laughing their socks off. I came off stage thinking, I started off 40 years ago wanting to do this and went in the wrong direction, into production. I should have stood my ground and stayed in writing and performing.”
Liff of QI Underbelly, Bristo Square, 4:40–5:40pm, 31 Jul – 24 Aug, not 13, £7–£13
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CRITICS’ CHOICE
‘AWESOME’
‘JOYOUS’
‘AMAZING’
TIME OUT
THE SCOTSMAN
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
MAIL ON SUNDAY
HHHHH HHHHH HHHHH HHHHH ‘HILARIOUS’
‘GENIUS’
‘BRILLIANT’
‘WONDERFUL’
WHATSONSTAGE
EVENING NEWS
BRITISH THEATRE GUIDE
HUFFINGTON POST
Festival Highlights.com
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GILDED BALLOON TEVIOT, Bristo Sq - Fringe Venue 14 2-25 Aug (not 22) 10.30PM www.theshowstoppers.org DON’T MISS OUR NEW FAMILY HOUR : 2-13 Aug 2PM edinburgh festival preview guide 2013 fest 41 Tickets 0131 622 6552 www.gildedballoon.co.uk
festcomedy
Flatshare nightmares
Take one small city, cram it with skint comics and you’re bound to create some upsetting living conditions. From Alex Horne bunking with a pyromaniac (and Graham Norton) to a house guest relieving himself on The Noise Next Door, Stevie Martin finds out why you shouldn’t stay on your comedian mate’s sofa this August.
JOHN ROBINS
CARL HUTCHINSON
In 2009 as a HILARIOUS PRANK I set off a fire extinguisher at 4am in Chris Martin’s bedroom while he was in bed with a girl he’d been wooing all month. It was a CO2 extinguisher and his room filled with yellow powder. Everyone DEFINITELY AGREED it was a hilarious prank which made HOW ANGRY he was and the fact that HE STILL HASN’T FORGIVEN ME so baffling. And it took a WHOLE AFTERNOON for me to clean up, so really I think he owes me one...
I lived with Chris Ramsey for a year. In that time he banned me from having mackerel (on account of it being an “anti-social” food) as well as having baths, because I had a “stupid red face” that was annoying to look at when I would walk around in my robe like a “lord.”
John Robins - Where is my mind? Pleasance Courtyard, 9:30pm
Carl Hutchinson - All The Rage, Underbelly Bristo Square, 7pm
COLIN HOULT Internet troll Richard Herring loves banging on about how Fergus [Craig] and I never washed up when we bunked together in 2004. He omits that on arrival he spent hours explaining how pointless, expensive and idiotic comedy was and how we’d never amount to anything. We spent that evening hugging and crying in the pub. Colin Hoult - Characthorse, Pleasance Courtyard, 6pm
TOM WRIGGLESWORTH THE NOISE NEXT DOOR We once had a guest who got tipsy and had to wake up in the night to use the bathroom. He got a little confused and relieved himself all over the sleeping body of Matt instead. Two years later... he did the exact same thing to Sam. Unbelievable. The Noise Next Door - Soundhouse Pleasance Dome, 7pm
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I rented a room from a student who was illegally subletting. The landlady got wind of it and came round at 9am to kick off. In a panic, the student decided it would be best if I pretended to be the guy who lives there all the time. There’s nothing to suggest this wouldn’t have worked perfectly, had it not been for a poster outside with my face on. Tom Wrigglesworth - Utterly at Odds with the Universe Pleasance Courtyard, 7:40pm
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festcomedy
LUCY PORTER
WITTANK’s KIERAN BOYD
My bedroom was a pantry/larder/kitchen cupboard. The owner had stuck a mattress in it, but it still smelled of old custard. There was no window, just a vent through to the living room where another comedian was staying. I was kept awake night and day by the sound of him shagging groupies.
WitTank flat, 2011. The others have spacious double bedrooms. I have a miniscule room adorned with child’s drawings. There is no window, but an extractor fan. The head of my tiny bed is broken, affording me a better view of the local mouse, who emerges to mock my situation.
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ALEX HORNE I can’t quite remember why but in 1994 I shared a flat with a folk duo, a permanently angry magician called Mister E and Graham Norton. Graham was no trouble—polite, generous, unfeasibly tidy—but the fiddle-wielding brothers wouldn’t stop playing and Mister E eventually made their instruments permanently disappear (he burnt them on the Meadows).
Lucy Porter - Northern Soul, The Stand, 5:10pm
WitTank presents The School Pleasance Courtyard, 6:20pm
Alex Horne - Lies
W I N N E R : C O M I C O R I G I N A Pleasance L I T Y Courtyard, 8:30pm M A L C O L M
H A R D E E
A W A The R D 2 Section 0 1 2 - Live in a Cow, Underbelly Horne Bristo Square, 10:30pm
W I N N E R : B E S T M U S I C A L C O M E DY A C T C
H
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2
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2 Sharon Burgess Productions presents
hilariously absurd comedy
David Johnson, John Mackay & Soho Theatre present
R U B B E R BA N D I T S D I R E C T
F R O M
L I M E R I C K !
‘Daily Mail’s nightmare of a feral underclass...’
‘Subversive genius... a big phat funny hour’
‘Comedy riotously of the moment’
««««
««««
««««
Guardian
Scotsman
Metro
GUILDED BALLOON-TEVIOT 31 JULY – 25 AUG (NOT 12, 19) 10.40PM 0131 622 6552 / GILDEDBALLOON.CO.UK RUBBERBANDITS.COM
“A delightfully unpredictable glam culture parody” Adelaide Now
19:30 (1hr) | 1-22 August (previews 1-2 Aug) Assembly George Square | George Square EH8 9LH | 0131 623 3030 | assemblyfestival.com
LordsofStrut.com
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LordsofStrut
edinburgh festival preview guide 2013 fest 43
festcomedy
Men of the people Sketch comedy sceptic Julian Hall finds out what’s so special about the genre’s proudly populist new poster boys, The Ginge, The Geordie and The Geek. Steve Ullathorne
T
hroughout 10 years of reviewing live comedy I have never been known for my love of sketch — and that’s an understatement. But when I heard that The Ginge, The Geordie and The Geek had secured a series on BBC2, I was pleased. I’d just seen their latest Edinburgh show and was pleasantly surprised by their consistent shtick and their acting ability. And the sketches weren’t too bad either. In the year since, I have been subjected to even more sketch comedy than usual, thanks to my role as a judge on the panel for Sketchfest, the UK’s first contest dedicated to the genre. It served to remind me just what an oddity the three Gs (as they’re known) are: they are alternative by being mainstream at a Fringe that still largely celebrates the avant garde, the clever, the cleverclever and the fashionable. On hand to explain further the difference is John Hoggarth, GGG’s co-writer and director, aka ‘the Ghost’ (according to the group’s website), and a background figure almost akin to The League of Gentlemen’s Jeremy Dyson. Hoggarth linked up with the group as part of his foray into writing and directing, which involved a spell as the artistic director of the National Youth Theatre. “We get genuinely broad audiences,” he says, “and for the TV show we wanted three generations to enjoy it. We tend not to use expletives or sexual references and aim to get to the funny without relying on shortcuts.” Though they may not be adventurous enough for some critics, there’s no doubt the trio are dexterous. It’s big comedy without big egos – uncomplicated, but
The Ginge, the Geordie and the Geek - Live Just The Tonic at the Caves, 4:30-5:30pm and 6:15–7:15pm and, 1–25 Aug, not 6, 13, 20, £14
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with plenty of belief. And it’s this sense of belief, not just confidence, that caught the eye of Kristian Smith, BBC Comedy Executive Editor. “There is something gloriously oldfashioned about those boys – they are good, clean fun, which is no bad thing,” says Smith. “They want to satisfy a mainstream audience and that is rare around Edinburgh, where there is a lot of niche stuff and career comedy. They are very certain of what they are and that is what makes good comedy for me, no matter what it is.” The group laugh when I suggest they are “dad chic,” but they are unabashed to admit that Morecambe and Wise and The Two Ronnies are among their favourite comedians. Style-wise, Smith likens them to The Goons. With all of the above, the distinctive personalities that comprised these acts shone through. “In Edinburgh, there are lots of sketch groups with confident, middle-class performers who are quite often interchangeable with what they do,” observes Smith. “Though their performances are often excellent and the material is strong, they do not necessarily speak to a larger audience.” Their first Edinburgh (in 2009) left them without a deposit for a flat and so they couch-surfed with friends for a while, meeting at Hoggarth’s flat to write. However, the sacrifice paid off. “Every Edinburgh has been a step forward,” says Graeme Rooney (the Ginge). “After the first, we got an agent, after the second we got a production company, and after the third Edinburgh, Kristian Smith from the BBC approached us.” Paul Charlton (the Geordie) adds: “It sounds funny now, but we had a business plan when we started and said that we would have a pilot within three years of our first Edinburgh show. Because we treated it like that we didn’t use any cheats— shortcuts like corpsing (breaking character by laughing on stage)—so that it could be used for a TV show.” They find their premeditated approach amusing now and the irony is that, despite being a fourth-wall sketch group, they are less synchronised than many ‘boyband’ sketch outfits. Some might say they are unsophisticated by comparison, but they certainly stand out one way or another.
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Theatre
Highlights Take a chance Nordic mayhem
BLAM! Pleasance Courtyard, 5:55pm - 7:10pm 31 Jul - 26 Aug, £8 - £15
Despite being set in a painfully familiar, identikit office space, there’s nothing sedentary about this Danish-devised atomic bomb of a show, shot through with aliens, superheroes, bone-risking stunts and bodily feats far beyond the reaches of us mere mortals. “Physical theatre” barely comes close. Strap in, and hold on.
magic band
Ring
Pleasance Dome, 2pm - 3pm, 19 - 24 Aug, £10:50 - £13.50
precious metal
The Tin Ring
Wearing headphones and surrounded by an inky cloak of darkness—and we mean total blackout—plunge yourself into this eerie, aural adventure produced by theatrical envelopepushers, Fuel. Seductive, unsettling and just a little bit special.
the thick end
Summerhall, 8pm - 9:15pm, 2 - 25 Aug, £14
The Wedge
Zdenka Fantlova was 17 when a deranged German dictator declared war on the world in 1939. Today, she’s one of precious few Holocaust survivors able or willing to speak out and tells her story, about “the unrelenting strength of the human spirit,” through actress Jane Arnfield’s solo performance.
Zoo Southside, 3:30pm 4:20pm, 2 - 26 Aug, £8
Naomi Said (Frantic Assembly, Old Vic New Voices) has some pedigree and this pared back, contemporary urban thriller (“a haunting tale of love and lost innocence”) foregrounds Said’s language and storytelling skill for what might be one of the sleeper hits of the summer.
ultimate romantic
The Six Wives of Henry VIII Assembly George Square, 4:35pm - 5:50pm, 31 Jul - 26 Aug, £8 - £12
Two actors, a sackful of instruments and a whole load of silly. Kick back and let the wholly inaccurate history lessons wash over you in this gag-packed gem of a musical comedy—a proper spirit-raising, Fringe pick-me-up.
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Northen Lights
The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project Northern Stage at St Stephen’s, 10pm - 11:15pm, 3 - 24 Aug, £14
The ever-excellent Northern Stage return to their St Stephen’s HQ with an excellent season that’s well worth a look in. This project is helmed by a gathering of audiences, artists, thinkers, musicians and balladeers who create a new ballad each night in the spirit of protest, prophecy, poetry and, naturally, party.
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festtheatre Little tragedies
SAFE BETS
Stuart: A Life Backwards Underbelly Bristo Square, 3:30pm - 5pm, 31 Jul - 26 Aug, £7 - £14
Debuting at Underbelly’s exciting-looking new Topside venue, this inverted biography follows the life of one Stuart Shorter, an unstable, homeless alcoholic with a violent twitch. Already a multi awardwinning book and small screen success (starring Tom Hardy and the omnipresent Benedict Cumberbatch), a similarly strong creative team here look set to add “Fringe hit” to the accolades.
Family crisis
Losing the Plot New Town Theatre, 4:20pm - 5:40pm, 1 -25 Aug, £12 - £15
Wakefield’s master of the observational comedy, the Olivier Award-winning John Godber, returns to Edinburgh after a decade’s hiatus with a typically incisive comedy unpicking the modern day mores of a family under stress.
untold horror
The Events Traverse, Times vary, 2–26 Aug, not 6, 13, 20, £12 – £19
The ever-prolific, increasingly high profile David Greig looks set to add another hit to an already formidable back catalogue with this; a probing examination of human responses to atrocity and our irrepressible urge to “fathom the unfathomable.” Features a local choir each night.
No argument
You Once Said Yes
dance extravaganza
Missing
Pleasance Courtyard, 1pm - 2:15pm, 2 Aug - 25 Aug, £15
Underbelly Cowgate, times vary, 12 - 25 Aug, £18
Gecko’s exquisite, visually amorphous dance-theatre takes some pinning down, but the net effect is a force to be reckoned with: there’s humour, hand-clapping happiness, domestic trivialities and the restless, roving pulse of a life lived. A heady whirl of a show, that’ll be quite unlike anything else at the Fringe.
supernova
Sensory, participatory, discombobulating… brilliant. All hail the return of this superb, mould-breaking one-on-one show, which places you, and your propensity to say “yes” or “no”, at its core. Travel the city, converse with strangers, discover and marvel at this ingeniously constructed little masterpiece. .
wikileaker
The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning Pleasance at St Thomas of Aquin’s High School, times vary, 6 - 25 Aug, £10 - £14
The National Theatre of Wales retell the story of 25-yearold Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of sharing thousands of military secrets with Wikileaks and beyond. Facing court martial and a life in jail, just how did a freshfaced kid living in Wales stray so far from the path?
Ballad of the Burning Star Pleasance Dome, 5:15pm - 6:35pm, 31 Jul - 26 Aug, £7.50 - £13
Having scored back-to-back five-star Fest reviews since 2011, imagination-plunderers Theatre ad Infinitum (Translunar Paradise) return with a diverting, semi-autobiographical, piece about life as a Jewish Israeli in one of the most conflict-ridden countries on the Earth.
urban blight
Pigeon English Underbelly Cowgate, 11:30am 1pm, 12 -25 Aug, £12
Supposedly inspired by the Damilola Taylor tragedy, Stephen Kelman’s 2011 Man Booker Prize-nominated novel elegantly sidestepped sink estate cliché, which this youthful adaptation—by Fringe First-winner Gbolahan Obisesan (Mad About The Boy)—develops further in its portrayal of urban survival.
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edinburgh festival preview guide 2013 fest 47
festtheatre
Clowning glory With aerial choreography in theatres, clowns exploring autism and jugglers inspired by Sir Isaac Newton, will 2013 be the year that circus gets serious? Lucy Ribchester finds out. Seventh Wave
T
here isn’t a dedicated circus section in the Fringe brochure yet, but if there was, the past five years would have seen it gradually filling up. Victorian sideshows, trapeze artists and rag-tag jugglers in bowler hats have become familiar sights come August in Edinburgh. But a glance through the 28 circus companies rolling up this year suggests that even dedicated circus groupies may be in for a bit of a surprise. There’s juggling show Smashed, inspired by Sir Isaac Newton and the late German choreographer Pina Bausch; an aerial re-working of Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale; and a clown show tackling autism. Contemporary circus bighitters NoFit State are back, but as well as their big-top spectacular, Bianco, they’ll be offering a lunchtime show with a smaller, more theatrical feel. And then there’s the return of Casus. One of the runaway hits of last year’s Fringe, Casus’s Knee Deep was a pared-down journey through the power of the human body, stripped bare of glitz, gimmicks and vaudeville. Circus, it seems, is starting to get serious. “28 years ago when we started out,” says NoFit State co-founder and creative director Tom Rack, “we were doing popular entertainment. People thought there was no reason we should get Arts Council funding. Since then there has been a real change and a real recognition of circus as an artform. Consequently a lot more young companies are developing work.” Rack describes the new-style smallscale choreographic works as “circusdance”, and says the movement in the UK is only now beginning to “snowball”. Some of
The Little Soldiers Pleasance Dome, 2:10pm–3pm, 31 Jul – 25 Aug, £10
Bianco NoFit State Big Top, times vary, 2–26 Aug, not 6, 13, 20, £18
Noodles New Town Theatre, 12:45–1:55pm, 2–25 Aug, not 6, 13, 20, £12
Chaucer All Strung Up C nova, 2pm–3:10pm, 31 Jul – 26 Aug, not 12 Aug, £10.50
Echolalia C aquila, 3:40pm–4:25pm, 1–26 Aug, not 12, £9.50
Above: Bianco
48 fest edinburgh festival preview guide 2013
the best contemporary dance he has seen, Rack says, has been by circus performers, a factor which inspired NoFit State’s decision to create their show Noodles, which will be presented, not in their big top, but on stage at the New Town Theatre. Both Rack and Casus’ Jesse Scott agree that the pioneers of choreographic circus are coming from Down Under. “I think that circus in Australia is quite unique,” says Scott, over the telephone from London where Knee Deep has been performing for the past four weeks. “In Europe, America or Canada, you have exposure to all these other countries. In Australia, we are quite removed from the rest of it. We don’t have any other influences to change the way we think, so we create our own style of work.” His top Australian circus tips for this year include 3 is a Crowd’s Fight or Flight, and Adelaide-based Gravity & Other Myths, who present A Simple Space. Scott claims it’s not just performers who have changed their concept of the form,
but that audience, too, have allowed circus to develop into something more creative. “People have become more savvy to what circus can be. You used to go to a big top with lions and tigers and a ringmaster, and it was pure entertainment. Going into a show now you don’t have expectations.” But it’s not only circus-dance that’s bending the boundaries. Clowns too are growing up, taking on social issues and treating them with tenderness. Last year’s heartbreaking Waiting for Stanley celebrated the role women played during WWII, using the vulnerabilities of the clown to draw on an uncertain and fraught period in history. This year, New Zealand-based Kallo Collective are using the medium of clown to explore Asperger’s Syndrome in their show Echolalia. “Clown has the potential to cut straight to an empathetic response from the audience,” says Jen McArthur, solo performer in the show. “The audience relates directly to the situation of the character. I think it’s a really useful way to tell a story about a section of our population that could do with some increased understanding.” McArthur used to worry that people who hadn’t seen the show would misunderstand it and think that she was mocking her subject. “It’s a widely held notion—and fairly true—that a clown who makes fun of themselves is an idiot. But there’s another side to a clown; through their failings, we relate to them through the heart and genuinely feel something for the character.” Not to be left behind, circus storytellers are also getting in on the act, with Cambridge University’s Strung Up telling The Franklin’s Tale through aerial acrobatics, and Theatre Re re-locating the Cain and Abel story inside a circus in The Little Soldiers. But does this move towards the realms of theatre and dance spell an end to travelling big tops? Not according to Tom Rack. “I think circus has the capacity to be accessible and work on so many levels. My worry about some of the smaller intellectual approaches is that they’re great shows by fantastic people, but they’re not always really circus and they’re not always really accessible. I think it’s an emerging strand of the circus spectrum and I wish it all the success, but I hope that it doesn’t take over all the other strands.” For Rack, the magic and the ethos of circus still goes far beyond what the audience sees. “As a company we put the tent up and take the tent down, drive overnight. There is a real equality amongst the whole company, and a spirit and an energy and a bond that is about living that lifestyle. There’s an indefinable magic of circus that people get caught up in.”
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festtheatre
Life sentence
Steve Ullathorne
Omid Djalili stars in one of the festival’s real theatrical attention-grabbers: a big budget adaptation of The Shawshank Redemption. Malcolm Jack finds a man revelling in his artistic freedom. Steve Ullathorne
I
t was exactly 20 years ago this August that Omid Djalili, on the cusp of his big break but still a mostly unknown new face in British comedy, sneaked a look at soon-to-be-Perrier-Award-winner Lee Evans slaying a sold out crowd in the Assembly Rooms Music Hall, and he left inspired. Much as the prospect of playing for a more sizeable throng did undoubtedly appeal to a comic who had recently done a show for an audience of three people (“one of whom,” he recalls, “wanted their money back”), it was the sheer exuberant joy that appealed to him. “I thought: ‘it just
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looks like so much fun, playing to a packed house,’” the London-raised Anglo-Iranian says. “I remember thinking: ‘he is having the time of his life. I’ll never do that.’” How wrong he was. In 2013, Djalili returns to the stage in Edinburgh for the first time since 2008, with two shows both in the same venue and the same room in which he saw Evans all those years ago. In a festival-long run, he’ll follow in the formidable footsteps of Morgan Freeman and star as contraband-smuggling prison inmate Ellis “Red” Redding in Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns’ major new theatrical adaptation of The Shawshank Redemption. Additionally, for 13 nights from August 13, Djalili will slickly switch from straight to funny man, ready to appear a few hours later in his brand new standup show. In these last two decades, he’s become not just one of the biggest draws in British standup (2005’s No Agenda broke Fringe box office records) but also an established actor on screens big and small, starring in the likes of Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Sex and the City 2, so Djalili’s in the privileged position of being able to pick jobs based on what he’s passionate about rather than purely for the work. “I’m past doing things for financial reasons,” he says. “It has to be for reasons of just loving it.” When he was approached by O’Neill about the stage version of The Shawshank Redemption (the movie he ranks as being among the greatest ever made) he was quick to say yes. At least once, assurances were given that they’d be doing something markedly different from the film. This interpretation will be closer to the source text of Steven King’s 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, rather than its critically-revered, multi-Oscarnominated and impossible-to-live-up-to big screen incarnation. The Assembly Rooms has a tradition of stage versions of well-known movies, 12 Angry Men and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest being recent examples. But with a six-figure budget, this is the most ambitious such production yet. Directed
The Shawshank Redemption Assembly Rooms, 4:50pm – 6:15pm, 1–25 Aug, not 12, £16 by former RSC associate director Lucy Pitman-Wallace, and featuring an all-star cast of comedy actors in straight roles including Ian Lavender—better-known as Private Pike in Dad’s Army—Owen O’Neill, Steve McNicholl and Terry Alderton, this is serious drama with a witty twist. Despite his popular image as a largerthan-life master of subversive firebrand wit, Djalili’s well accustomed to playing it straight – as he’s been known to joke in standup shows, he’s a “theatre ponce” at heart. “I actually fell into standup comedy by accident,” he explains. “I dropped drama because I enjoyed doing standup more. And because I also didn’t see myself getting the kind of roles I wanted. In the early 90s, there were no real opportunities for actors with a Middle Eastern background.” “Standups really do love doing serious roles,” he muses. “I think deep down we all want to be taken seriously.” On that note, Djalili gives a sober analysis of what he believes to be the heart of The Shawshank Redemption’s enormous appeal. “To me the essence of it is very simple,” Djalili states thoughtfully. “The move from hopelessness to hope.” “If I can be esoteric for a moment,” he continues, “in all our lives, we’re all stuck in the prison of the self. We don’t really live – we all just survive. When in fact we’re all here to fulfil our potential, by really pushing ourselves and learning to hope and dream – to really grab life by the bullhorns and be happy.”
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festtheatre
Rhythm of the night
writers like Greig, Kieran Hurley, Stef Smith and Alan Bissett, as well as digital artist Kim Beveridge. And its gaggle of lauded contemporary musical acts, most of whom will play live at each performance in Edinburgh this August, include electro-rock outfit Errors, 2013 Scottish Album of the Year Award-winner RM Hubbert, former Delgado Emma Pollock, Eugene Kelly of The Vaselines, beatboxer Bigg Taj and indie-folk band Meursault, in addition to many others. “I know there have been bands that write music or soundscapes for theatre, but I really wanted to place the music bang in the centre of the action,” explains director Bissett, who was influenced by Chemikal Underground’s literary-music collaboration album, Ballads of the Book, the collection of short films Paris Je T’aime and Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis. “The development process involved people like Dan Wilson [of Withered Hand] and Drew Wright [of Wounded Knee],” she says, “with a couple of actors in the room. It really was a genuine, absolute experiment. I said ‘OK, we have no text, we have no scene. We have Dan so let’s take the lyrics from his songs and those are the only words we have to play with.’” “It was amazing,” says Wilson, whose acclaimed first album Good News has made him one of Edinburgh’s lead“David and I are more theatre people,” ing musicians. “Sometimes, it felt really says Bissett, who began her performance organic, that things fed off each other. I’m career in music, “and Andrew, Laura and not a theatre-going guy, as much as I keep Hamish from Swimmer One traverse meaning to do more. It was amazing to theatre and music. I think we just thought, be that close to actors just running with ‘why wouldn’t you create a piece that uses something. I’d never seen anything like that all that brilliant stuff on your doorstep?’ For before in my life. It was educational.” me, it seems obvious – why not?” Though most of the show’s contribuEssentially, the show is a series of tors are based in Edinburgh or Glasgow, vignettes—some drama, some dance, Bissett was always keen to encompass some visual and performance art—set the entirety of Scotland. “We’ve got our to original music, all of which take place Edinburgh festival,” she says, “we’ve got between the hours of midnight and 4am. our Glasgow thing going on but you Motherland advert 54x90:Layout 1 a lot 2/7/13 Page 1 Its contributing artists feature acclaimed know, there’s of strong 17:23 writing voices
Yasmin Sulaiman looks forward to the collaborative, arts-pollinating exploration of life in the small hours, Whatever Gets You Through the Night
W
hen Whatever Gets You Through the Night premiered last year at The Arches—the infamous multi-arts venue beneath Glasgow Central Station—it felt more like a festival than a theatre show. Put together by Cora Bissett, star of 2009 Fringe hit Midsummer and the director of multi award-winning Roadkill, prolific Scottish playwright David Greig (also of Midsummer fame) and acclaimed Edinburgh band Swimmer One, it’s a landmark collaboration between playwrights, musicians, dancers and visual artists in Scotland.
ZOO southside
‘Astonishingly original’ New York Times www.motherland.org.uk 19–23 August Dissec�on Room Summerhall Edinburgh 0845 874 3001 www.summerhall.co.uk
52 fest edinburgh festival preview guide 2013
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festtheatre and music voices coming through from different areas as well. So I liked the idea that you’d hear a song from Greenock or Fraserburgh or Wick at the same time as someone who’s written a song in the middle of Glasgow.” Its Edinburgh run is part of the Made in Scotland showcase, but the show was originally funded by a Creative Scotland Vital Spark award, which explicitly promotes cross-sector collaboration within the arts. So in addition to its live incarnation, there’s also a Whatever Gets You Through the Night soundtrack, as well as a book and a film, which was screened at Summerhall last August. “Theatre is ephemeral,” says Swimmer One’s Andrew Eaton-Lewis. “Unless it tours, it sort of disappears. But this show is very well documented. The film will still be there, and the album will be there for as long as people want it to be. When people went to see the show last year, I liked that there was a souvenir that they could take with them that was more substantial than a programme. This time, people will go into the show having lived with the music for a year, so it might have a different meaning.” “We wanted to reach as many different audiences as possible,” Bissett adds. “In theatre, we’re always going ‘how can we
Whatever Gets You Through the Night The Queen’s Hall, times vary, 20–25 Aug, £16.50
“
We all need people in our lives, things to hold on to, to get us through the night. pull people into our territory?’. But maybe some people don’t want to come see the theatre show, they just like the album. So that’s available as well.” Perhaps surprisingly, given the number of successful artists collaborating on Whatever Gets You Through the Night, the creators report no tension between them. “What I particularly enjoyed was the lack of ego,” says Eaton-Lewis. “There were lots of people working together, some were very well-known like [Deacon Blue’s] Ricky Ross, others less well known. We were all sitting together and making this thing, and it was really lovely. Everyone was quite generous.” “I think the collaborative thing was a positive thing for everybody,” says Wilson. “I do feel that in Scotland, people are
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For festival gigs
DODGY HUDSON TAYLOR THOMAS J SPEIGHT VOLTS THEM BEATLES BAGS OF ROCK MACFLOYD
Thu 22 Aug Thu 15 Aug Sat 24 Aug Sat 3 Aug Sun 4 Aug Thu 8 Aug Fri 23 Aug
ELJAM & FEAST RECORDS SHOWCASE
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03 - 25 August 2013 Tickets: 0131 665 2240 www.thebrunton.co.uk www.edinburghfringe.com The Brunton, Ladywell Way, Musselburgh. EH21 6AA
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generally supportive of each other’s creative work because it’s a small pond. But this made it really concrete, it felt great. And subsequently I’ve gone on to work with some of the people that I was in the show with. Eugene Kelly was playing on the album I just made. So, there were some existing allegiances and some new ones have come out of it as well.” For Whatever Gets You Through the Night’s Edinburgh run, every musician involved in the show will play live each night, except for Ricky Ross. And though it’s technically a theatre show, the music has absolutely equal billing says Bissett. “I think there’s so much diverse, eclectic, experimental, exciting, innovating song-writing talent in Scotland, I really wanted to make them core to the piece. And in that sense, they’ve not been an add-on or a prettifier of a theatre production. The songs are absolutely key.” And she’s hoping that the universality of the show’s subject matter will bring in an audience as diverse as its contributors. “We all need people in our lives, things to hold on to, to get us through the night. Hopefully you come to this show and there’s a kind of joy in going ‘we’re all just trying to survive in the best way we can,’ and there’s a beauty in sharing that.”
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ONE OF THE TOP TEN MOST CREATIVE SHOWS TO SEE ON THE FRINGE - Huffington Post 2012 ‘Spare, Shocking, beautiful’
‘A great work This was perfection!’
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Scilla Ellworthy Nobel Peace Prize Nominee
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29-31 ABERCROMBY PLACE. EH3 6QE 3.00p.m. 6-10 & 12–17 August Tickets £10(£8) BOX OFFICE: 0131 226 0000
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edinburgh festival preview guide 2013 fest 53
festtheatre
Behind closed doors An immersive theatre project in a Wester Hailes council house aims to crack open the taboo of domestic abuse. Edd McCracken talks to the creative minds behind Our Glass House.
D
omestic abuse is as old a dramatic trope as theatre itself. Greek theatre is littered with one half of a couple whittling away at the other’s sanity. Millennia later, domestic violence still inhabits our screens and stages because it is still in our homes. This festival, however, a disused council house in Edinburgh’s Wester Hailes area will be home to a different dramatic approach. Animation, music and magic are being employed to tell six stories of domestic abuse. In Our Glass House there is no violence, just survival. It is about love and fear. In the end, no one cries. They escape. “We didn’t want to make something dark,” says director Evie Manning, who interviewed a dozen individuals about their real life experiences of abuse. “You need those elements of beauty and escape. That was the experience of people we spoke to. We would come away from interviewing these women but it was uplifting. These people are so strong and have achieved so much despite it all. For us, we didn’t want people to leave feeling depressed. We wanted people feeling hopeful.” There is a personal impetus behind Our Glass House. Manning co-founded Common Wealth Theatre in Bristol with Rhiannon White. When White was five, her mum put some belongings in a plastic bag, took her three children by the hand and walked out the front door. They swapped a home in which her mother was regularly abused for a refuge. “Abuse is still such a taboo subject,” says White. “It shouldn’t be. And yet there are more animal sanctuaries in the UK than refuges for women and kids. That’s insane.” Our Glass House is anything but silent. A sound artist will create a live soundtrack from under the stairs. Each character, ranging from a 10-year-old boy with a violent father to a Pakistani woman in an arranged marriage, has their own, specially designed room – part stage, part art installation. The action will spill out onto the street. Patterns of abuse and control—such as the perpetrator hiding shoes, controlling money, telling callers their partners are not in—ripple through the six stories. Signs on doors will declare facts like Women’s Aid
Our Glass House Summerhall, times vary, 13–25 Aug, not 19, free
has to turn away 230 women a day due to lack of resources. The audience, which will be limited to 30 people at a time, let themselves in and are free to wander around the rooms, piecing together the different character’s stories as they go. Every punter’s experience will be different. It is deliberately elliptical. “That’s the experience of domestic violence,” says Aisha Zia, who wrote the play. “You never really know what’s going on next door or in the room upstairs. You just hear sounds and pick up snippets of stories. “When Evie first asked me to write a play about domestic violence, my initial gut reaction was: no, I don’t know anything about it, it has never happened to me, it has never happened to anyone I know. But when I read all the material and read about what constitutes abuse and what constitutes violence, you reflect upon past relationships and say, they could have been abusive. It can be so subtle and so manipulative.
54 fest edinburgh festival preview guide 2013
“That’s the biggest thing I learned – victims of domestic abuse don’t think they’re in an abusive relationship. But the perpetrator also doesn’t know they are being abusive and violent. They just think it’s just part of being in a relationship.” As well as producing a cracking, immersive piece of theatre, Our Glass House wants to raise awareness. No more taboos. No more closed doors. To that end, all the tickets are free. “Domestic abuse is classless, sexless, and cultureless,” says White. “It can happen to anyone. As long as people know they are not alone in that situation, that’s what will make them stronger and able to leave an abusive relationship.” Again, White speaks from experience. Years after leaving home with her mother, White found herself trapped in an abusive relationship too. One day, after her boyfriend left the house for work, White escaped. She hopped on a train and didn’t get off for four hours. A palpable feeling of bravery coursed through her. She hopes to transfer some of that into Our Glass House. “We found this tremendous sense of courage in these women and men when they leave,” she says. “And that should be celebrated.”
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festtheatre ARD H DIEMEETS CE! FFI O THE ON
Y SS D B GIMAR ATE CRE JÁN IN T KRIS NDER EA // N
★★★★★
‘A PARTY BOMB OF A SHOW!’ Politiken
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31 JUL - 26 AUG
5:55PM
www.blamtheshow.com
www.pleasance.co.uk 0131 556 6550 Suitable for all ages.
NORTHERN STAGE AT ST STEPHEN’S UNMISSABLE THEATRE MADE IN THE NORTH DAYSAVER THE GB PROJECT KATE CRADDOCK HOW TO OCCUPY AN OIL RIG DANIEL BYE IF ROOM ENOUGH WITH WINGS THERE HAS POSSIBLY BEEN AN INCIDENT ROYAL EXCHANGE CHRIS THORPE SAM PRITCHARD ON THE ONE HAND THE PAPER BIRDS CAPTAIN AMAZING LIVE THEATRE ALISTAIR MCDOWALL A CONVERSATION WITH MY FATHER HANNAH NICKLIN THE BLOODY GREAT BORDER BALLAD PROJECT KIERAN HURLEY CORA BISSET ALEX KELLY LUCY ELLINSON WHEN WE EMBRACED FALLEN FROM GRACE ARC STOCKTON CAPE WRATH THIRD ANGEL THE MAN WHO THOUGHT THE MOON WOULD FALL OUT OF THE SKY NORTH MAKE. DO. AND MEND. FOREST FRINGE THIRD ANGEL WHAT I HEARD ABOUT THE WORLD WANT TO BE A PLAYWRIGHT? NORTHERN STAGE SEE ANOTHER SHOW ON THE SAME DAY FOR ONLY £5 MORE. Venue No 73 www.festmag.co.uk
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festtheatre
Brutal truth After news of a brutal gang rape on a Delhi bus spread across the world, South African playwright Yael Farber teamed up with actor Poorna Jagannathan to shed light on a culture that permits such violence against women. Jo Caird talks to them about Nirbhaya.
O
n 16 December 2012, 23-yearold paramedical student Jyoti Singh Pandey was gang raped and brutally beaten on a Delhi bus, before being dumped at the side of the road. While the overwhelming majority of incidents of sexual violence in India go unreported and unnoticed, this one caught the attention of the media. As the alleged perpetrators were arrested and charged, the subcontinent erupted in anger and fear, with protestors and politicians condemning not just this brutal attack but a culture in which sexual violence against women is endemic. Two weeks later, Nirbhaya, as Singh Pandey was referred to before her real name was released to the media, died of her injuries at a hospital in Singapore. At the time of writing, the trial of her alleged murderers continues. In the days after Singh Pandey’s death, Mumbai-based actor Poorna Jagannathan approached South African playwright and director Yael Farber with an idea for a project based on the case. Nirbhaya, the play Farber and her all-Indian cast have crafted this spring and summer, premieres at Assembly Hall this August. Jagannathan remembered being struck by a play of Farber’s she had seen years previously, a ‘testimonial work’ called Amajuba that explores the horrors of apartheid through the personal experiences of cast members. “You actually don’t watch Yael’s plays, you witness them,” recalls the actor. “You see truth on stage like you’ve never seen before, you see actors bare themselves and you witness healing.” Having corresponded initially via Facebook, the pair decided that this approach could be an effective way of bringing to life the issues around the rape case and the culture of sexual violence that permitted it to occur. Farber and Jagannathan put out a casting call for actors with personal experience of sexual violence who would be, in the playwright’s words, “courageous enough to work on such material”. Including Jagannathan, there are seven in the cast, six women and one man. Collaboration is a fundamental aspect
Nirbhaya Assembly Hall, 4pm–5:30pm, 1–26 Aug, not 12, 19, £10–£16
of the process. Farber is keenly aware of her status as an outsider to this culture; she sees herself as “a someone who can metabolise and structure what is already out there into a work of theatre. It is an endeavour that tolerates little ego”. Intense concentration is required, says Farber, who is based in India for the duration of the rehearsal process. So intense, in fact, that she will only answer my ques-
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tions via email, not wishing to be distracted by a phone interview. She is working “very obsessively and without respite”, she says, writing at night and directing during the day, her mind constantly “turning [the issues of the play] over like a Rubik’s Cube”. Farber has been lauded as a writer and as a director—most recently for Mies Julie, the modern-day, South Africa-based adaptation of August Strindberg’s 1888 play that won last year’s Best of Edinburgh Award—but it’s directing that comes more naturally, she says. “Writing is another animal altogether. I never have enough time as a writer. That’s how it has always panned out for me... I work hot and fast as a writer, with great urgency.” With Nirbhaya of course, there is an additional pressure, to get the play in front of audiences while the story of Singh Pandey’s rape and murder is still fresh in people’s minds. “Issues have their time when at their most potent in the public eye and are then gone from view in our saturated world,” says Farber. “The time for this story—these narratives and this issue— is now. The death of Nirbhaya brought this issue front centre.” In December the company will perform the play to mark the one-year anniversary of the attack. Jagannathan particularly wants Nirbhaya to be seen “by people who don’t normally go to the theatre”. She and Farber hope to tour it elsewhere too: “I cannot think of a single country that does not have to—on some level—address sexual violence in its social fabric,” says the director. Critical success, Farber says, is “a great barometer on gauging if one is capturing the zeitgeist of the society the work is showing to,” but on a project like Nirbhaya it is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. “I want the most for the art so that its potency enables the message to fly at full velocity and accuracy. And so in a way there is less focus on personal achievement and more on the effectiveness of the work.” Whether in Edinburgh, India, or wherever else it plays, Nirbhaya is intended as nothing less than a call to arms. Farber hopes that the play will motivate audiences “to speak about their own experiences with clarity and truth.” “It is the fabric of silence around the world that enables sexual violence to continue unabated; the enduring myth that the victim and not the perpetrator has lost their honour. The irony of this is an enslavement to silence – and so change remains buried as a possibility. By speaking out a society is able to reckon with itself.”
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paterson’s land The Fringe’s newest venue BabyO SensoryO Dance Derby The Garden John and Zinnie Harris
Gareth Williams and Johnny McKnight
Last One Out Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht
The Seven Deadly Sins Scottish Opera
9 - 26 August
is core funded by
Registered in Scotland Number SCO37531 Scottish Charity Number SCO19787
Ménage à Trois By Claire Cunningham and Gail Sneddon
9 - 25 August Part of Made in Scotland 2013. Part of British Council Edinburgh Showcase. National Theatre of Scotland, a company limited by guarantee and registered in Scotland (SC234270) is a registered Scottish charity (SCO33377). Photograph of Claire Cunningham by Sven A Hagolani.
Box Office details
Book now!
Fringe Box Office
0131 226 0000 l edfringe.com
Paterson’s Land (venue 247) 37 Holyrood Road, Edinburgh Box office open from 9 August 0131 651 1421 l patersonsland.co.uk See website for full programme. Booking fees apply
Supported by the European Union
festtheatre
WordUp
Spoken word, performance poet, storyteller – whatever the label, Kate Tempest is very, very good at it. But she’s not the only one, as Catherine Love discovers.
“I
don’t really know what it is, spoken word. What the fuck is it?” jokes Kate Tempest, her infectious laughter ringing down the phone. But she has a point. What is spoken word? Despite gaining its own section in the Edinburgh Fringe programme last year and being stamped as a burgeoning cultural scene, the genre straddles a huge range of artistic practices. It’s an artform that revels in mixing influences. “There’s a lot of snobbery,” Tempest muses. “If you’re a spoken word poet, you’re not quite a real poet; if you’re a spoken word artist, you’re not quite a rapper; if you’re a spoken word theatremaker, you’re not quite a theatre-maker.” Whatever snobbery spoken word might have faced in the past, however, the Fringe is an increasingly welcoming place for performers whose work falls into this boundary-blurring space. As well as an expanded range of offerings in the second year of the spoken word section, 2013 sees two spoken word performances make it into the British Council Showcase: Tempest’s Ted Hughes Award-winning show Brand New Ancients and Inua Ellams’ Black T-shirt Collection. Despite growing up performing her poems—“it’s never been surprising for me that people stand up and tell their rhymes”—Brand New Ancients marks something of a departure for Tempest. Blending storytelling, poetry and an electrifying live score, the show intertwines the tales of two modern day families, spinning an epic narrative out of ordinary lives. “I’ve never done anything like it,” says Tempest. “I’ve never sustained a narrative for that long; I’ve never tried to tell a story like this.” Her starting point, she explains, was the idea of myths. “I’ve always found a lot of comfort in reading myths,” she says. “In the myths I recognise friends of mine, recognise my family, recognise myself.” Wondering why these characters that she recognised all around her could not have myths of their own, Tempest set about the task of creating just that. Her heroes are compassionate barmaids and dissatisfied advertising execs; they drink pints down the local and hang out at the betting shop. As Tempest points out, “you don’t really get to hear epic narratives about
people who aren’t epic heroes”. As well as drawing heavily on storytelling and poetry, the live score is central to Brand New Ancients. Music appeals to Tempest because, unlike with poetry, “you’re straight in, there’s no faffing around with language”. Uncharacteristically, she fumbles slightly for the words to express music’s narrative power. “There’s just something that happens when you hear a violin soaring and when you watch
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Above: Brand New Ancients Top right: Inua Ellams: Black T-Shirt Collection Bottom right: Luke Wright
a drummer going for it – there’s something that happens to you,” she says. Inua Ellams equally identifies a range of different influences in Black T-shirt Collection, which combines the simple art of telling a story with poetic and multimedia elements. “I don’t even necessarily think of it as spoken word or as performance poetry,” he says, shaking off the spoken word label as restlessly as Tempest. It’s just a story, he shrugs.
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festtheatre Franklyn Rodgers
Criss-crossing the globe from Nigeria to Britain to China, Ellams’ story follows two foster brothers—one Muslim, one Christian—who travel the world selling their T-shirts. While Ellams is keen to emphasise the simplicity of the tale, along the way the brothers’ experiences touch on issues as diverse as sectarian violence, homophobia and the ethics of the fashion industry. “The story covers so many things and does so very honestly,” he reflects. Ellams’ aim, similarly to Tempest’s, is to identify the human narrative at the heart of his subjects. “Whenever I read stories about politics they tend to bore me,” he admits, pointing to the lack of a human connection. “That’s what I try to do,” he continues, “just tell stories about two guys and how the world happens to them.” As well as being a consummate storyteller, Ellams very much identifies himself as a poet, explaining that the page is usually his first consideration. He describes the range of his work in terms of transformation. “Usually I think of myself as Bruce Banner,” he grins, seizing with glee on the superhero metaphor. “When I write a poem I think of myself as this scientist, this geek with glasses, conducting literary experiments with paper and pen. And then I think of myself reading poems as somewhere in between.” It’s only in his solo shows, when harnessing theatrical elements, that he’s the Hulk – “the monster is entirely unleashed.” Elsewhere in the spoken word programme at this year’s Fringe, the offerings are equally varied. From the chaotic spontaneity of an ad-libbing show at Assembly Rooms to a range of one-off talks from speakers such as Jeanette Winterson and Jon Ronson, spoken word is a patchwork genre. Among the highlights are the return of Scroobius Pip, poet John Osborne’s follow-up to the acclaimed John Peel’s Shed, and Luke Wright’s new show Essex Lion. As Wright explains, his show was born from the inspiration of the false lion sightings in Essex last year and has ended up bringing in a range of poems about the things we want to see. “I think we’re always looking for those things in the next field, those things on the horizon,” he says. “All the poems are quite unrelated in their subject matter, but they’ve all got that at their core; they’re all about longing in some way and wishful thinking and self-deception.”
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Inua Ellams: Black T-Shirt Collection Pleasance Courtyard, 10:45am – 12pm, 19–24 Aug, £13.50
Brand New Ancients Traverse Theatre, times vary, 20–25 Aug, £18–£20
Luke Wright: Essex Lion Assembly George Sq, 6pm–7pm, 1–26 Aug, not 13, £10.50
Steve Ullathorne
Discussing the spoken word scene, Wright is more pragmatic about the terms in which it is described. “Labels exist for a reason,” he points out, and he speaks of the launch of the spoken word section in the Fringe programme as “hugely symbolic.” For all these artists, however, the work itself is more important than the words used to discuss it. “Hopefully there are a lot of writers coming through who are exploring new places and having new ideas and going on this huge adventure with text,” says Tempest. “Whatever form that comes in, if that’s happening we should be really, really, really glad.”
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festtheatre
In it to win it Everyone wants to be a champion, right? But what lengths would you go to to come out on top? Catherine Love meets two theatrical provocateurs asking just that question.
J
ust take a stroll down the Royal Mile and you quickly notice that competition is right at the heart of the Fringe. Flyerers trip over one another to slap their leaflet in your hand, performers all fight for attention and the ultimate prize is the fivestar review. Like it or not, there are winners and there are losers. For two shows at this year’s festival, that competitive element is dragged into the foreground. Made in China’s new show Gym Party, a dark and funny dissection of the desire to win, describes itself as a “three-way battle to the death” between its grimly competitive trio of rivals. In Fight Night, meanwhile, regular Fringe provocateurs Ontroerend Goed pit five performers against one another in a popularity contest where the audience have the final say. “People have always been competitive and competition is not an inherently bad thing,” says Jess Latowicki, one half of Made in China. What she and fellow theatre-maker Tim Cowbury are troubled by, however, is the extent to which competition now drives our society. “It’s a mindset that has brought the world to its knees in the last few years,” Cowbury observes, pointing to the failure of free market competition in the financial crash and subsequent recession. While Made in China’s starting point was politics, and in particular David Cameron’s “aspiration nation” speech, Gym Party draws on myriad types of competition. “When you say you’re making a show about competition, people are like: ‘what do you mean?’” Latowicki laughs. “It’s a
Gym Party Summerhall, 6:30pm – 7:30pm, 12–25 Aug, £10
Fight Night Traverse Theatre, times vary, 1–25 Aug, not 5, 12, 19, £19 Above: Fight Night
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really, really big topic.” Not aiming to focus on any one type of competition, the show instead critiques the underlying desire that drives it all, bringing in references to everything from competitive sport to television gameshows and talent contests. Like Gym Party, the initial inspiration for Fight Night was political. Reflecting on the situation in his home country of Belgium, Ontroerend Goed’s artistic director Alexander Devriendt was struck by how far the cult of personality could sway elections and found himself wondering if it might be possible to explore these impulses in a theatrical setting. “I wanted to see what happened if I left behind all party colours and society issues,” Devriendt explains. “What if I take them all out, what do you vote for then?” The resulting show fills the stage with five performers—or “candidates”, as Devriendt refers to them—who must persuade audiences to keep them in the game. Voting decisions are made based on “their presence, what they believe in, how they look, how they sound”, with Devriendt emphasising that the performers are playing versions of themselves rather than defined characters. Perhaps because of this, there is a genuine desire to compete. “The actors who perform in the show all want to
win, because if they don’t win they’re out,” says Devriendt. “I like this real drive of the actors – they really want to perform and they want to win you over.” The structure of different rounds and the very real element of competition bear certain resemblances with Made in China’s show. As it stands—Latowicki and Cowbury are still in the final stages of making the show when Fest speaks to them—Gym Party moves through three distinct phases of competition. The first offers a playful take on sports day, with performers competing in a series of silly physical tasks, while the second section moves into what Latowicki calls “subjective competition”, asking the audience to become the arbiters. In the third and final segment, the piece takes a dark turn. Through this grim and admittedly “nasty” material, Gym Party asks just how far we will go in order to win. But Latowicki stresses that what they show the audience is no more shocking than the world around them. “These things happen,” she says. “People are horrible to each other for the sake of getting ahead, and all we’re doing is taking things from real life and framing them in a way that allows the audience to go ‘oh shit.’” Similarly, Ontroerend Goed hope that there will be a darker political resonance to the competition in Fight Night, unveiling some of the motivations that trigger us as voters. However, it is important for Devriendt that this interpretation is never explicitly defined. “You can also see it as a game, but you can see it as a metaphor for what you want,” he says. “I try to leave that open.” Latowicki and Cowbury agree that they would rather leave the conclusions up to their audiences. “Some people want shows to give answers, but we’d much rather ask questions,” says Cowbury. “Our job is to provoke people to think about things they might not otherwise think about, or challenge their preconceptions and unsettle them.” He pauses. “As well as entertaining them, of course.”
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Heart of Darkness Tom Basden, one of Britain’s top comic writers, is fascinated by the terrible things people do to each other when everyday society breaks down. Yasmin Sulaiman chats to him about Holes, a dark satire taking place in a top-secret location.
I
t’s been six years since Tom Basden won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer, and four since his satirical play Party won a Fringe First. In the meantime, the writer and comedian— who first came to Edinburgh as a member of sketch group Cowards alongside Tim Key, Lloyd Woolf and Stefan Golaszewski—has cemented his name as one of the country’s top comic writing talents, contributing to Channel 4’s Peep Show and Fresh Meat, and most recently creating Plebs for ITV2. But Holes—his first Edinburgh show since Party—doesn’t exactly sound funny from the off. Three colleagues and a teenage girl are the sole survivors of a plane crash and, stranded on a desert island, are forced to learn how to survive. “It’s not an out and out comedy in the style of something like Party,” Basden explains. “It’s meant to be funny and the characters are meant to be comic but some of the action goes to quite an extreme place. I guess it’s in the tradition of something like Lord of the Flies, looking at the way that people behave in a crisis.” “The play is very stealthy,” says director Phillip Breen, who also directed Party. “It’s a satire and rolls down a very familiar groove stretching back to The Tempest and Gulliver’s Travels. “I would say that the comedy works in a similar way to Beckett or Pinter. There’s a dark theme to it certainly. In some ways, the humour is similar to The Life of Brian, which is essentially about a bunch of people being crucified but it’s very, very funny.” Produced by The Invisible Dot, Holes will take place in a top-secret location and both writer and director aren’t giving any clues away. But Breen admits, “We’re taking people to a place in which we can do something that we couldn’t do anywhere else in Edinburgh,” and
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Basden—who originally wrote the play for the National Theatre but had to scrap it when the proposed venue changed—is just pleased the play is happening at all. “I didn’t think anyone would be stupid enough to put it on,” he laughs, “because it does involve a shit ton of sand. It’s like a huge sandpit really.” Basden will be in China when Holes premieres in Edinburgh, but he’s confident his play is in good hands. The excellent cast features comedian Katy Wix (who
Holes by Tom Basden Assembly George Sq., times vary, various dates, £10–£20
also starred in Party), Horrible Histories’ Matthew Baynton, acclaimed young actress Bebe Cave and Daniel Rigby, a BAFTA-winner for his performance in the BBC’s Eric and Ernie but perhaps most recognisable as the current face of BT. And Breen, recently lauded for directing the RSC’s The Merry Wives of Windsor has an impeccable Fringe track-record, having in addition to Party directed 2008 Fringe First-winner Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved and Humphrey Ker’s Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning show in 2011. “Tom’s the greatest joke writer around, I think,” says Breen. “It’s like getting the first Stoppards. What I love about Tom’s writing is the fact that it’s very funny, it’s very theatrical, has a great rhythm but it’s always ultimately about something.” And that something in this case is the limits of human behaviour. “I’m quite interested in stories where society breaks down,” Basden says. “Like during Hurricane Katrina there were people who were committing these horrendous acts of individual crime and abuse on each other, when they were all penned into the sports stadium and fighting for survival. And I was interested in what it would take to get relatively normal people to that point. The play is, I guess, an attempt to chart how very mundaneseeming people can get to the point where they’re doing absolutely awful things to each other.” “It is a comedy,” Basden insists. Then he laughs, “but the audience might end up being a bit brutalised by it. It depends on what they’re into really. Hopefully there’ll be at least some laughter before the screams of horror.”
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festtheatre
Born in the USSR
Amnesty International’s Freedom of Expression Award picks out the best Fringe productions shedding light on contemporary human rights issues. Lindsey Johnstone looks at three stirring pieces highlighting cruelty and corruption in the former Soviet Union.
T
he extraordinary Belarus Free Theatre’s Trash Cuisine draws on conversations with executioners, inmates and their families to tell individual stories of capital punishment. Producer Natalia Kaliada acknowledges the subject is not an easy one to tackle: “The challenge was finding the entry point for the audience as it’s such a complex issue to take home with you.” It is a challenge also faced by Ines Wurth’s Who Wants to Kill Yulia Tymoshenko? and Badac Theatre Company’s Anna, which complete a trio of productions coming to this year’s Fringe that highlight the human rights abuses prevalent in former USSR countries, and serve as a call to action for their audience. The exiled Belarus Free Theatre, last seen at the Fringe in 2011 with the unforgettable Minsk, grounded their approach in research trips to Rwanda, Uganda, Bangkok and Malaysia. The motivation for the piece, however, was found closer to home. Belarus is the last remaining European country to retain the death penalty; its most recent use being in March 2012, with the execution of Dzmitry Kanavalau and Uladzislau Kavaliou, accused of plotting the bombing of the Minsk subway in April 2011. According to the International Federation for Human Rights, the guilt of the men had not been established due to conflicting testimonies as well as Kanavalau’s assertion that his confession was obtained using torture; and that the evidence on which the men were condemned had been destroyed by the court. While Belarus Free Theatre tell the stories of powerless young men like Kanavalau and Kavaliou, Ines Wurth uses a higher profile figure to command the audience’s attention in Who Wants to Kill Yulia Tymoshenko? Wurth’s production places the former Ukranian president in a cell with a young woman who has been framed for murder. She explains how this device expounds the issues: “Having her sharing a cell in prison is fictitious, as in reality she is in solitary, so this was for dramatic purposes. The play focuses on the relationship between Yulia
and her cellmate; two women from different worlds. Yulia realises this is who she is fighting for; the whole purpose of the Orange Revolution of 2004 was democracy for people like this girl. It’s in this way Yulia’s politics and ideals come through. It’s not preaching at the audience, it’s all done through the story of two women.” Following the life, work and assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Badac Theatre Company’s Anna focuses on those who report human rights failings, and are themselves persecuted as a result. The site-specific piece is performed in a corridor around a lift, recreating her assasination in the lift of her apartment block in 2006. Writer and director Steve Lambert explains the significance of this aspect of the production: “[Anna] is attempting to drive home to the audience, by speaking directly to them, the fact that although human rights abuses are reported to them they don’t really listen to, or act upon, the reports they get. The play is being performed in a corridor with the audience lined up against both walls and the action takes place between them. It is very intimate.” Mark Bevan, programme director for Amnesty Scotland, believes the Fringe is the perfect forum in which to engage an audience thus: “Artists tend to know the value of freedom of expression more than most, and the Edinburgh Festival has always felt like a very natural place to talk about the right to say or laugh at whatever you wish without fear of reprisal. You simply couldn’t do the Edinburgh Fringe in Moscow.” For Natalia Kaliada, the separation between audience, artists and subject matter is a barrier to be broken down: “The role of the arts and the media in combating human rights abuses is a vital one, but it’s very important to keep it coming back to the fact that this is about human rights, and we are humans. Artists often say it is our role to observe, not to participate, but that is not enough – to participate is our job as humans.”
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Anna Summerhall, 8:30pm – 9:30pm, 2–25 Aug, not 12, £10
Trash Cuisine Pleasance Courtyard, 3:30pm–5pm, 19–26 Aug, £12–£15
Who Wants To Kill Yulia Tymoshenko? Assembly Roxy, 11am–12pm, 1–25 Aug, £8–£12
Above: Who Wants To Kill Yulia Tymoshenko? Below: Trash Cuisine
Simon Annand
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Presents
Robbie Thomson’s 2 – 25 August (not Weds) // 19.00 // £12/£8
“Bonkers but Brilliant! ” Grazia
Sven Werner’s 12 – 25 August // Every 30 mins from 15.00 until 20.00 (not Weds) // £14/£9 Fringe Venue 26, Summerhall, Edinburgh Book now: 0845 874 3001 // summerhall.co.uk cryptic.org.uk // sonic-a.co.uk
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A man uncovers his wife’s infidelity after discovering he can remove his face
17:30
Whispering in the Dark
Dallin is turning 13, and no one has come to his party. O’Neill Theatre NPC Semi-finalist
13:15
Mask
10:30
Goose
CalArts Festival Theater - 10 years on the fringe!!
Pauline and Juliet commit matricide in 50s New Zealand - only to meet 60 years later in the afterlife.
August 3 - 24 -
10:30 Goose 13:15 Mask (No Aug. 5, 12) 17:30 Whispering in the Dark £8 General / £5 Concession tickets: 0707 420 1313
On Lochend Close Just off the Royal Mile 100m past Cannongate Kirk
www.venue13.com edinburgh festival preview guide 2013 fest 63
festtheatre
I predict a riot Rarely a week goes by without the clamour of marches, uprisings, unrest and protest booming on our television screens. Catherine Love eyes up several Fringe shows looking at direct political action in very different ways.
“W
hat makes people act?” Director Clare Quinn’s question sounds simple enough, but its answer is anything but. As her company Gramophones Theatre bring their new show The Smallest Light to the Edinburgh Fringe, the subject of political action feels particularly raw. While television screens beam over images of unrest in Turkey and Brazil, the UK continues to reel from the impact of Occupy and the 2011 summer riots amid a building sense of dissatisfaction with the current government. For Quinn, however, the question of inertia is just as pertinent as that of action. “I think that we’re actually in a situation now where people believe that protest does not work and so disengage from it,” she explains, partially blaming the way in which protests have been reported in the media in recent years. “Just as the systems of government in this country have failed us, I think traditional forms of protest have as well. I think that protest has been marginalised to the point where it doesn’t really relate to most of our community.” Gramophones Theatre’s response to this disengagement has been to commit to positive action. Performers Hannah Stone, Ria Ashcroft, Rebecca D’Souza and Kristy Guest have each chosen an issue they care about, from food waste to domestic violence, and set about trying to instigate change. The eventual show will chart their progress. “It’s not very high concept,” Quinn says, almost apologetically. “It’s just about what happens if you try and change something.” Theatre-maker Daniel Bye agrees with Quinn that the media’s presentation of protest has led to a level of apathy. “There’s a huge amount of misrepresentation of the act of protest, of the people protesting and of the ideas behind the protest,” he says. Of course, as he adds, “the generation of that fear and anxiety is actually quite useful to people who would rather that
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there wasn’t more widespread protest.” His new offering, How to Occupy an Oil Rig, finds a solution born from that ubiquitous modern source of both knowledge and frustration: the instruction manual. “For quite a while I’ve been completely fascinated by ‘how to’ videos, instruction manuals, self-assembly kits – all these instructions which purport to make simple the complex,” Bye says. Taking inspiration from ‘how to’ videos on YouTube, the show engages with demonstration both in the political sense and in the sense of explaining how to complete a task. As well as providing a practical set of instructions about the act of protesting, which exists in constant tension with the irreducible complexity of the issues that protest might be in response to, Bye hopes that this format will begin to demystify political action. “It’s a way of saying this is really a normal thing to do – it’s not an outlandish act.” This demystifying of protest also takes place in Hannah Nicklin’s A Conversation With My Father, which is just what its title suggests: a conversation between protestor Nicklin and her retired police officer father. While the piece is unavoidably political, Nicklin emphasises that it is personal first. “I’ve always thought it has to be about me and my dad,” she says, “because we can debate the issues, but actually that’s the story only I can tell.” It is important to Nicklin that this personal narrative is told as simply as possible, because “I didn’t want it to look like it could have been made up.” Her hope is that by relating her own experience as honestly as possible and admitting the complexity of the issues she’s addressing, she might prompt audiences to think and talk about these ideas. Above all, she is emphatic about the power of stories: “I think that storytelling is a vital civic act.” The work of Kieran Hurley, who had Fringe success last year with Beats, is also steeped in storytelling. “I’m kind of obsessed with stories,” he admits with a
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festtheatre How To Occupy An Oil Rig Northern Stage at St Stephen’s, 12:35pm – 1:45pm, 3–24 Aug, not 5, 12, 19, £14.00
A Conversation With My Father Northern Stage at St Stephen’s, 8:05pm – 9:10pm, 14–24 Aug, not 20, £11.00
The Smallest Light Zoo Southside, 5:50pm – 7:00pm, 18–26 Aug, £8
Chalk Farm Underbelly, 6:30pm – 7:30pm, 1–25 Aug, not 13, 19, £11.50 slight laugh. This was evident in Beats, which told the tale of a teenage boy caught up in the rave culture of the 90s, and is equally important to the new play he has co-written. Chalk Farm, receiving a new production from Thick Skin for this year’s festival, is a response by Hurley and theatre-maker AJ Taudevin to the “reactionary kneejerk conservatism” of the media’s coverage of the 2011 riots. Through storytelling and empathy, Hurley and Taudevin hope to offer an “alternative perspective” on these events. “It’s just a story, but simplicity and complexity are often two sides of the same coin,” says Hurley. He describes the riots as the play’s backdrop, explaining that it is more about social class and the demonisation of certain sectors of society. While Hurley thinks that all theatre is inherently political, he’s not interested in what he calls “agit-prop polemic”. Instead, he talks about the power of “collectively sharing a little bit of space and imagining possibilities about how we might relate to each other”, and through this process exploring political alternatives. Nicklin defines political empowerment as “the ability to re-see, to reflect, and to react to the world around us.” Considering theatre’s potential for offering such empowerment, she suggests that it can achieve the first two through providing a
Left: Chalk Farm Right: A Conversation With My Father
space where the world can be seen anew, but that the third is ultimately out of its control. “I don’t think theatre will ever make anyone act,” she concludes. “I think it will just bring you to the point at which you can choose to if you want to.” Bye equally believes that is up to the individual to choose to act, expressing a certain queasiness about theatre that hopes to provoke its audience to action. “If guilt is what moves an audience to do something when they leave the room, I’m almost not
sure that I want them to,” he says. “I would rather recruit an audience’s genuine positive sense of will to act on something.” This aim to reposition political action as something positive is echoed elsewhere, contrasting with the negative presentation of protest in the media. “If anything, I’d say what we’re making is a celebration of protest,” says Quinn. After all, as she puts it, “having an opportunity to do something about the things that you feel are wrong in the world is a positive, happy, joyful thing.”
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THE RADICALISATION OF BRADLEY MANNING 6th - 25th August 7.30pm (2.30pm) Pleasance at St Thomas of Aquin’s High School (Venue #17)
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edinburgh festival preview guide 2013 fest 65
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Man, I feel like a woman In his new solo show, Alan Bissett stages a conversation with the notorious anti-porn campaigner, Andrea Dworkin. He talks to Ben Judge about the pitfalls of being both a man and a radical feminist.
S
at in the genteel surrounds of the Scottish Storytelling Centre on a sunny Edinburgh afternoon, Alan Bissett is happily chatting away about his new pet interest: hardcore pornography. It’s an odd juxtaposition, highlighted all the more by the temporary arrival at our table of a little girl—no more than four years old and obliviously playing at our feet— who brings a swift and uneasy silence with her. For while Bissett finds himself politically galvanised by porn, finding an uncontroversial way of talking about it is proving hard. Pornography is central to his new play, Ban This Filth!, which sees Bissett playing both himself and the radical feminist writer and anti-porn campaigner, Andrea Dworkin, as they discuss the impact of hardcore pornography on culture and society. But the ambition of the piece, coupled with the sensitivity of the subject
Ban This Filth! Scottish Storytelling Centre, 9–10pm, 1–11 Aug, £12 matter, has clearly put him on edge. As demonstrated by the occasional Twitter pronouncement that sounds suspiciously like a cry for help (”Just out rehearsals. Oh my fucking god, this new Fringe show is THE biggest creative risk I will ever take in my entire life #hyperventilate”), Bissett is clearly worried about how Ban This Filth! will be received. “This is not the sort of show I want to be misquoted on. The one about the spiders [last year’s offering, The Red Hourglass] is fine! But this one you need to get right, because it’s really on a knife edge.” Bissett’s unease is understandable given that engaging in the highly charged arena of feminist politics is not easy for any man, let alone for a public figure whose
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profile in Scotland has been raised not only by his career as an acclaimed novelist and playwright, but also as a vocal and visible campaigner for Scottish independence. After all, there’s a danger that to do so insensitively is to effectively say, Bissett acknowledges, “‘I’ve cracked feminism, ladies! I’ve got the answers! Sit down and take note.’ That’s bullshit!” Despite his good intentions, he’s already found that wading into this arena in a public way has a habit of biting you. Shortly after reading Dworkin for the first time, and with the exuberance of a newly converted zealot, Bissett began “making public pronouncements about my radical feminism, which was a bit controversial because I’m not a woman. And there’s a lot radical feminists who would go: ‘Well, that’s very nice, but what the fuck makes you think you’ve got the right to lecture us?’ “And then I started getting all this stuff on Twitter from sex workers and more liberal feminists explaining the holes in my position. And again, I’m not a woman and I’m not a sex worker. And I thought maybe I’ve gotten this wrong? I don’t know. I don’t have the answer. It’s only now that I’m realising that feminism is so large and diffuse.” However, while he acknowledges that the issue of pornography is not as black and white as his most radical self might have it, our pornified society still leaves Bissett uneasy. “I think porn is one of the great social issues of our time, because it’s so prevalent in our culture. When I was growing up, we encountered porn when some kid your age had found a porn mag in the woods in a puddle. And then the bat-signal goes up, y’know, and every boy under 15 goes round and has a look. There was an excitement about it, a frisson, because you very rarely encountered porn. But the availability and content of online porn and the speed at which it’s evolving... It got to the stage where I thought ‘Right, this doesn’t look like healthy male-female relations.’” And it’s through exploring his own porn use that Bissett feels he can truly engage an audience with the feminism of the 1970s. But this comes at something of a personal cost. “Of course talking about porn is embarrassing, aye! But all the more reason to do it. If you’re on a stage, that’s a kind of safe place where people allow an openness or an emotional transaction that wouldn’t take place if you were standing at a bus stop. If you said ‘Do you watch porn?’ the answer would be ‘Excuse me!’ “A lot of us have seen a shit lot of porn, but no one talks about it. Of course we don’t talk about it! No one says they’re wanking! But I want to talk about it. I want to start a conversation.”
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festtheatre
Happily ever after Can disability stand in the way of finding true love? Lucy Ribchester meets dancer Claire Cunningham, whose latest piece Ménage à Trois sets out to discover the answer. Sven Hagolani
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he may be a rising star in the Scottish dance scene but there was a time when Claire Cunningham wouldn’t have called herself a dancer. “I had very traditional notions of what dance was, and thought that it was something I couldn’t do. I had no interest in it whatsoever. But I was interested in aerial work and in my naivety I didn’t consider that to be dance.” That was eight years ago, before Cunningham met the pioneering choreographer Jess Curtis, or trained with dancer and choreographer Bill Shannon (aka “The Crutchmaster”), or won a Creative Scotland Award which allowed her to develop her craft as a dancer using the crutches that have helped her walk since the age of 14. Cunningham, who was diagnosed with osteoporosis at an early age, had been spotted by Curtis while working with an aerial dance company in England, and was introduced by him to contact improvisation, a method of “learning to dance from a sensory stimulus” as opposed to following steps. “It seemed a little bit hippy to me at first,” she says, “but it did open my perception in a way that I’d never tuned into before.” Curtis pointed out to Cunningham that she was using her crutches in a choreographic way, playing with their weight and balance. “It was changing that perspective for me, going, ‘Actually these are skills, specific strengths that I’ve developed because I’ve used the crutches all this time.’” She kept dancing, and the result was two successful solo shows (Evolution and Mobile), a name-check on the Cultural Leadership Programme’s 2010 50 UK Women to Watch, and now a collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland for her latest piece, Ménage à Trois. Working with choreographer and video artist Gail Sneddon, the piece uses interactions between dance, video projections and puppetry to explore Cunningham’s relationship with her crutches, and whether or not they get in the way of forming romantic bonds. “It wasn’t intended to be quite as biographical but it just evolved. There were a lot of things in there that I needed to work through. Simply put, it’s about the question of who are we all looking for and why
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Ménage à Trois Paterson’s Land, times vary, various dates between 9 Aug and 25 Aug, £14 are we looking for that person and are we looking for the wrong person?” Sneddon was brought in initially as a choreography mentor, but later developed the show’s multimedia side. As Cunningham puts it, “It was still about pulling the story out of my life and Gail did a lot of the teasing.” Both Cunningham and Sneddon are keen that Ménage à Trois is not just seen as addressing issues relating to disability, but that audiences find resonance in the themes of love and loneliness that affect everyone. “I think Ménage à Trois is on one level questioning for me: ‘Does my impairment affect whether I am deemed attractive or not?’ But that’s simply my particular hangup, my issue. Everybody is asking that same question but for different reasons, though you always kind of feel it’s just you.” Sneddon agrees. “All the things that go on in our minds, it’s just the same for eve-
rybody. Hopefully it’s a familiar place that people share, and that they can connect to.” This notion was affirmed for them earlier this year when they took Ménage à Trois to an arts festival in Doha, Qatar, renaming it Three. “It was very interesting to see that it could work in that environment, where people’s views about relationships are quite different,” says Sneddon. At the same time, Cunningham hopes that working with the profile that the National Theatre of Scotland brings will attract the right kind of attention to the show, and open up doors for other dancers with disabilities. While, there are already a number of talented disabled dancers working in the UK, taking that step requires bravery. “It’s about choosing to take control of [your disability] and turn it around and explore it on your own terms. Part of that comes from seeing work by people with your experience. If people don’t see an example of something, then they often don’t consider it a possibility. To have such a high-profile platform hopefully will trigger that.”
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festtheatre
The Traverse at 50 Edinburgh’s bastion of new writing, the Traverse Theatre, clocks up 50 years of boundary-pushing theatre this year. Jo Caird unpicks the secret to its success.
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dinburgh was intolerable. One could not stand the thought of Edinburgh without the festival.” Richard Demarco, one of the original founders of the Traverse Theatre, does not mince his words. In January 1963, the Traverse Theatre Club opened in the tiny basement of the Paperback Bookshop on Lawnmarket. The space was first used as a venue during the festival the previous summer. Those involved in what was known as The Sphinx Club in August 1963, “wished to keep the spirit of the festival all year round,” says the 83-year-old arts impresario. But that’s not all. The Traverse, says Demarco, without a hint of irony in his voice, “was founded to be one of the world’s greatest theatres”. Half a century has passed since Demarco and the other founders—actor John Malcolm; director Terry Lane; Jim Haynes, who ran the Paperback Bookshop; and Tom Mitchell, who owned the building—set those wheels in motion. Lots has changed in the intervening years, but the Traverse
is still going strong, arguably the most respected venue at the Edinburgh Fringe and one of the UK’s top theatres when it comes to new work. So what’s the secret of its continued success? “If we knew that we would bottle it and sell it!” says Orla O’Loughlin, who took over as artistic director of the Traverse from Dominic Hill in January 2012. Central to the theatre’s philosophy for a long time now, she says, has been “nurturing people at the start of their careers”. There are plenty of examples of where this early support has paid off: such names as David Greig, David Harrower and Liz Lochhead were all commissioned by the Traverse at the beginning of their writing lives. It was the debut of another Scottish writer, however, that first properly brought the work of the Traverse to the attention of O’Loughlin. The director saw Gregory Burke’s Gagarin Way at the National Theatre in autumn 2001, a transfer following the play’s triumphant run at the Fringe that August. She had been aware of the theatre
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Top: Traverse at 50 Above: Jim Haynes
before that point, of course, having taken work to the festival as a student, but it was “seeing that brilliant, euphoric, terrifying piece of writing and then tracing its genesis back to the Traverse” that opened her eyes to the magic being worked there. Burke went on to have another huge success at the Traverse with Black Watch,
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which played at the Barbican and toured the UK and the world since its premiere at the 2006 Fringe. Black Watch saw Burke reunited with the director of Gagarin Way, John Tiffany, who was associate director at the Traverse when Burke sent the theatre his first script. Burke is unequivocal about the impact the Traverse has had on his career. “If it wasn’t for the Traverse and the people in it at the time, I wouldn’t be a writer.” Black Watch is perhaps the biggest hit in the theatre’s recent history, but there have been plenty of other major successes over the years. Too many to even recall, in fact, says Renny Robertson, the theatre’s chief electrician, who has been there since 1993 and has “worked on pretty much every festival show”. Moscow Stations, which played during the 1993 Fringe and transferred to the West End, stands out in his memory. “Tom Courtenay gave an absolutely masterful performance in a one-man show. You can see something like that for weeks on end—every day—and not be bored, not have any bits of the show that you drift away from. That’s the test. It’s a very unusual thing.” By no means, however, have the Traverse’s productions always been positively received. Gordon McDougall, artistic director from 1966 to 1968, recalls that the early years in particular were fraught with scandal. A play called Futz by the New York company La Mama earned itself the Daily Express headline ‘Filth on the Fringe’ when it played at the 1967 festival, while a University of Edinburgh production called Mass in F was cancelled after one performance that same August. Both involved simulated sex on stage, the former with animals. “[The Traverse] started off being highly controversial,” says McDougall. “There was the tension between the new and theoreti-
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The Traverse at 50 Summerhall, various dates throughout August, free Top left: John Byrne Top right: Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon in David Greig’s Midsummer Above: Simon Callow & Jim Haynes
cally challenging and sexually explicit work that was being done in this tiny theatre in this extremely conservative town.” The theatre is still presenting work that shocks and challenges Fringe audiences— just think of the stir caused by Tim Crouch’s The Author in 2009—but gone is the rough and ready vibe of days gone by. “[During the Fringe] there’s something about our spaces that demands a polish and a finish and a finesse, I think. And a real rigour,” says its current artistic director. “We’re not a place where brand new artists come to try out their craft.” It’s something the theatre is beginning to address. This year’s Fringe programme includes classic Traverse fare like David Greig’s new play, The Events, and Ciara, the
latest from David Harrower, but on Monday evenings audiences will also be treated to work by emerging artists courtesy of Theatre Uncut and the University of Edinburgh with Playwrights’ Studio Scotland. O’Loughlin’s dream is to create a third space that will enable the Traverse to “bring the truly emergent in... Going forward we’re looking at embracing newer artists and writers and this year we’re starting to find moments to do that. But how exciting that would be to have them with us all festival round!” One aspect of the Traverse that certainly won’t be changing is its renowned bar. From the theatre’s origins as a censorshipdefying private club, the bar has been a space for lively discussion and debate, networking and socialising. “You know the Scottish word ‘howff’? asks founder Richard Demarco. “‘Howff’ means a meeting place. It was a meeting place for writers, poets, musicians.” Today, says O’Loughlin, the bar still has “a magnetic pull... there’s something about the atmosphere of being down there that is as creative the work in Trav 1 and Trav 2”. Because in the end, of course, the success of a theatre doesn’t just depend on the work it presents. It depends on the audiences who see that work. That’s why the Traverse bar is such a crucial part of the mix. “It’s a space of engagement between audience and artists; and between different artists; and audience speaking to itself,” says O’Loughlin. “It keeps that engagement between the people making the work and the people who are witnessing the work alive.”
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festtheatre
Puppet
No longer an outmoded niche, puppetry is set to be one of the most exciting artforms at this year’s Fringe, discovers Charlotte Lytton.
masters T
James Allan
here was a time when the popular image of puppetry was of a tacky sea-side side-show, forever associated with a gaggle of crying five year-olds forced to watch Punch and Judy at a wet village fête. But the past decade has seen a seismic change in the artform’s mainstream credence, with puppetry shows now taking centre stage in the West End and on Broadway, and scooping countless awards from prestigious industry gongs to the top prize in Britain’s biggest televised talent show. Putting a contemporary spin on an artform that has been a stalwart of live theatre for thousands of years has made puppet shows a hot ticket once again at this year’s Fringe, where a wealth of new and returning acts are blending artistic methods in a bid to make their work more visceral and engaging than ever. Prior to the current boom, puppets undeniably enjoyed a certain small-screen golden age. Be they nappy-toting Orville, vulpine sophisticate Basil Brush or silent magician Sooty, a hand was never far from the innards of a toy animal on mid-twentieth century children’s TV. And smashing this stereotype has been key to propelling puppetry into the more refined theatrical reaches it occupies today. “Puppets appeal
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festtheatre Michelle Robin Anderson
Adventures Of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer Underbelly Bristo Sq., 2pm–3pm, 31 Jul – 11 Aug, £8–£15
Hag Underbelly, 3:30pm – 4:40pm, 1–25 Aug, not 13, £6–£11
The Paper Cinema’s Odyssey Summerhall, 2:15pm – 3:30pm, 17–25 Aug, £14
to a childlike, innocent part in every person: the artform is universal, profound and deeply human. And I think it is even more delightful as an adult, as we aren’t invited as often to play,” muses Weeping Spoon’s Tim Watts, who returns to the Fringe this
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Above: Adventures Of Alvin Sputnik Left: The Paper Cinema’s Odyssey
year with 2011 hit, The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer – a glorious piece of solo storytelling about a man searching for his lost love in an underwater dystopia. “People have been plugging away for years, working dedicatedly in puppetry, wanting to raise its profile and show that it wasn’t just for children,” adds The Wrong Crowd’s Hannah Mulder, “and that it could be a vital, complex, interesting part of theatre-making.” The Wrong Crowd’s efforts are paying off: a sell-out run of the miststrewn, mythical tale, The Girl with the Iron Claws (complete with hand-held
marionettes, shadow puppetry and a giant omnipresent bear) garnered a Fest five-star review at the 2011 Fringe. This year, they dip further into the well of Slavic folklore with Hag, about the “extraordinary hagwitch character, Baba Yaga,” whose tale permeates the cultural history of IndoEurope. As a rising number of companies and shows have started to integrate puppetry into their performances, the medium has begun a well-documented departure from the margins of populat culture. No longer a solitary performance art, it is now accompanied by a raft of other theatrical devices: from videography and ‘perspective shifts’, such as those seen in The Paper Cinema’s lauded retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey, to the exquisitely human-puppet fusioneering and object animation in Perth Theatre Company’s It’s Dark Outside, another slice of heartstring-tugging storytelling from the team behind Alvin Sputnik. This dialogue between different forms has renewed the meaning of live puppetry and its elevated status has been welcomed. “I’m quite amazed at how puppetry has risen in popularity – it’s quite beautiful to see,” says Nic Rawling of The Paper Cinema. “Puppetry is an innate concept: the notion that something can be manipulated to express an idea is always going to continue. Take blokes trying to explain the offside rule using salt and pepper shakers: that is a form of manipulation and puppetry – and there is always going to be a need for people to make renderings of the world in paints, pigments and pens.” Digitisation, CGI, 3D films and cartoons may have appeared to all but eradicate the need for puppets some years ago, but Rawling believes that this, in fact, is what has led to the artform’s resurgence. “When we first started, there was a kind of backlash against digital artforms and a call for hand-crafted puppets and illustrations. There seems to be a lot of love around craft and craft-making, and sometimes larger mediums like big films and music can be overproduced. I think there’s a kind of human need for something handmade.” And Mulder agrees, adding: “After the digital and technological revolution, which theatre-makers investigated so passionately for decades, there might now be a hunger to rediscover a more tangible form of theatre, like puppetry, which requires the audience’s direct imaginative engagement. “As an audience member, you are the one actively involved in animating that object, by being willing to believe that it is alive. I think we’re all really hungry for suspension of disbelief and puppetry is one of the elements of theatre which most demands that.”
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festinternational
World Out of this
Site-specific theatre company Grid Iron return to the Fringe with sci-fi extravaganza Leaving Planet Earth. Tom Wicker talks to co-writers and directors Catrin Evans and Lewis Hetherington about taking audiences on the trip of a lifetime.
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ulti-award-winning Scottish theatre company Grid Iron’s latest immersive production will take Festival visitors well beyond the melee of central Edinburgh – to another world, in fact. Large-scale promenade piece Leaving Planet Earth will cast audiences as the final migrants to New Earth, in a future where we have exhausted our homeworld’s resources. In reality, New Earth is the Edinburgh International Climbing Arena, located on the city’s outskirts. When I speak to co-writers and directors Catrin Evans and Lewis Hetherington in a snatched half-hour off from planning the show, they stress the appropriately otherworldly beauty of this huge glass and steel structure. “The site has really informed the story’s shape,” says Hetherington. “There are these remarkable, characterful spaces throughout, which we’ve been able to use so naturally in scenes that it almost feels alive.” Evans agrees. “It’s a place built with vision and you want to make a show that respects that.” As soon as she walked in, “I knew we were on New Earth.” The seeds for the piece were planted when freelance theatre-maker Evans read a Guardian article by environmentalist George Monbiot positing the terrifying notion of Earth as the ultimate disposable commodity. Evans took this “really provocative image” to Grid Iron—who’d invited her to pitch ideas—as an interesting starting point for telling a story. “I just didn’t know what that story was going to be.” The idea of creating an immersive experience centred on a new world emerged collaboratively when Evans invited playwright Hetherington onboard. The pair had been “chatting a lot about potential
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projects,” and Hetherington—a sci-fi fan— was excited by the challenge of making a theatrical reality from the idea of “screwing up the Earth and throwing it away.” Some types of sci-fi storytelling were never going to work. “One of the archetypal images of a sci-fi film is some amazing spacecraft hovering in space, which is much harder to do in theatre!” Hetherington laughs. Instead, the pair focused on telling an epic, sci-fi-inspired narrative through a human lens, exploring how various settlers on New Earth are coping. And no single strand dominates. For example, while Vela—the architect of New Earth—is an important character, her’s is just one of several voices. “We realised quite quickly that we weren’t interested in telling just one story,” Evans says. “I guess the overall arc is: how do we construct a new society? Which ideas, philosophies and politics do we bring with us? What are the things we can’t leave behind?” And what should audiences expect from this kaleidoscopic vision? “The key thing is that they will be new arrivals,” Evans teases. “And Vela’s specialism is making sure that people are emotionally and psychologically prepped to live in this new society. So we’ll be looking at how they handle things. And then we’ll tell them some stories...” Hetherington adds: “Hopefully people will have real fun piecing together all of the different experiences that make up the collage the show is painting.” Since staging their adaptation of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber beneath the Royal Mile at the 1997 Fringe, Grid Iron have won countless awards and are recognised as one of the foremost pioneers of site-specific theatre. This form has exploded in popularity
in recent years, with companies like Punchdrunk and dreamspeakthink cropping up everywhere from abandoned warehouses to disused supermarkets. Evans attributes Grid Iron’s continued success in this increasingly crowded marketplace to the fact that they’re very good at casting the audience. “Here, just by being clear about what we’re asking of people in terms of the specific role they’re playing in this fictional world, they’re much more likely to go on the journey with us.” Edinburgh-based Grid Iron have performed globally but their native roots run deep. They have returned regularly to the Fringe, premiering work embedded with Scottish references. Even the interstellar voyage of Leaving Planet Earth starts with an Edinburgh-based research institute, the fictional Galactic Futures Organisation. Hetherington speaks glowingly about Grid Iron’s “fantastic reputation” at the Fringe: “It’s so exciting for us to be part of that.” But what he and Evans most love about the company is that “they’re very good at getting in people who wouldn’t usually come to the theatre. Any fear of curtains and old velvet seats is immediately done away with.” Evans and Hetherington hope that Leaving Planet Earth will be just as liberating. “The majority of the content is the same but people will see it in a different order depending on where they are,” Hetherington says. “What’s amazing about a big site is that you become your own editor – your eye can go wherever you want.” And, adds Evans, “as much as we want to grapple with really serious stuff, we’re also making an offer to the audience – let’s go on adventure.”
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“How do we construct a new society? Which ideas, philosophies and politics do we bring with us? What are the things we can’t leave behind?” Leaving Planet Earth Edinburgh International Conference Centre 8pm–11:30pm, 10–24 Aug, not 13, 20, £12.50
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festinternational
California Dreaming Founded in 2012 by choreographer du jour Benjamin Millepied, L.A. Dance Project are set to be one of the hot tickets at this year’s International Festival. Lucy Ribchester talks to Ballet Master Charlie Hodges about their exciting triple-bill. Ryan Schude
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os Angeles: synonymous with sunshine, glamour, healthy eating and the body beautiful. It seems little wonder then that a contemporary dance troupe would want to set up camp there. “LA comes with its own perks and hurdles,” says Ballet Master Charlie Hodges. “Like any city, where there’s desire, there’s a will to find a way – and the will of L.A. Dance Project is in sunny Southern California.” Having spent their first year developing new works and delving into the canon of choreographic greats, the troupe will form part of EIF’s 2013 dance programme, showcasing revivals of work by William Forsythe and Merce Cunningham, and a new piece by Benjamin Millepied himself. There’s certainly a sweet whiff of glamour about them. Surely not many new dance companies can claim as their founder the official face of an Yves Saint Laurent fragrance who worked on an Oscar-winning film (Black Swan) and later married its star (Natalie Portman). Or to have raised over $250,000 in a single night, as L.A. Dance Project did in June, in a star-studded gala attended by the likes of Portman and Reese Witherspoon. But for Hodges it was the attraction of working with Millepied that led him to put on hold his academic studies to get involved. “I had previously worked with Benjamin on a few separate projects and the collaborative relationship was positive, so when he asked I seriously considered. Saying no to graduate school was a very difficult decision. I had spent four weeks in Perth, Australia, teaching a dance course I created while in college for architecture. The experience changed my life and re-routed me back to the dance floor, where I belong.” Hodges says there isn’t an L.A. Dance Project “type” when it comes to selecting performers but that individuality is part of the company’s remit. “We crave individuality. None of us has the same skill set, body type or inclinations. This fosters an environment of growth and humility.” It’s a notion that has been gaining currency for some time in the contemporary dance world, with choreographers such as Ohad Naharin and Cesc Gelabert devising
L.A. Dance Project The Playhouse, 7:30pm – 9:30pm, 24–26 Aug, £10
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movement languages that celebrate each individual performer, and performers who don’t conform to the stereotypical dancer body type—either through age, size or disability—appearing more and more. For audiences it provides the beauty of variety. For dancers such as Hodges, it’s about the opportunity to keep developing as a performer. “For me it’s exciting to know that my contributions, my strengths, matter to the group. But it’s what I haven’t learnt yet that counts. Getting to learn new skills via my colleagues is where growth and humility lie.” According to Hodges, L.A. Dance Project’s theory of individuality doesn’t just apply to the dancers but to the choice of pieces on their programmes too. On their EIF triple-bill there’s Cunningham’s almost 50-year old Winterbranch, a piece set to a score of aluminium being dragged across glass which Hodges has in the past described as dramatically dividing audiences; Forsythe’s Quintett, a final love letter to the
choreographer’s terminally-ill wife, created in 1993; and Millepied’s Rodarte-costumed Moving Parts, described by the New York Times as showcasing “a modishly urban ballet mode.” While some US critics have so far wondered what exactly it is that the group are trying to say, Hodges says that at times it comes down to the simple aesthetic of “balancing the performance for viewing pleasure.” Anyone looking for an overarching theme connecting the pieces may therefore be taxing their brain for a long time. “The three pieces are as unique as the dancers. Multiple styles of dance should exist together – it’s like getting three different scoops of ice cream instead of the same scoop three times. It’s more interesting and flavourful, and doesn’t that sound delicious?” Hodges hopes that the traffic will go two ways as well. Aside from audiences taking away a new appreciation for dance concerts, he hopes they can bring something to the table too. “Dance is a universal language. Hopefully audiences will leave having experienced a pleasant conversation with us, not just a performance.”
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‘this work should not be missed’ The New York TimeS
Beauty and the Beast Film by Jean Cocteau (1946) music by Philip Glass
Saturday 10 & Sunday 11 August 8.00pm Supported by Ewan and Christine Brown
Book tickets now at eif.co.uk/labelle or call 0131 473 2000
Photo: Courtesy of Janus Films Charity No SC004694
Philip Glass Ensemble Conducted by Michael Riesman
festmusic&cabaret Down and out
Safe bets
The Les Clöchards Assembly Checkpoint, 9:10pm - 10:10pm, 6 - 25 Aug, £11
Hobo-chic rock band The Les Clöchards charmed audiences in 2012 with their medley of unusual musical instruments and their intriguing mythical backstory. This year, their shabby clothes and dirty faces are back, along with their winning takes on pop and rock classics.
Super Slick
The Magnets Underbelly, Bristo Square, 5:50pm - 6:50 pm, 1 - 26 Aug, £15
This British a cappella group have won several fans at Edinburgh thanks to their joyous harmonies and charismatic humour. Catch them again in August, three months after they released their fourth album.
operatic spectacle
Seven Deadly Sins
Vintage glamour
Lady Rizo
Paterson’s Land, 8pm - 8:45pm, 20 - 23 Aug, £12.50
Pleasance Courtyard, 7pm Jul 31 - 25 Aug, £9-12
This New York cabaret singer won the inaugural TOAST Award last year, the first of its kind for Fringe cabaret artists. Expect to be wowed by her luscious vocals as she injects vintage glamour into pop hits.
This take on Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins won a Herald Angel Award in 2011. A co-production between Scottish Opera and lauded dance group Company Chordelia, it’s a must-see spectacle of opera, dance and Depression-era USA.
Rub-a-dub-dub
Totally tubular
Hot Dub Time Machine
Tubular Bells ‘For Two’ Underbelly, Bristo sq, 5:45pm - 6:45pm, 31 Jul - 26 Aug, £7 - £15
Underbelly, Bristo Square, 12:15am - 2:45am, dates vary, £7 - £12:50
This duo performed the unthinkable at last year’s Fringe: attempting to play Mike Oldfield’s multi-instrumental 1973 album Tubular Bells with just two musicians - to ecstatic results. They return for a month-long encore as the album marks its 40th anniversary.
A refreshing alternative to the now ubiquitous Silent Disco for Fringe clubbers, DJ Tom Loud starts his party in 1954 and get his revellers to dance all the way back to the present day. Sweaty, time-travelling fun.
Folkin’ brilliant
Rachel Sermanni
The Queen’s Hall, 8:00pm - 9:30pm, 9 Aug, £12
This singer-songwriter from the Highlands is one of the most exciting new voices in Scotland’s folk scene. If you miss this one-off gig, you can catch her in Whatever Gets You Through the Night, also at the Queen’s Hall.
Piece of cake
Le Gateau Chocolat Underbelly, Bristo Sq, 8:30pm - 9:30pm, 31 Jul - 26 Aug, £14 - £15
One of the UK’s leading cabaret artists, this La Clique star wowed Fringe audiences in 2011 with an alluring blend of opera, drag and contemporary pop. This year’s show is in an intimate new venue so grab tickets fast.
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festmusic&cabaret take a chance
outrageous
Briefs
Assembly George Square, 7:50pm - 8:50pm, 1 - 26 Aug, £10 - £15
Last year, the boys of Briefs brought us “a little bit of butch with a fuckload of camp”. Hopefully, this year’s show from these polished Aussie cabaret performers will be just as slick and outrageous.
Art Haus
Die Roten Punkte
it’s a kind of magic
Assembly George Square, 8:55pm - 9:55pm, 1 - 25 Aug, £5 - £12
Ben Hart
Sitting somewhere between The White Stripes and Kraftwerk, this camp, clownish musical duo are back at Edinburgh for the first time since 2009. They don’t appeal to everyone but for their many fans, their faux-German, siblings/lovers act is nothing but riotous fun.
Underbelly, Cowgate, 5:05pm - 6:05pm, 1 - 25 Aug, £6 - £10.50
Having graduated from a successful run at the Free Fringe last year, Ben Hart hits the dark caves of the Underbelly with his winning blend of charm and magic. A promising bill of cabaret, comedy and theatre from the 2007 Young Magician of the Year.
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05/08/2012 21:12
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festmusic&cabaret
Freaks&Cliques Since La Clique’s maiden Edinburgh performance at The Famous Spiegeltent 10 years ago, they’ve revolutionised the cabaret scene at the Fringe. Lewis Porteous looks back at the history of this prestigious band of misfits. Sarah Oliver
I
n the two years since a dedicated cabaret section was created in its programme, the Fringe has become the established home to some of the festival’s most unconventional and genre-defying performers. Many of them are comedians—the likes of Phil Kay and Charlie Chuck, whose respective acts involve mercurial improvisation and barking at drum kits—who have found that being marketed as cabaret has a significant impact on their audiences’ expectations. By filing themselves alongside existential satirists, The Creative Martyrs, farting maverick Mr Methane and the gloriously bawdy Dusty Limits, they place themselves within a vaudevillian tradition far removed from the preconceived no-
tions attached to standup. A host of musicians, meanwhile, are offering exciting, thematic and characterdriven shows too conceptual or stylised to rub shoulders with those of more traditionally-minded artists. Vicky Arlidge’s Mum, Can You Wipe My Bum? may transpire not to be a million miles away from a Chopin recital, but will certainly attract a different audience. Historically, the term cabaret refers more to the venues in which shows are performed than the nature of acts themselves, but at the Fringe it has become synonymous with edgy and diverse entertainment. The many mixed bills on offer serve as freewheeling rides through high and low art, put on to satisfy audiences
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La Clique Spiegeltent, 10pm – 11:30pm, 2–25 Aug, £20 that grow with each passing year. This apparent hunger for cabaret can be attributed in part to La Clique, the frequently outrageous circus and variety troupe whose runaway popularity went some way to legitimising the form for Edinburgh audiences. Masterminded by David Bates, owner and producer of The Famous Spiegeltent, La Clique began life as a collection of acts chosen to punctuate the venue’s vibrant late night clubs in 2002 and 2003. Recruiting from the international cabaret scene,
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festmusic&cabaret Sarah Oliver
as well as a deluge of travelling street artists, Bates recognised the heady array of performers drawn to the festival but sorely in need of a suitable vehicle for their talents. “By 2003, I’d seen lots of amazing acts but they had limited places to be seen,” he says. “Their material was astonishing but I realised that there would be no better home than The Famous Spiegeltent – a performance environment like no other. I was witnessing a zeitgeist; these acts were all part of the revival of burlesque, the intimate pocket-sized circus, the new cabaret, and what was needed was a context to put them in – a reinvention of ‘variety’.” Striking a compelling balance between glamour and subversion, the acts became a hit under Bates’ auspices and La Clique emerged in 2004 as a ticketed show in its own right. The Spiegeltent provided the misfit performers with a suitable context in which to display their talents and it wasn’t long before a sympathetic, like-minded audience began to consolidate itself. Bates believes that many attending these spectacles had never witnessed anything comparable, and this is perhaps the key factor to their success. Audiences were being given what they wanted without having previously desired it, La Clique filling a void that few knew existed. Of course, it helped that “the
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artists were at the peak of their powers and the best they would ever be,” he says. Many La Clique regulars would go on to find fame in their own right, their careers developing in tandem with the show. Ali McGregor and Le Gateau Chocolat’s personalities were simply too strong to be confined to the brand, while Camille O’Sullivan is now a respected actress and recording artist, renowned for her masterful delivery of narrative lyrics. Both McGregor and Chocolat will be taking their own solo shows to the Fringe this year, but whether or not they’ll be returning to the La Clique stage in 2013 remains a mystery. What we do know is that La Clique shows no sign of stagnation as it approaches its 10 year anniversary. In the decade since its debut, a legion of imitators has emerged, prompting Bates, who tours the globe with The Famous Spiegeltent, to refresh his original format wherever possible. “We’ve been copied around the world—that’s a fact—but we set the bar in the first place, so we constantly have to keep moving forward to raise our game beyond the imitators. I definitely feel a pressure to discover the next crop of artists: the young, the fresh, the creative imaginations, pushing their own envelopes and the genre itself.”
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festmusic&cabaret
Unknown pleasures Musician and producer Jim O’Rourke talks to Andy Chadwick about his collaboration with the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra.
I
f you look closely enough, past the giant billboards for interchangeable Russells (a phenomenon first identified by Stewart Lee), there’s no shortage of events during the Fringe to satisfy more left-field tastes. But a collaboration between the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (GIO) and Jim O’Rourke stands out even amongst the most avant-garde happenings in Edinburgh. GIO were recently described as “one of the best large improvising ensembles in the world” by BBC Radio 3. O’Rourke is a man whose alternative rock pedigree—forged through work with Sonic Youth, Wilco and a number of exceptional solo albums for Drag City in the 90s—is only a small part of his wider work as a renowned improviser and experimental musician. Given the personnel involved, this multimedia piece in Summerhall’s unique Dissection Room should pique the interest of anyone with an eye and ear for the improvised form. Some I Know, Some I Don’t came about after GIO’s Artistic Director, Raymond MacDonald, spent a day working with O’Rourke on an album in the latter’s adopted home of Tokyo. It’s clear from speaking to MacDonald that he relished the opportunity, and when the time came to think about new work for GIO’s tenth anniversary festival, he got back in touch.
“Jim doesn’t travel out of Japan, so that presented both a challenge and an opportunity to see how we could collaborate from afar to write a piece for an orchestra from there,” he tells me. “Of course I’d met him and worked with him, but he hasn’t met the other musicians.” Using only recordings of GIO’s work and an outline of the band’s lineup, O’Rourke devised a set of Japanese playing cards consisting of instructions for the musicians. “That perhaps is where the title of the piece, Some I Know, Some I Don’t, comes from, because he had a little bit of information about the group but not a huge amount.” The format, says MacDonald, gave O’Rourke the opportunity to explore the dynamics of the band in a way that would open up new possibilities. “He was looking to compose a piece from his own ideas for a group of musicians that he wasn’t going to meet, and give us the freedom to develop improvisatory elements within the piece.” Once the source material had been dispatched, O’Rourke seemed happy to let the piece go where it would. “As well as being a visionary musician, he’s also been generous of spirit and generous with his ideas in sharing this with us, so there wasn’t a sense of him being very specific about how we
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Some I Know, Some I Don’t Summerhall, 10:00pm – 11:00pm, 17 Aug, £12.00 interpreted those cards. The collaboration process seemed to work very well.” MacDonald is keen to emphasise the centrality of the improvisation, seeing the theatrical aspects as complementary to the primary purpose of spontaneous musical creation. “There’s a definite element of humour and a theatrical aspect to it, but the challenge for the group was to also retain the gravitas of the sequences of improvisation while allowing these bizarre elements to come to the surface.” Each card leaves the musicians free to have a “personal negotiation” with the instructions, which MacDonald stresses are influenced heavily by the particular context of the performance, and allow the immediate surroundings to impact on the finished piece. The excitement, he says, comes from the possibilities to be found in “the mix of real improvisatory elements plus more structural conventionally composed elements.” Summerhall should also come into its own, with the Dissection Room providing a suitably distinctive setting for a performance that is by its very definition, unrepeatable.
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festmusic&cabaret
IRISH PUB
FRINGE FEST Finnegan’s Irish Bar Fringe Venue 101 Thursday 1st August until Saturday 24th August
LIVE COMEDY LIVE MUSIC 7 NIGHTS WWW.FINNEGANS-WAKE.CO.UK Finnegan’s Wake, 9b Victoria Street, Edinburgh EH1 2HE T:0131 225 9348 E: FinnegansWake@tcg-uk.com
Find us on
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Feel the Fest Force!
With great power comes great responsibility, as the guardians of our star ratings know only too well. Meet our Super Kid Critics. Photos with thanks to Summerhall
Gymnastique
Buck Starcruiser Jedi Padawan
AGE: 5 SPECIAL POWER: Able to conjure up wondrous Lego spaceships in his quest to defend the Galaxy - not to mention the Milky Way Stars and Mars Planets - and displays astonishing Light Sabre skills. CRITIC TOUGHNESS: 30 FESTIVAL FAVOURITE: Funny shows REAL NAME: Archie Lamb Archie would like to be an archie-ologist when he grows up, because he would like to hunt out dinosaur bones and then put all the pieces of the skeleton back together, like a giant jigsaw.
Taparella
Lightning Flash
SPECIAL POWER: Ability to cartwheel any time, any place
AGE: 7
AGE: 6
CRITIC TOUGHNESS: 40
SPECIAL POWER: Super fast tapping feet
SPECIAL POWER: Running at lightning speed
FESTIVAL FAVOURITE: Any Roald Dahl shows.
CRITIC TOUGHNESS: 45
CRITIC TOUGHNESS: 82
FESTIVAL FAVOURITE: Musicals
FESTIVAL FAVOURITE: Anything silly or funny
REAL NAME: Lois Black
REAL NAME: Minnie Stephenson
REAL NAME: Ben Cotter
Lois enjoys hot chocolate and ice-cream treats, dancing in front of the mirror and reading books at night time with her head torch on. When she grows up she’d like to be a Spy Kid or a teacher.
Minnie loves reading, going to the theatre, dancing, singing, playing the piano and talking. She lives with her mummy, daddy, big brother Maxwell and their two budgies called Oscar and Blue who are very squawky.
Ben loves music, being silly, Star Wars, playing guitar, mountain biking, tennis and football. He would like to be a tennis player, footballer or in the Mountain Rescue Squad when he grows up.
The Dance Battle Angel aka DBA
AGE: 7
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READ-io-active
Footy Fiend
Little Miss Super Skates
AGE: 10
AGE: 7
AGE: 11
SPECIAL POWER: License to give readers a fantastic review
SPECIAL POWER: Run up the pitch as fast as Usain Bolt to score a goal
SPECIAL POWER: Ability to freeze interesting situations
CRITIC TOUGHNESS: 30
CRITIC TOUGHNESS: 76
CRITIC TOUGHNESS: 124 - tough gig!
FESTIVAL FAVOURITE: Originality
FESTIVAL FAVOURITE: Any sort of moonwalking
FESTIVAL FAVOURITE: Pop chart impressions
Eleanor loves tennis, dancing and—of course—reading: Lemony Snicket & J. K. Rowling are her favourites at the moment. She’s looking forward to seeing some brilliant shows with Fest again this year.
REAL NAME: Hector Cotton
REAL NAME: Iona Wood
Hector’s favourite things are watching footy, playing footy and collecting Match Attax. He’s currently saving his pocket money to buy Messi for Hearts.
Iona loves reading spine tingling books and would like to write books when she grows up, or maybe be a teacher. Her cat is called Dipsy and her fish is called Claire.
KERO
Zumba-Lollipop
The Clever Climber
REAL NAME: Eleanor Smith
The Kilted Hero
AGE: 11 ½ SPECIAL POWER: The ability to ward off evil with very loud music. CRITIC TOUGHNESS: 30 FESTIVAL FAVOURITE: Dare devil stunts or funky dancing REAL NAME: Ruari Black Ruari loves most sports—rugby, football, badminton, mountain biking, cricket and kayaking—but his favourite thing is playing the bagpipes. When he grows up (a bit more) he’d like to be either a piper or a Scotland rugby player.
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AGE: 4 SPECIAL POWER: Hypnotises baddies with her mesmerising dance moves CRITIC TOUGHNESS: 39 FESTIVAL FAVOURITE: Bright busy shows with water guns REAL NAME: Phoebe Black Phoebe is happiest when she’s dancing in the front row of Zumba class with her best friend. She is waiting patiently for the day when her cat—Duchess—sits on her knee for more than 3 seconds.
AGE: 9 SPECIAL POWER: Climb up any wall. Even upside down. CRITIC TOUGHNESS: 78 FESTIVAL FAVOURITE: Circus shows REAL NAME: Zander Cotton Zander likes to muck about, playing on the iPad and is ace on a scooter. He loves going to the cinema to see superhero and spy movies to learn some new special powers.
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W
ith children as your audience, it’s pretty hard to go wrong with pirates, dinosaurs or any combination thereof. Bearing that in mind, Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs was probably a smart choice for the much-acclaimed and multidisciplinary Les Enfants Terribles theatre company as their first foray into children’s theatre. Following the success of phantasmagorical First World War drama The Trench last summer, the Fringe veterans’ latest venture, adapted from the book by Giles Andreae and Russell Ayto, heads for this year’s Fringe under the auspices of their newly established children’s company Les Petits. As its first production, standards remain high: no matter how much of a safe bet the juxtaposition of giant reptiles and buccaneers may seem, there are few critics more icily unforgiving than a theatre full of kids. Director, producer and co-founding Enfant James Seager admits that, despite being immersed in the stage for over a decade, he only recently became well-aquainted with children theatre: “Probably because I now have a four-year-old daughter,” he says, chuckling. “And as a result, I have been going to see a lot of children’s plays in her company. Some of it is very good,” he allows diplomatically, “but unfortunately, a lot of it isn’t. Being both a parent and a punter, the laziness in a lot of children’s theatre suprised me. There was a lot of talking down to the audience, as if they deserved less.” Displaying the ambition which has become their trademark, Les Enfants felt that not only could they do better than the bulk of what was on offer, but they could do so without sacrificing the company’s distinct, otherworldly aesthetic: “Ollie [writer and co-founder Oliver Lansley] and I wanted to do what we usually do with Les Enfants, only with a kids’ show. Les Petits was set up specifically to do
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Jurassic jolly roger Sean Bell talks to Les Enfants Terribles as they set sail for the uncharted waters of children’s theatre. children’s theatre, using the techniques and styles we’ve developed with Les Enfants.” Returning Fringe audiences should be familiar with the polymathic diversity of Les Enfants’ repertoire: The Trench was an astonishing blend of live music, surreal, intricate puppetry and hellish, vividly-realised symbolist staging, which combined into a truly unique and haunting experience. Despite Captain Flinn’s marked shift in tone (which, Seager laughs, has been a little jarring for those who have
worked on both shows) Les Petits employs just as much multimedia mastery in creating the appropriate atmosphere and bringing the story to life. “We usually do puppetry and llive music, it’s part of what we’re known for,” Seager says, “but those techniques all help carry the audience into the adventure of the story. And it should be a real adventure: a little boy discovers a pirate crying in the corner of his classroom and decides to help him win back his ship, which has been stolen by
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festkids
FOUR TERRIFIC TALES IN ONE SUPERB SHOW! Scamp Theatre & Watford Palace Theatre are delighted to present:
Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs Underbelly, Bristo Square, 3–4pm, 31 Jul – 26 Aug, not 12 Aug, £7–£12 the eponymous pirate dinosaurs.” While not going into detail regarding how the dinosaurs have been realised for the stage, Seager promises their beasts of a bygone age will be “big and scary, but also fun. In particular, the T-Rex— the main baddie of the piece—is something pretty special.” Considering the eternal fascination which seems to exist between the show’s intended audience and its subject matter, Seager observes that “children always find dinosaurs a rather fascinating concept. One of my daughter’s little friends, a boy who’s about three or four, is utterly amazing – he can recite whole lists of dinosaurs which I can barely pronounce.” Many children are like this at one stage or another, we decide; unfortunately, times-tables and other such useless information eventually forces all those wonderful dino-facts from our youthful minds. When I ask what the experience of moving from adult-oriented to children’s theatre has been like, Seager shrugs that for Les Petits, the shift has been fairly untraumatic: “We want to do what appeals to us, so we’re less conscious of divisions like age. For example, we’re doing a show at the moment called Imaginary Menagerie, which is a big family piece, quite close in spirit to children’s theatre. While we were putting it together, we were thinking less about whether the show was for adults or children, and more about what suited the script. Everything follows the story.” “What we care about most,” he concludes emphatically, “is not treating the audience like they’re stupid. Kids can be much more intelligent and resilient than you might expect. Roald Dahl, whose work is famously dark and gruesome and has been a big influence on us, is a perfect example - kids can take a lot. We want to do a show that both kids and parents will enjoy, and will patronise neither of those groups. There is no need to dumb down.” A worthwhile sentiment for theatre in general, and a good omen for Captain Flinn.
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& other terrific tales from Julia Donaldson & Axel Scheffler
11.45AM (12.40PM) 01-26 August 2013
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festkids
The two Howards CBBC star Howard Read and his animated sidekick return to the Fringe with an incredible high-tech new show. He explains to Caroline Black how, with the use of multimedia technology, he has brought Little Howard to life.
B
efore we speak, I feel like I already know Howard Read—better known as Big Howard—and his animated sidekick Little Howard; I’ve seen their CBBC television show Little Howard’s Big Question where they ask those allimportant questions like “Why do I have to share?” and “Why can’t I be bigger?” My kids and I laugh at their silly—slightly naughty—humour. But whilst I know that it works very well on television, I’m less sure how this will translate to a stage show when one half of the double act is a cartoon boy. “We’ve really developed the technical bits. I say ‘we’. I refer to him as ‘we,’ which is slightly psychotic,” laughs Read. The development of these ‘technical bits’ means there is now one big difference; it has its unique selling point – it’s live. Lets think about that for a minute. Live cartoons, talking back. That’s pretty impressive. “His voice and all of his movements are controlled by me live on stage. It’s completely revolutionised what I’ve been doing. Little Howard can now host the show. He can talk to the audience, pick out someone in the front row and ask what he or she had for breakfast. When the kid answers, Little Howard can respond and they can actually talk to each other in real-time, which is quite cool. It also means that the show can be absolutely different every night. “Before, my shows have all been sort of comedy plays because Little Howard was all pre-recorded and any interactive bits had to be through me, whereas Little Howard is the one that kids are much more interested in because, well, he’s a cartoon. Now we can also do a lot of
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Steve Ullathorne
panto stuff, have the kids shout out, come up on stage, so suddenly toddlers as young as three are interested and engaged.” What prompted him to look at developing this aspect of the show? Did our generation of technologically savvy kids expect more? “Not that I’ve noticed,” he says. “It mainly comes from me feeling that I could make my shows better and working out a way to do that. So it’s really exciting making it a much more immersive and interactive experience. We can do funny, we knew that, but it was a case of getting the smaller children in and entranced.” “The brilliant thing about kids is that the audience are the stars too. Usually when someone heckles me at my grown-up show its obnoxious and because they hate you. But with kids they just want to tell you about the plaster on their finger or that their Dad’s got a shed, which is brilliant. Now Little Howard can tell them how many sheds he’s got. It doesn’t occur to them that a cartoon boy wouldn’t be able to do that. It’s a lovely state for your mind to be in.” Read, himself a dad of two, is clearly very fond of this animated six-year-old boy. Maybe this shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the character has been in his life for six years, longer than his own children. Little Howard sounds like he’s part of the family, with Read’s own kids quoting him, and vice versa. Yes, you can credit Read’s young son for the show’s ‘slug in the toilet’ poo anecdote. So if he didn’t have children when Little Howard was created where did the original character come from? “His personality was based on me as a kid,” says Read. “I was quite severely dyslexic so I constantly misunderstood the world—and words—and how it all sort of worked. I think my brain does look at the world in a slightly skewed way, different to other non-dyslexic adults.” Weirdly, it might also have been Little Howard who kickstarted Read’s road to parenthood. “I think having Little Howard made me feel quite clucky. I was getting to that age when you start thinking about having kids and—strangely—having an animated boy around all the time made me want it a bit more. The trick about writing for Little Howard is getting into the mind of a child. So it helps having some running around the house.”
Little Howard’s Big Show For Kids Underbelly, Bristo Square, 2:45pm – 3:45pm, 31 Jul – 26 Aug, not 12 Aug, £6–£12
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Kids’ Fringe
Highlights 0-4 years You’re never too young for the Fringe, baby. With a huge variety of music, theatre and storytelling on offer - babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers have plenty to choose from. For babies that like a bit of noise and are happy to shake their thang, Australian award winning Soprano and cabaret artist Ali McGregor’s Jazzamatazz (The Famous Speigeltent, George Street) is sure to get them jumping, twisting and shaking. Covering a snazzy mix of jiving jazz and well-known pop songs, this is one for everyone; parents, grandparents and kids. Lissa and NeeNee’s Riverside Adventure (86 Candlemaker Row) looks hard to beat if you’re after enthusiastic, all-singing, all-dancing duos with a unique take on nursery rhymes and rocking originals. For an altogether more meditative experience, Scottish Opera’s shows BabyO and SensoryO (both Paterson’s Land, 37 Holyrood Road)—for 6-18 month and 2-3 year olds respectively—are described as “living picture books” told through song, music, movement, touch and texture where the children are very much part of the experience. BonBon (C Aquila, Roman Eagle Lodge) promises an innovative mix of traditional fairy tales and interactive drama, The Boy and the Bunnet (Acoustic Music Centre @ St Brides’s, 10 Orwell Terrace) is a musical adventure performed by Scottish traditional musicians, The Golden Goose (Spotlites @ The Merchant’s Hall, 22 Hanover Street) looks ideal for those young children who want to get involved rather than just sit still and Head in the Clouds (Royal Botanic Garden, John Hope Gateway) is a multi-sensory show designed for the youngest of audiences.
4-7 years
Above: Poopiedoopiedoop
You’ll find lots to choose from for your early school children; comedy that appeals to their classroom sense of humour, theatre with engaging narrative, dance and acrobatics.
Below: Ali McGregor’s Jazzamatazz
If last year’s The Snail and the Whale is anything to go on then My Brother the Robot (Pleasance Courtyard, 60 Pleasance) should deliver an entertaining and quality show as we meet the little girl whose inventor dad builds her a little brother to play with. For those that like to laugh out loud this year’s comedy line up offers plenty of choice: Little Howard’s Big Show for Kids (Underbelly, Bristo Square) is a new show featuring the awardwinning CBBC animated character brought to
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Right: Slapdash Galaxy Bottom right: Help! My Supply Teacher is Magic
life with added technical wizardy, The Breakfast Club (Assembly George Square, George Square) offers a family standup comedy show with different comedians every day and Poopiedoopiedoop (Gilded Balloon Teviot, Teviot Row House) brings Australian double act Chrissy and The Doop together for silly science experiments, stories, dancing, magic and – of course - fart jokes. Book adaptations are big this year with Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs (Underbelly, Bristo Square) promising a rollicking adventure after Flinn finds a pirate hiding in his cupboard and must fight the baddy pirate dinosaurs, Roald Dahl proves his eternal popularity with The Twits (Zoo Southside, 117 Nicolson Street) and Danny Champion of the World (Paradise in Augustine’s, 41 George IV Bridge) both on offer and Princess Pumpalot: The Farting Princess (The Assembly Rooms, 54 George Street) tells the tale of a princess who gets 32,141 tins of beans for her birthday. Those who want to get more involved have a wide choice of interactive shows: Rapunzel – May The Force Be With You! and Curse of Pharaoh’s Tomb (both Spotlites @ Merchants’ Hall, 22 Hanover Street) see the audience invited up on stage; Hush (Gilded Balloon Teviot, Teviot Row House) needs the audience to help Nosey the Superspyingspy find out a Princess’s secrets; Drama Workshops for 5-12s (Spotlites @ Merchants’ Hall, 22 Hanover Street) offer kids the chance to try acting themselves using different daily themes ranging from Doctor Who to Barbie; while Breakdance Evolution (Sweet Grassmarket, Apex International Hotel) is ideal for anyone that wants to learn some bustin’ moves. Contemporary dance Crying Out Loud presents l’Apres-midi d’un Foehn – Version 1 (Summerhall, 1 Summerhall) looks like offering a more mature family piece as currents of air are used to make colourful plastic bags dance to a background of Debussy.
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festkids 7+ years This age group demands more – and they get it. There are more diverse shows to choose from, more interaction and more laughs, thrills and circus skills! Forget anything you thought you knew about shadow puppetry when it comes to Slapdash Galaxy (Underbelly, Bristo Square) as Canadian puppeteer Jeff Achtem uses household objects, white screens and the audience to create a show that is fast, funny and frenetic. Former children’s Laureate Michael Murpurgo’s I Believe in Unicorns (Pleasance Courtyard, 60 Pleasance) is about a boy who doesn’t like books until he meets a unicorn and the audience are encouraged to bring a book of their own to swap after the show. Those with short attention spans should head to The Big Bite-Size Play Factory’s Family Creatures (Pleasance Courtyard, 60 Pleasance) for a selection of playlets featuring magical, mystical and mythical creatures hosted by a bunny-hating gardener. Silly sketch show Bec and Tom’s Awesome Laundry (Gilded Balloon Teviot, Teviot Row House) looks to liven things up as the pair get ready to wash their pants on laundry day, while The Showstoppers’ Family Hour (Gilded Balloon Teviot, Teviot Row House) is a brand new show from the acclaimed musical theatre troupe who create improvised adventures built entirely from audience suggestions. Doctor Who buffs should try Back from the Future (Pleasance Courtyard, 60 Pleasance) which offers the audience the chance to help change the future of one man
who has returned from the year 2042 in this sci-fi themed satirical play. Classic stand up is on hand and there are return visits from the comedians at Comedy Club 4 Kids (Underbelly, Bristo Square) and the observations and anecdotes of James Campbell’s Comedy 4 Kids (The Famous Spiegeltent, 54 George Street). If you’re after something a bit less obvious The Man Who Planted Trees (Scottish Storytelling Centre, The Netherbow) is a highly acclaimed show that promises to be a funny and touching tale of an amazing man and his dog, brought to life by master puppeteers. A deeper message should be expected in the adaptation of the picture book The Red Tree (Zoo, 140 The Pleasance) as puppetry, movement and live animation as used to explore themes such as hope and feeling lost. Wannabe clubbers can try Pop Lock-In (Electric Circus, 3639 Market Street), an afternoon lock-in at an Edinburgh night club complete with its own street dance instructor, mocktails, cup cakes and parents’ V.I.P room which should satisfy even the coolest of kids. Or how about being a real-life detective, exploring a building to decipher puzzles and find clues in The Adventure (Pleasance Up The Hill) which sounds like a cross between Scooby Doo and The Crystal Maze. For kids that demand to be amazed there is plenty to get their jaws dropping: Help! My Supply Teacher is Magic (Underbelly, Bristo Square) has up close magical illusions and the chance to take away some tricks of the trade; Freedom Family Circus (Gryphon Venues at The Point Hotel, Bread Street) for daredevil circus skills and spooky stories on the Children’s Haunted Underground Tour (The Tron Kirk, Royal Mile) of the city vaults. Caroline Black
Eoin Carey
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Directory Magnus Hagdorn
The best cafés From free chips and falafel balls to fantastic coffee, comedian Catriona Knox shares her tips on the best cafes in Edinburgh. City Restaurant 35 Nicolson St, 0131 667 2819
Often confused with the City Café, but never half as lauded, which amazes me. I mean, who would choose comfy booths, ‘posh’ mac ‘n cheese and ‘grazing plates’ over a place that shamelessly announces in its slightly-sticky-to-touch menu: ‘all our dishes come with chips; no extra cost’? My point being, I don’t like my mutton dressed as lamb. The City Restaurant isn’t pretending to be something else and because it’s happy in its own skin, you don’t mind that you come out smelling like you’ve been marinating in vegetable oil overnight. It’s open late, the staff are lovely and the chips are the best in the business.
Lovecrumbs
proper slab of cake. I’ll have a slice of the lemon drizzle please, yes the one sitting in the hat draw.
Peter’s Yard, Quartermile 0131 228 5876
After three weeks of Haribo Tangfastics and late night Crunchy Nut Cornflakes binges, I sometimes crave something a little bit Gwyneth Paltrow, by which I mean a quinoa fest. And you can have a proper organic frenzy at Peter’s Yard. Plus, the coffee’s great (trumped only by the little red van in the Udderbelly Pasture last year – my god I hope that’s back again or I won’t survive the month). In fact the coffee here is so good they don’t even need to etch a milk heart onto your latte to make you think it’s going to taste better than it actually does.
City Restaurant
set in space. I like to feed off their energy and zeal and go back out to the Royal Mile replenished and full of renewed vigour. Who needs a caffeine hit, right?
Palmyra Pizza 22 Nicolson St, 0131 667 6655
155 West Port, 0131 629 0626
Like all achingly-hip places, it’s tricky to fathom whether the design of Lovecrumbs is pure cutting-edge brilliance or pure Grandma’s front room. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much mis-matched crockery in one space. But it’s great. The main selling point for me is that they display their (incredibly delicious) cakes in a vintage wardrobe which lends the whole experience that elusive Narnia-cum-John Lewis appeal. You get bang for your buck too with a
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The Pleasance Dome Café
Scones at Peter’s Yard
Bristo Square
Sure, this place is less café, more greenhouse. And while I’d take a pint of their finest Fosters over their cappuccino any day of the week, I really do enjoy whiling away a few hours here in the bar/canteen/sauna area. You’ll always get chatting to interesting acts and you’ll usually be commandeered by a huge cast of teenagers waxing lyrical about their production of Troilus and Cressida
Palmyra Pizza
Seven years ago, when I first started coming to the Fringe, I tried my very first Palmyra falafel. I’d heard it was the ‘cool’ place to buy falafel, (and yes, I think you’ll find that seven years ago falafel was ‘cool’) and I’m not ashamed to admit that seven years on I still get that rush of ‘yeah, I know all the cool places’ when I cross its threshold even though it couldn’t really be less so. NB: don’t fail to spot the joke when the staff ask how many balls you want in your wrap this evening. Catriona Knox: Player Pleasance Courtyard, 3:15–4:15pm, 31 Jul – 26 Aug, not 13 Aug, £10
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festdirectory The Edinburgh Blog
Best bars & pubs Shirley and Shirley are two sophisticated women-about-town. They’ll know good bars, right? Brass Monkey
The Earl of Marchmont
14 Drummond St, 0131 556 1961
22 Marchmont Crescent, 0131 662 1877
Brass Monkey was a fabulous find last year. They know how to keep it real with their pints of red stripe as well as their fine selection of rums. The staff are friendly and you can always recline into the semi supine position in their back room should you choose to do so. We found many a mattress and pumped up cushion back there alongside some friendly folk who were resting their pints through holes in these special tables. The music is funky and its never more than 3 deep at the bar why would you not?
The Earl of Marchmont has been an old favourite of ours for five long years now. It’s our first port of call when we rock up in Edinburgh and realise the fridge in the flat is bare and it was a bad decision not having brought our duvets up with us. The Earl is cosy and well lit, the bar staff are quick and responsive to our Edinburgh thirst that we manage to work up after a day of shows and flyering. The Earl also seems to shut later than the rest of the local watering holes, so If you’re residing in the Marchmont area this year there’s no reason why you shouldn’t pop in for a jar or six.
The Sheep Heid
Robin Zebrowski
43-45 The Causeway, 0131 661 7974
There’s nothing quite like the annual walk up to Arthur’s Seat to clear the cobwebs and cholera that you’re prone to catch at some of the venues at the festival. Once you’ve done your hike up and down reward yourself with a hearty meal and an ale from The Sheeps Heid which is apparently the oldest pub in Scotland. It’s been there since 1360 and although it’s quite a walk, the staff are lovely, and they’re very happy to guide you towards their specials board.
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The Bailie Bar 2-4 St Stephen St, 0131 225 4673
If you want to get down and dirty, get thee to The Bailie Bar where Stockbridge and New Town meet. It’s a black and red basement pub with an island bar and an extensive food and drinks menu. It’s the perfect place to go if you want to escape the fringe and you can find a real mix of revellers in there from lawyers to joiners, gays to straights, and bisexuals to bifocals. Sit in there with
a drink and amuse yourself with the constant banter between steadfast locals and the bar staff who are said to be both the friendliest and rudest in town. This bar closes at 1am and the clock in there runs 5mins late, be prepared for the bar manager to tell you “te get on yer bike” at 1.05am on the dot. Shirley and Shirley: Carnage Underbelly, Bristo Square, 2:50pm – 3:50pm, 31 Jul – 26 Aug, not 17 Aug, £6.00 – £11.00
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festdirectory More bars & pubs From old man pubs to classy bars, Irish comic Keith Farnan knows his way around Edinburgh’s drinking dens. The Blue Blazer 2 Spittal Street, 0131 229 5030
An Irishman recommending pubs! I might as well be dressed as a leprechaun recommending fields to catch rainbows while singing a ballad you’ve never heard about a man who never existed. However, Edinburgh is blessed with some lovely dark corners and usually if you’re recommending a pub, it was the first stop of the night as you can’t quite remember where you went to after that. Such is the way with The Blue Blazer, a lovely old pub down by the end of the Grassmarket where you can end up in all sorts of intelligent and unintelligible debates with friends and strangers alike. It’s the kind of pub where you can sit comfortably while waiting for others to join you without the need to take out your phone and pretend that you’re really busy.
Deacon Brodie’s Tavern 435 Lawnmarket, 0131 225 6531
The inclusion of this pub on the list is entirely personal as it was the first pub recommended to me on my first visit to the Edinburgh Fringe when I told the taxi driver I was doing a stand-up show about the death penalty. Without missing a beat, he told me to go to Deacon Brodie’s for a pint, “as Deacon Brodie was the man who built the gallows in Edinburgh
Under The Stairs
and then they hung him on it.” While I sat, quietly stunned, he continued; ”It’s a bit like that Kevin Costner thing... If you build it, they will come.” Class. It’s one for the tourists, but if you spot a hairy Irishman cackling away as he walks past, well, it could be any of us really.
Under the Stairs 3A Merchant Street, 0131 466 8550
I don’t know if I should recommend this pub as I really like it and I don’t want people going there. But apparently that’s selfish. It’s right on the hill between the Grassmarket and the Gilded Balloon but you wouldn’t know it as it announces itself in such an unassuming way. It almost doesn’t want you to know it’s there. A pub that’s a tease, well you’re going to have to chase it now aren’t you, until it makes a fool of you and you can’t understand why it doesn’t text you in the morning. It feels like an old man’s pub for the Xbox generation, dark and comfortable, but without the smell.
The Blue Blazer
The Penny Black This pub is closed but I wanted to take a moment to recommend that you pass by it at least once and pay respects to what was an exquisite early house for the great unwashed who failed to make it to bed, either alone or accompanied, and felt the day wasn’t done until it was the next day. We live in a world where artists have personal trainers and tax advisors and the Penny Black simply could not bear to exist in such a world. So raise a glass of the most watered down but available alcohol at the earliest possible hour. Keith Farnan: Fear Itself Underbelly, Cowgate, 6:20pm – 7:20pm, 1–25 Aug, not 13, £10.50
Deacon Brodie’s Tavern
FAILEONTOLOGY We all want to escape something
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4.45pm (1hr) 2-26 August (Not 12th) Venue 124 Zoo. 140 the Pleasance, EH8 9RR Box office 0131 662 6892
"Totally original fringe theatre" Mark Finbow
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edinburgh festival preview guide 2013 fest 93
festdirectory Mike Gifford
Best fast food “I had a heart attack last year,” says Carey Marx, “so I recommend you avoid all my recommendations below.” Café Picante
The Baked Potato Shop
Broughton Street
Cockburn Street
Scotland is one of the top places to eat yourself dead. One place you might like to start is the Disco Chippy, more accurately and boringly known as Café Picante. If, like me, when you think of chips you think of music, this is the place to hang out. They have decent late night food, cigarettes, chocolate, and I bet they’ve got condoms and tampons. “Portion of chips and a tampon please, can you make them separate.” They’re also on a dangerous corner that stops really bad drunks from getting near them.
Here at the end of the Royal Mile is the place to restore your energy and read the hundreds of flyers that have been stuffed into your pockets and orifices. You can get a massive potato with butter and a lifetime supply of cheese and beans. This is a good place to take a fat kid you just want to shut up for a while. I’ve never had anything else but cheese and beans there, though I’ve heard it’s all good. This year I’ll have one without butter, but with all the cheese. One change at a time.
Well Hung and Tender
Forrest Road
Gilded Balloon Garden
A quality Angus burger. The one downside is their refusal to offer English mustard. Is this an “English” thing? If so, it’s biting off your own nose to spite your face. Or are you scared of English mustard biting your face off? Putting out French or American namby pamby yellow wet stuff is cowardly. Whatever happened to Scotland the Brave, now cowering before proper mustard? Scottish steak and English mustard make a handshake of friendly joy. You can also get cheese with your burger, but then everything must be available with cheese according to Scottish law.
Well Hung & Tender
Mums Great Comfort Food Such a simple formula. High quality sausages and high quality mash. I presented my wife with her engagement ring in a sausage and mash place. I also had a heart attack. I guess there were clues along the way. I don’t know if you can get it with cheese but I’ll bet you can. If not, ring the police. For a giggle, agree with your friends that the word sausage definitely means penis, then all go in and order. Or just say penis.
The Mosque Kitchen Nicolson Street
If you want your food cheap, good and curried then this place has
Mums
been waiting for you. With vegetarian dishes on offer, this is one of the healthier options around. It’s outdoors, so you can eat in the rain and watch the Edinburgh wind blow the food off your plate and onto your friends lap. There’s a rival Mosque
Kitchen around the corner if you prefer to just pour the food onto your friend’s lap yourself. Carey Marx: Intensive Carey Gilded Balloon Teviot, 10–11pm, 31 Jul–25 Aug, not 12 Aug, £9.50
POP UP FRINGE
Day Pass
£25
15-25 August
Tickets from
£5
Le Monde Hotel 16 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 2PF
www.funnywomen.com 94 fest edinburgh festival preview guide 2013
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festdirectory Romantic Hotspots Comedian David Quirk is nothing if not a romantic. Here, he counts down his top places to find love in Edinburgh. Out the front of the Assembly Rooms George Street
I was last in Edinburgh in 2010, and I had to do flyering every afternoon. If you don’t know, you can surely imagine how bad flyering is for your health. One thing that makes it ok is meeting new people, of both sexes, but since this article is about meeting women, I can say that about half of the those that I met on George Street were women. I would have met hundreds. I did actually meet a lady that I fell in love with here at the Fringe though while flyering. If you’re not doing a show, you can still hand out flyers. It doesn’t even have to be during the fringe. I recall Doctor Brown handing out blank pieces of paper to people one night in Melbourne. Ladies like him, so I’d recommend that. He’d say “Please come to my show,” and give them the piece of paper.
Edinburgh Airport I know, as if. But the lady I met randomly while flyering on George Street I met again at the Airport at about 5am the day after the Fringe. We nearly missed our planes. So if I’m the one writing about places to meet women in Edinburgh, then I feel I
Black Medicine
have to say that Edinburgh Airport worked well for me, though I assume it’s normally a terrible place to meet ladies in general. This is because when women are at the airport, they’re usually there to either travel, or to work. They’re less likely to be looking for love at the airport, they’d normally go to a night club, perhaps, or online these days. They could, however, be looking for love AND travelling... they might be travelling FOR love. Either way, that’s of no help to you.
Black Medicine
is probably the only decent place I’ll mention in this article to actually meet women in Edinburgh. I think that’s because I’ve been there many times and never met any women. I remember seeing all kinds of well-dressed, pretty women there and I never talked to any of them. That’s why I think it might work for you, because it didn’t for me, and that’s surely a good thing for most men. I imagine if you had courage you could approach girls here, just go up and talk to them, say hello or tell them something nice, maybe. But I’ve never done that.
Nicolson St, 0131 557 6269
The Edinburgh skate park
Everyone seems to like this café; I do. It reminds me of somewhere I might go in Melbourne. It’s day time, it’s caffeine fuelled, it’s busy and hip. This
I actually use the skate park here in Edinburgh. I’m 32 years old. This article is about where to meet women, and I must say that the skate park is
by Kenny Boyle and Clare Sheppard
Directed by Ben Harrison
not a good place to meet women, at least not girls your age. So I feel that I should also point out places to avoid if you are simply looking for women in Edinburgh. If women are what you want, you’d do well to avoid the Edinburgh skate park. That said, I did once meet a cool lady at a skate park in Melbourne. She was a skateboarder so that made sense. I suppose I’m saying that I’m living proof that you could meet a lady at the skate park, but it’s a long shot. Maybe don’t rule it out, but be realistic. It will seem creepy either way, you being at the skate park. David Quirk: Shaking Hands With Danger Pleasance Courtyard, 9:45pm – 10:45pm, 31 Jul – 26 Aug, not 12 Aug, £6.00 – £10.50
www.footlightstour.co.uk
“every relationship is forever.. until it ends”
The Independent
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festdirectory Best days off Riotous comedy double-act Pete Shenton and Tom Roden—better known as New Art Club—have two days off this August. So if you miss out on tickets to their show, here’s where to find them. Musselburgh Links 0131 665 5438
The world’s oldest golf course: its a ridiculous thing to do with your time. Nine holes of total misery. It’s stupidly windy, even on a nice day, so take plenty of balls and be prepared to lose them – especially if you’re shit at golf like we are. But if you’ve got some plus fours and a stupid hat then it could be fun. It’s in the middle of Musselburgh Racecourse so you might get to see some really small, very hungry people (jockeys) knocking around. You can tease them with your flamboyant golf snacks.
Royal Botanic Garden 20A Inverleith Row, 0131 248 2909
If I’m looking for peace, which I generally am—if you’ve seen our shows, you will probably be aware that the main thrust of what we do is an attempt to tangentially bring about world peace by creating secretly politically charged physical comedy, so secret in fact that most people assume we’re just twatting about. But its so much more than that, you just don’t get it—then I like to get out to the Botanic Gardens on a sunny day. I find myself a spot under a tree and ignore the rest of the hoards who are trying to do the same.
The Museum on the Mound The Mound, 0131 243 5464
It’s a museum about something that most people performing at the festival
The Museum on the Mound
will be losing a lot of. No it’s not friends – I’m sure we’ll all be gaining lots of those, even if its only on Facebook. It’s a museum of money. Personally, I am not much for museums as I have too many bad memories of being dragged to things that I did not want to see whilst on rainy holidays by my well-meaning, aspirational, working class parents. But this one is surprisingly good fun. It’s not Canon and Ball at the Blackpool Winter Gardens in 1978 good fun. But what is?
Cramond
The Fruitmarket Gallery
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It’s a little bit out of town but there’s a lovely walk along the river and it opens out on to the sea. There’s a great little pub that sells bloody cheap and good beer too. At low tide, you can walk out onto Cramond Island. Try not to get stuck out there
though, because that makes you look a right twonk, doesn’t it, Tom?
The Fruitmarket Gallery 45 Market St, 0131 225 2383
The last time I was there, I walked up and down Martin Creed’s musical staircase for ages, like a four year old with an annoying toy, and nobody told me off. This is my favourite gallery in Edinburgh and this year it has an exhibition by Gabriel Orozco. It looks like it might not have such a strong interactive element but feel free to tell me to stop being a dick if you see me in there and I’m ruining your enjoyment of the show. I won’t be offended. I’m used to it. New Art Club: Feel About Your Body Assembly George Sq, 6:45–7:45pm, 1–25 Aug, not 13 Aug, 20 Aug, £14
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festdirectory Best jogging routes Jogging down the Royal Mile in August? If anyone’s up for the challenge, it’s outspoken American comedian Lee Camp. He shares his favourite routes in Edinburgh. Arthur’s Seat Granted, it’s hard as hell to run all the way. I’ve never actually done that. But if you run up even most of it, you do indeed feel like a super hero. If you’re looking for the lazy solution, I discovered last time I was at the Fringe that there’s actually a quicker (and of course easier) way if you take the road. It doesn’t give you full satisfaction of running the climb, but take an extra bottle of water with you to drench yourself with before seeing others so that you look like you actually did go the proper way.
Down London Road Run towards the water. I like any run that ends at water. I guess it truly feels like you got to the end–unless you have scuba gear. If the weather was warmer, I’d be tempted to jump in the water post-run. Then again, if the weather were warmer during the Fringe, I’d probably stop at Royal Terrace Gardens, treat myself to a cold can of Guinness and forget about the run all together. In fact, that way I’d probably forget about doing my show later that evening, so perhaps its best that the climate remains as it is.
The Meadows
The Royal Mile
Around The Meadows
It’s pretty impossible to actually run up The Royal Mile during the Fringe, but half the fun would probably be in trying to do so. If you do achieve it, it’s fun because people assume you’re some sort of street performer and they jump out of your way because they figure you might be on fire. Or they might help encourage your stamina by throwing money your way – that way you get fit and rich at the same time. I say rich; it would take you every second of every day to run enough to accumulate the cash to cover the costs of being at the Fringe, so best to just run as if you are on fire.
The Meadows are nice if you need to find some green but don’t want to go far. It’s far from a secret spot but there’s something about running around that space in the hustle and bustle of the Fringe that I find eerily calming. There’s usually an ice cream van nearby too, which gives me more incentive to run so I can treat myself to one afterwards – bringing us back to why it’s a good job the weather’s so shit. Don’t go at night though. You’ll trip over people humping.
Deep Sea World Go jogging underneath the sharks in Deep Sea World in North Queens-
ferry, just outside of Edinburgh. If you’re feeling particularly energetic, you could run there from the city centre, though it takes an age on a bus so I’m not sure how long that would take. The last time I was in town, I did indeed get in with the sharks at the aquarium (against my will). And since the tank is the size of a football field, you can get quite a nice jog going. And something about having sharks around you does indeed help you keep up quite a pace. I set a personal best. Lee Camp: Destruction! Distraction! Evolution? Just The Tonic at Bristo Sq, 6:50pm – 7:50pm, 1–25 Aug, not 13, £12
2-4 (previews), 5-10, 12-17, 19-24 August 13:45 (40 mins), £7.50/£5 (Concession) Greenside Studio 2 (venue 231), edinburgh fringe 2013
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festdirectory Best nightlife After sunset, Edinburgh acquire a magical quality. Kirsten Innes, one of the stars of Whatever Gets You Through The Night, gives you the lowdown on some of the cities best evening haunts. Unbound at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Charlotte Square There are many Speigeltents open late in Edinburgh this month, but you can only catch your favourite authors doing night-time cabaret in the one in Charlotte Square. That, and the palpable lack of overexcited posh teenagers trying to bag off with Daniel Sloss, make it the best Speigeltent. Running for the entire length of the Book Festival, Unbound is a nightly-changing literary cabaret: stand-up lit, spoken word, and bookish live music and comedy, expertly programmed and all for free. It’s also great for alternative star-spotting: very big name authors are both on the stage and in the audience.
Unbound
jammed into a former vet college, with great bars and a whole late night programme. Last year, I remember rocking up blurrily at around midnight to witness an Eastern European open-air dance melodrama being enacted all over a car, soundtracked by a kletzmer band playing out of a nearby open window. I think. Anyway, this year their special late night programme takes in everything from ghost stories and flamenco-tipped club nights to chill-out sessions in shipping containers, experimental concerts, Lynchian mime and silent disco-esque theatre.
Forest Fringe Drill Hall, Dalmeny Street
Summerhall Summerhall Place, 0845 874 3000
Basically, if you’re not spending at least 60% of your August in and around Summerhall, you’re doing it wrong. It’s a vast, sprawling campus of weird, with well over a hundred shows, gigs, clubnights, live lit events, installations, dance-pieces and things
The Forest Fringe, which now pops up around the edges of festivals all over the country, grew out of our own, much-missed Forest Café (original version): a rag-tag group of young artists who wanted to challenge the increasingly corporate homogenisation of the Fringe proper They’re back after two years’ absence
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with a new home in Leith’s Out Of The Blue Drill Hall, which has a great atmosphere year round anyway – Forest Fringe being there will make it an extra special. Their programme times weren’t confirmed as this went to press, but look out for tiny shows, one-on-one encounters, happenings and parties stretching late into the night, and all for free. It’ll be GREAT.
Mediterranean Gate 48 George IV Bridge
Forget yer dodgy pizzas and yer salt and sauce. This is the only late-night food-spot you’ll need in Edinburgh. It’s a small takeaway on George IV Bridge with the sort of well-stocked deli counter you don’t often see at 2am – grilled aubergines, halloumi, courgettes, marinated mushrooms, hummus, coriander leaves, justmade baba ganoush. Everything is gorgeously fresh and prepared by people who care about food and taste: they do as roaring a trade at lunchtime as they do to empty
drunken stomachs. I recommend the Lebanese chicken wrap – be warned, though, it’s HUGE.
Star Bar 1 Northumberland Place, 0131 539 8070
I shouldn’t even be telling you this. You can only use this information in case of emergency. The Star Bar is tucked away up a series of New Town back lanes: basically, it has to want you to find it. It contains precisely none of the following: comedians, comedians’ egos, comedy groupies, PRs for comedy shows, inflatable cows, overpriced drinks in plastic cups. It’s just a warm, cosy wee hideaway with a great jukebox, good cocktails, a foosball table and a cursed skull in the wall. All of which makes it perfect for those nights when the Festivalling just gets too much. Whatever Gets You Through The Night The Queen’s Hall, times vary, 20–25 Aug, £13.50 – £16.50
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The Invis覺ble Dot presents
id:174
Three conference organisers and a teenage girl are the sole survivors of a fatal plane crash on a remote tropical island.
A world premiere from the Fringe First winning team behind 2009 smash, Party. Written by Tom Basden and directed by Phillip Breen.
With
Written by
MATHEW BAYNTON TOM BASDEN BEBE CAVE Directed by DANIEL RIGBY PHILLIP BREEN KATY WIX
Secret seaside location Transport provided Meeting point: Assembly George Square non-transport tickets also available 3.00pm
6.30pm
4-25 August (selected dates) See assemblyfestival.com for various dates/times
assemblyfestival.com
theinvisibledot.com
0131 623 3030
@theinvisibledot
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PEATBOG FAERIES PORTICO QUARTET PRINCESS PUMPALOT THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION TOM STADE VERY BEST OF THE FEST WE WILL BE FREE: FREE! THE TOLPUDDLE MARTYRS STORY AND MANY MORE