Edinburgh Fringe fest

Okay, I'd been saying it about Edinburgh since I walked out of the train station, but it's still true: "Oooh! Pretty!"

Georgian and Victorian houses, a centuries-old castle, and—in August—lots and lots of Festival goers.


In Edmonton, I live mere blocks away from the second large Fringe theatre festival in the world. This year, I decided it was high time that I attended the much-bigger largest Fringe Theatre Festival in the World in Edinburgh. Edmonton wears its "second largest Fringe" designation proudly, but seriously, in every possible category, it's a distant second compared to Edinburgh. The Edinburgh program is larger (as thick as a Sears catalogue), there are over 100 venues spread out over the city (many concentrated in the Old Town area), the festival lasts for over three weeks, some bars stay open as late as 5 a.m., and you can buy booze and bring it into many of the performances.

My Edinburgh set-up was obviously very different than my Edmonton set-up—I was without a proper "home base", without my usual Fringe buddy, and without a plan since the schedule was so daunting. I was also with three other people and we proceeded to drink a lot, eat a lot, and see some shows. If I were to do Edinburgh Fringe again (and I would), I would certainly book accommodations earlier (no fault to Nicole on this, who did her best) and read trusted reviews sooner. I'd also scope out the Scotsman each day for their coupons for shows and take more advantage of the e-ticketing system and the half-price same-day tickets. I realize now that it would have been relatively easy to see some great shows. While a good early review at Edmonton Fringe will sell out a show's entire run, Edinburgh runs for so long and there are just so many competing shows and events that you can still get tickets for a five-star show the morning of. At least, in the beginning days of the festival, which is when I was there.

Some highlights:

• I saw two excellent shows on my last day (when I finally clued into how to do things), an incredibly well-written, well-acted one-man show, Scaramouche Jones, about a clown whose life was a metaphor for the 20th-century British colonial experience (sounds heavy-handed but it really wasn't). I gave it a standing ovation, though not everyone in the crowd did so.
  
• I also saw one half of a pair of related plays, The Bird and the Bee: The Bee, about a fifteen-year-old girl who commits suicide. My only regret was that I missed seeing The Bird, which is about the boy she loves, who commits suicide with her. Depressing? Yes. But also lyrical, intelligent, and really well acted and directed. I should have given this a standing ovation, but I was crying too much.
  
• of course, X-files improv
• my student card got me discounts on lots of tickets! Wo0-hoo!
  

Lowlights:

• One of the shows I had marked out in the program was a "could-be-good, could-be-horrible" puppet show whose program description ended with "Sophisticated wordless puppetry from Poland." Well, it was puppetry and I'll assume that the three puppeteers were Polish, but it was not sophisticated at all. Nicole was right when she called it self-indulgent. The show needed a plot to add cohesion, the movement work wasn't detailed or musical, the themes were superficial, and there was a lot of repetition. I don't mind pretentiousness in my art, but it still has to be good.
• I almost walked out of another show, The Gullibility Factor, a series of supposedly satirical sketches that were just annoying. The last sketch, a critique of the selling of the war in Iraq, was heavy handed without contributing to the debate. And another sketch hinged on the mocking of a character's Canadian accent, specifically the pronounciation of the word "Saskatchewan", but the actress playing the Canadian couldn't actually pronounce "Saskatchewan" correctly. It really really irked. I hated the show so much that when I left I walked up to the box office and bought a ticket for another show nearby just to wash the bad taste out of my mouth.
  
• With the number of people in Edinburgh for the various festivals (book, comedy, music, and the military tattoo), you'd think there'd be relatively good audience numbers. Not so. I saw a show where I was one of three (!) people in the audience. The venue was small (essentially, a large reception room in a house) but it could certainly seat more than three people. It was a one-man play that was only okay, but the poor actor deserved more than the £17 he made that night.
• I missed out on getting a ticket for what promised to be an amazing show, How It Ended, a physical theatre/dance performance. I was on the stand-by list, but there were no stand-by tickets to be had. I picked the show based on the description, not knowing that it had received amazing reviews, and had I gotten a ticket it would have been my Fringe "discovery", that show that you have no expectations of and that completely blows you away. Alas.
  

My five days (more like 4.5, really) were not spent solely on the Fringe. A conscientious researcher, I also went to the National Archives of Scotland (the building in the middle of the photo below) and looked up some of Robert Adam's letters. They were, for the most part, useless, but being in the lovely archives and getting to read and touch letters written in 1755 was pretty fucking cool. Last summer I'd e-mailed the archives asking for a quote on photocopying and mailing the letters I was interested in to Canada. The quote came to £115. Having now seen the letters, I'm very very relieved that I didn't get them.


Also, I ate haggis for the first time (the stuffing looking food underneath the chicken). It had the consistency of dried stuffing but tasted good.


And then, after five days of on-and-off rain, hit-and-miss theatre, disappointing research, and confusing navigation through the windy streets of Edinburgh, I was on a train to Sheffield.


I miss the Canadian summer.