Last days at the Edinburgh Fringe

So, last day of the Edinburgh festival. Things I've seen since last time:

Eric's Tales of the Sea

A fun talk/comedy routine/memoir by a former Royal Navy submariner. It's very hard to know what to say about this one, I enjoyed it, but learned less about life on submarines than I thought I would. It had some genuinely good laughs, and seemed an honest recollection, and such technical details as were needed were sugar-coated with humor to make them go down easy. Not one for all the family though, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Perils of Love and Gravity

This was a very silly comedy concerning the unhappy love-life of a woman trapped in a house that is much narrower at the bottom than at the top. It breaks the forth wall constantly and has the narrator as a character in the play. It was these very features that made me go and see it, as I'm a sucker for that kind of cheap rule-breaking (though it's hardly revolutionary these days). The play was alright, funny in places, well acted, with some interesting ideas, but not all the silliness was as funny as it thought it was.

Unfortunately when it ended I was left with a sense of "So what?" It had the standard "girl meets boy/girl loses boy" plot with an antagonist who wants the girl for himself, etc, etc. These plots always make the hair stand up on the back of my neck a little, because they all basically come down to an antagonist who has ideas above his station. Perhaps he's too ugly to aspire to the princess's hand, or he's too common or uncharismatic to aspire to the rule of the kingdom, and when he attempts to acquire these things, he's damned. These are plots the third Reich would approve of, where the natural order is preserved and those lesser mortals (like, say, Macbeth) who offend the rule of nature by trying to improve themselves are punished. Now, you might say 'No, their offence is *how* they try to get ahead', but I'd say that these people are always shown to be strange and ugly, things are set up so the only way they *can* hope to get ahead is to cheat, because the system is rigged against them from the start. These plays run counter to fairy-tales in which the ugly duckling or poor cobbler can aspire to greatness. I suspect this is because folk and fairy tales come out of the lower classes, whereas more outrightly theatrical work, like that of Shakespeare, comes out of playwrights working for the upper classes, who have a lot invested in the established order.


Swamp Juice

This was a performance that I went to after hearing a word-of-mouth recommendation in a bar (yes ladies, I was that creepy guy butting into your conversation saying "What was that? That sounds good!"). It was a very silly shadow-puppet show about a man who is trying to capture a bird for his pot. Most of the audience seemed to enjoy it a lot, but I have to say that although some of the puppetry was cleverly done, overall I found it tedious until we hit the 3D section. Now, I've never experienced 3D movies, so 3D shadow puppet theatre, done with red/green glasses and red/green lights, was something quite new for me. The 3D effect was very successful, with various puppets and artifacts appearing to be right before my face, zooming across the front rows of the audience, or plunging towards me. My favorite bit was simply soap bubbles blown into the path of the red and green lights, creating an illusion of bubbles raining down on the front few rows of the audience. Basically the puppeteer could have just dispensed with all the narrative, and gone straight to a 3D special effects show, and I'd have been perfectly happy.

In for a Pound

An incredibly silly play concerning someone who needs one more quid to buy a pack of cigarettes, and thus gets involved with an (all female) organized crime syndicate. Unlike all the other silliness I'd seen though, this was silly, and clever and funny with it. This had jokes that you didn't see coming, and which were still funny, some of it was very well observed, and overall the cast did a very good job. The hero's dimwit 'brunette but a little blonde inside' flatmate stole the show, despite being something of a stereotypical 'ditz' character. The only people I could fault were perhaps the crime syndicate, who were good, but I felt could perhaps have pushed their characters a bit further. The hero himself (although he was actually the damsel in distress most of the time) played his part well, though he was actually the 'straight man' to all the other whacky characters, and thus didn't stick in the mind as much as some of the others.

Overall this was one of the shows I enjoyed most, although it got pushed down the ranks the next day.

Wrens

This was well acted and well written, but wasn't entirely the show I was looking to see. It concerned royal navy women faced with the impending end of WWII, and the questions of what their lives would be afterwards. In truth it was a lot like some story set in a convent school, and probably rightly so. You realize that these would generally have been very young women, children really, just as many of the men we sent to war were little more than children, so the bickering and emotionality would have been entirely realistic. However, the whole plot mostly hinged on the discovery that one of the girls was pregnant out of wedlock, and the immense importance that this took on, while there was still a war going on and they could all still be killed by a stray bomb, seemed incredibly surreal. This was a window into another era, and in some ways it's an era that is hard to connect to now.

It was a good play, but in some ways it left me feeling adrift, not because of any flaw in the play, but because the times it portrays are too alien for me to emotionally connect with.

Faust/us

A one-man telling of Christopher Marlowe's tale of damnation. This was an ambitious thing to try and do, and overall I thought he did a good job of it. I could tell the rest of the audience were not enjoying it as much as me (the reverse situation to 'Swamp Juice'), but I liked this. When the first conjuration of Mephistopheles results in a phone call in which the unearthly part of the conversation is just an sinister mechanical drone, I thought that was a pretty original gimmick.

This show confirmed again that I really like Elizabethan and Jacobean drama for it's language, which is a motherlode of gorgeous out-of-copyright lines that are begging to be stolen and reused.

Marlowe's play itself is perhaps a bit weak on plot. Faust sells his soul to the devil and is damned. This isn't really a play, it's a government health warning. Don't mess with demons, kids!

Chaps with Legs

A sketch-based comedy show that I was talked into on the basis of a free ticket. It's a hard thing to say, but this was the worst thing I saw on the fringe, and it wasn't just me that thought so, because there were a gaggle of vocally amused young women on the front row that I assumed were the cast's girlfriends, until half of them bailed on the performance half-way through. I *still* think they might have been the cast's girlfriends.

Piff the Magic Dragon

Another recommended show, magic and comedy in one package. Not bad, but not as great as the full-house turnout implied. Most of the best laughs in this were self-referential and impromptu ones. Worth seeing once, I'd say.

Shakespeare for Breakfast

An absolutely wonderful reworking of Macbeth as a high-school comedy (yes, comedy. The young cast were all superb, and the humor was very clever and off the wall, without ever becoming pantomime. As with the original play the witches are the best thing, even though one of them was a sock-puppet. The obligatory humiliation of those foolish enough to sit on the front row was artfully done. This was the one show that had a Lady Gaga reference that didn't make me groan (I'm as tired of Gaga as I am of Vampires, Zombies and compelling drama about someone coming home from Iraq/Afghanistan). This takes joint first with 'Arabian Nights' as my favorite thing that I saw. So good was this show that I immediately signed up for the other show that this theatre group were doing.

Free croissant for every audience member at this performance, but honestly, that didn't sway my opinion. I'm easily bought, but not *that* easily bought.

This is Soap

Same cast as 'Shakespeare for Breakfast'. Maybe not quite as awesome, but well worth the price of admission (admittedly, I got my ticket for free, but I got it when I was actually intending to pay, but they said 'It's the last showing, have it for free'). This was a supposedly improv soap opera built from suggestions of the audience, but the audiences suggestions frequently got short shrift. No matter, it was still very funny, and the casts rendition of soap opera characters was very well observed (even though I don't watch soaps, so I'm not one to judge, but that's never stopped me before and it ain't stopping me now).

Both these last two plays were put on by the in-house company of the 'C-venues' venue. The venue itself struck me as very chaotic, when I turned up to buy tickets at 9:30 (performances start at ten), they weren't ready to start selling, the cafe (which was a terrible dive) wasn't serving anything, and they'd set things up so there was one queue serving all the shows and venues within the complex. However, if the in-house theatre group maintain this standard, none of that's going to matter, they're still going to get sell-out shows despite everything. "Shakespeare for Breakfast" is apparently a reoccurring series of performances at the Fringe, and thus I'd recommend anyone up here next year to check it out.