I went to the Edinburgh Fringe last weekend and here’s a quick rundown of what I saw.
Friday
The Amazing Bubble Man
Yes, I started my Fringe with a kids’ show. Of course there were adults there but all the others had come with small children. However, the Amazing Bubble Man had been highly and repeatedly recommended (“He blows bubbles for an hour. He’s amazing. And he’s a man. There’s not a lie on the poster.”) and yes, he’s good. He does indeed blow bubbles. He also fills them with smoke and helium and lights them up and pops them in slow motion and fires lasers through them. The majority of the target audience – the small kids – didn’t appreciate it enough.
Adam Hess – Seahorse
I stuck this one in my planner months ago, can’t even remember why. This is Fringe stand-up – more charm than professionalism, small over-hot room and a feeling that half of it is being made up as it goes along. And then all of that is turned upside down at the end when a fail in the middle turns out not to be a fail at all and it only takes two or three photos of moments mentioned half an hour ago to get the whole room shrieking in triumph.
Marcus Brigstocke – Devil
I did think twice about going to be this one because Marcus Brigstocke tours and mostly I feel like I should see comedians in Edinburgh that I can’t see anywhere else (with a couple of special exceptions, obviously) but Marcus has managed to avoid my corner of the world while also putting his poster right in front of my face all the time. The hot room became part of the atmosphere here – I never for a moment expected (spoiler alert!) for him to do the entire show as Lucifer, complete with red paint and horns and a Voice. It was unnerving for quite a while – I could see a comedian but at the same time, I could see the devil and it’s probably not so surprising how well the political stuff fits in that narrative.
Andrew Maxwell – Shake a Leg
Would it be the Fringe if I didn’t go to see Maxwell? Whenever he’s on stage, I realise I’m seeing someone who’s simultaneously really good at this and also terrible – that is, most of the time it feels like he has no idea what he’s going to say and yet an hour of stuff that makes sense and is funny follows. I feel like he shouldn’t need to write a show. All you need to do is give him at any moment a microphone and an audience and order him to talk hilariously for an hour and he could. It just comes naturally to him. My favourite thing? The fact that he invariably introduces himself as “your clown for this evening!”.
The Noise Next Door’s Comedy Lock-In
I’ve seen The Noise Next Door a couple of times before and I couldn’t resist a relatively late-night show with guests, particularly when the guests turned out to be the utterly likeable Rich Wilson and the beglittered Lauren Pattison, both of whom I need to see more of. The Noise Next Door do improv and musical improv, kind of like the Comedy Store Players but a younger, more millennial version. Could have done without the cake stuffing though – picture the Bruce Bogtrotter scene coming to life right in front of you (it was for a birthday, I don’t think it happens every night).
Saturday
Shakespeare for Breakfast – The Taming of the Shoe
Another Edinburgh must for me. Yes, it starts at 10am but it includes free coffee/tea/juice and a croissant and I make a point of saving the pot of jam that comes with my airport breakfast toast for it. It’s a Shakespeare play performed by two people in just under an hour and set… somewhere else. In 2013 I saw the Taming of the Shrew as the William & Kate wedding, in 2015 Hamlet as a pretentious drama student and 2017 Macbeth as MacGary. This year it was the Taming of the Shrew again but this time in a Dagenham shoe shop, with Bianca’s dad and husband played by the same person and Bianca and her husband’s mate played by the same person, in only half the costume. It’s always fun, it’s always lively and it’s always imaginative (although I’m always glad when it’s a play I already know a bit about).
Lou Sanders – Shame Pig
This was one I was flyered for. I planned, on Friday, to see all the shows I was given flyers for, before realising I don’t like the look of a lot of them and the ones I do fancy mostly overlapped. Lou Sanders was somewhere scuppered by the room being so hot that I spent most of it trying not to fall asleep. I appreciated what she was trying to do but it needed a bit of smoothing out and I needed to not be so tired. Sorry, Lou. I’ll try you again next time – I have a long history of preferring people the second time.
Nick Doody – PG
And my third Fringe regular. Nick Doody deserves to be better known than he is. He certainly deserves more than fifteen people sitting in an empty nightclub while half a dozen Scottish men have a yelled conversation right behind us. Granted, the show feels unfinished right now – I was at his very first show of the Fringe – but it’s all there and it includes several songs and I think the only thing wrong with it was that the audience was too small to create any atmosphere. The microphone fell loudly and heavily out of the stand twice and took a slow and delicate dive not quite to the floor as well, which got the biggest laugh of the whole hour, which isn’t fair. Go and see him next week. The show will be good by then. I wouldn’t have gone back as often as I have if he wasn’t any good.
Jayde Adams – The Divine Ms Jayde
I missed Jayde last year somehow – sold out or I was elsewhere or… I can’t remember. So I wanted to see her this year and she was not what I expected. She came out dressed as some kind of Empress and then stripped down to all-over rhinestones and looked spectacular. And she sings! I didn’t know that! Oh, she’s very good and very magnificent and I’m so glad I decided to go and see her.
Tape Facebook Live
I wanted another late-night show because with the pub opposite being so noisy, I’d be awake anyway. And this… well, it’s Tape Face doing a live Facebook broadcast. The first half of the show was kind of a rehearsal and the second half was the broadcast itself, featuring three guests and another over Skype who I don’t want to even think about because he did a freak show act including during the rehearsal the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen (except I didn’t, I turned my back and put my hands over my ears and have tried to block it from my memory ever since). He does something unspecified but equally gruesome, I assume, in the live broadcast. I didn’t watch and he didn’t say what it was but it involved a drill, wet noises and horror from the audience. We were let in while they were still getting ready, so we saw the setting up, Tape Face answered questions (mostly ones that weren’t actually being asked, “Yes, I’m a kiwi”, “this is the only brand of tape I use” etc) and then we all planned the show, including picking people from the audience to do bits. Tape Face untaped is kind of really adorable. If you want to see the finished product, this is it:
Sunday
Finding Fassbender
I went to see a play! Actually, I’m not sure “play” is the word but the programme describes it as “theatre” so I suppose it’ll have to do. Anyway, it’s one woman who pretends to throw up six times in all and I thought it was real the first time, so that began well! It’s about a woman who moves from Wolverhampton to London, discovers that Michael Fassbender used to live in her flat when he was a student, sets out to impress him and discovers herself in the process. I relate. I liked it. I came out with Resolutions.
Speechless
I always like to see some sketch comedy and previously this has been provided by Jigsaw and Giraffe. This time it was Speechless, who wore mime shirts and did a series of sketches in silence. I think having a recorded soundtrack is cheating the silence theme a bit but genuine silence would be seriously weird. They were clever and they were funny and although I saw the mouthful of water coming in plenty of time, the entire audience just died of laughter at that moment. Recommended.
Flo & Joan – Alive on Stage
You know the two singing sisters from the Nationwide adverts? Yeah, them. They’re really good, really comedically and musically talented and it’s taken far too long to see recorders used in actual music – and not just the school-size descant. Joan produced a soprano and Flo a tenor (maybe a treble?) and a bass. They’re clever and the audience loved them and I think of all the spontaneous “Yeah, that might be good” shows I’ve ever seen, I think this was the best.
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