Edinburgh Festival 21st – 26th August


Until last week, I was pretty much the only person I know who hadn’t been to the Edinburgh Festival, and to prove it, I was billed as a “Virgin” in the Utter! series programmed by Richard Tyrone Jones Ringmaster of Spoken Word. RTJ is only thirty and almost died a couple of months ago from a previously undiagnosed heart condition. Despite this, he soldiered on with his month of MC-eeing, and also appeared in his own right in various venues over Edinburgh delivering his intelligent, witty and sometimes surreal poetry.

As an Edinburgh Virgin I wasn’t prepared for the relentless flyering which happens as soon as you get close to the Royal Mile, around where most of the Free Fringe can be found. Artists appearing at the Free Fringe would have spent as much as fifteen hundred pounds on their venues for the month, plus the money they would have need to have forked out on accommodation so it is hardly surprising that the flyering is so intense. And once people come to see your show, there is no guarantee they will throw any money in the bucket on the way out. The incentive for appearing at the Fringe is to get reviews, and thence to get proper paid gigs. There is so much talent touting itself around the streets, and there are so few people who go all the way. We only walked out of one free event half way through – I won’t say what it was, and it did feel awful to walk away, knowing how much time and money goes into it. Imagine having to do the same one hour show once or sometimes twice a day for the whole month, sometimes to less than ten people AND to keep your enthusiasm for your material at the same level as if you were playing to a packed house. Not for the fragile and easily wounded.

One of the best Free Fringe shows I saw was without doubt poet Tim Turnbull’s Tales of Terror. Turnbull is influenced by Musical Hall on which he puts his own dark twist – his previous show was Caligula on Ice. Yorkshire born Turnbull is naturally funny with great comic timing and the audience was in howls of laughter as he half spoke half sang and danced a jaunty number about a man who has life enhancing plastic surgery which has the chorus…
 
“Knock me down
and strike me dead
who’s that handsome fellow
with the extra head.”

… an ear-worm of a song which is still bouncing around my one head after a week.

We went to a few paid events too, and these were largely high quality shows. The most expensive of these was the £12 a ticket we doled out for Rainer Hersch’s Victor Borge which we heard parts of on the radio as we drove up to Edinburgh. The show took us through Borge’s life and his rise to fame which was interesting enough. Unfortunately it appeared we had heard all the funny bits in the 5 minute feature, and a show whose posters promised ‘tear-streamingly funny’, was in fact mildly amusing. 

The funny bits were Victor Borge lines which would have been ground-breaking in his time, unfortunately Hersch who “has performed on every major comedy stage in Britain and abroad” according to his biog, didn’t really compare. There was some very dodgy material about getting the Borge (US/Danish) accent right, in a kind of ‘don’t foreigners sound funny when they are trying to speak English’ way, of which Prince Philip would have been very proud. (Well he is the Duke of Edinburgh …Ed) The audience for this show was in general a lot older than the audience for anything else we went to at Edinburgh (the ticket price, the subject matter?) but nobody was actually laughing their shoes off. In fact there was fairly weak applause at the end too. This piece was commissioned by the BBC and I am pretty sure Hersch didn’t have to pay for his own hotel for the month.

The main thing I took away from the festival was the many varieties of ways of telling a story in a theatrical setting. Whether your stage is a large box you have placed in a cobwebby cellar yourself or whether you have a whole theatre and technical staff to press buttons to make lights and music, the best show is going to be the one with genius at its heart. Spirit, wit, creativity and yes, that elusive X factor.