Edinburgh Fringe: Dipping In

Hello. I am up at the Edinburgh festival and have persuaded the lovely people at musicOMH to let me send my thoughts up, down and across (both ways) to you via the internet, which is almost as amazing, crazy, wonderful and irritating as the festival itself. You get bombarded with information, most of it factually incorrect, editorialised and written in overblown prose by someone who likes to use long words for the sake of them. Welcome to my Edinburgh Festival Fringe blog. If I use a long word I shall probably have had to use a wiki-dictionary to find the meaning before confidently using it in a spontaneous fashion.

Shows. There are lots of them, so it’s confusing. Theatre-wise everyone’s talking about Deep Cut. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t.

I have seen lots of comedy and a wee bit of theatre, so here goes. Go and see Michael Fabbri because he is wonderfully stupidly funny and made me laugh loads. He’s been steadily rising up the comedy ladder for a while and has always had a great comic voice that has sometimes been shackled by his own shambolic nature, but the fact that he is so funny that he makes you snort should be enough.

An all female sketch show, Ladygarden, was pretty good with an excellent bunch of young performers. Some of the sketches didn’t quite hit home – I won’t flag them up in case you see it – but the standard of writing was high and the performances were bang on. I loved the p*ss-take of vintage clothes-loving types and lots of other ones too.

The main reason I’m up here is to watch lots of shows, but I’m also (whisper) doing my own little show (it’s shambolic musical comedy if you’re interested, or just to clarify), so I am experiencing the highs and lows that all the other performers go through. Today was my second as I’m just here for two weeks and it was ‘okay’ although I have an interactive element to the experience and my main interaction involves dragging someone on stage to help proceedings. He was, of course, a reviewer. I need to be more aware of these things – though the sneaky blighter didn’t even get a notepad out and sat in the second row, so how was I to know?

Other shows that were good were… Stand Ups, Dave Longley – challenging and funny, Seymour Mace silly and funny, Mick Sergeant – a character, played by Lee Fenwick, who is an amazing character comedian and will do really well, I confidently predict.

Theatre-wise, I’ve seen You Don’t Need To Know That a surreal, well-performed and staged three-hander play where one character is trapped by two other actors playing loads of other characters. Does that make sense? Good. It was brilliantly performed and staged, I thought, though the pace dropped a wee bit before the end, but the performers then pull it up by its bootstraps and finish on a high.

I am just settling in to my Edinburgh routine. It is, as usual, mental and hectic. I have had precisely one celebrity encounter (Adrian Edmondson – not bad on the scale of things, particularly as Neil and Christine Hamilton were high up the list last year). Hang on, Jerry Sadowitz bought an apple before I was about to buy some strong mints – not as good as the other one, but memorable nonetheless.

I’ll end this first blog now and will attempt to contextualise everything a bit better next time, but I’m a bit rushed and running off to see Dan Antopolski, so forgive me....

Yours

Matt Tiller