Review: Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Day 1

Despite, or perhaps because of the media hype, I've always wanted to attend the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I always intended to take advantage of my relative proximity to Edinburgh during the years I spent living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne by taking a day trip (or just hanging around Waverley station in the wee sma' hours until the first train back the following morning) to the Fringe, but somehow never got around to it. Living back in the North-West I thought my chance to attend had gone, as I was definitely not willing to shell out for the cost of rail fare and a hotel during the Fringe on top of the cost of attending various shows. But this year my luck was in. A close friend from my early postgraduate career had moved back to the "mother country" of Scotland and was now living in Stirling. A mere hour away from Edinburgh by train, Stirling was the perfect place for me to base myself for day trips to the festival, and with the additional perk of a very cheap rail fare up to Scotland, meant that it became a financially viable trip once more.

The plan for my first day at the festival was quite simple: there was one show that I definitely wanted to see, and after that I planned to go to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to spend some time wandering around the special exhibition Witches and Wicked Bodies. But, as the Scottish national poet Robert Burns made plain in 'To a Mouse' (1785), what you plan and what actually happens are completely different...

Arriving at Waverley this morning with some time to kill before the show I really wanted to see began, I consulted the fringe app on my phone to see what was happening nearby whilst I waited. The first show to really catch my attention was:

Show 1: Grated Expectations

An original three-man play, Grated Expectations takes the audience on a journey through various scenes of the novels of Charles Dickens via the medium of one man's fractured mind. The scenes selected are ones that will be familiar to many and a current of humour runs throughout the selection. But never far from the surface is the play's insistence that the heart of Dickens is a dark one; that for all the sentimentality and mawkishness on display in his work, the most powerful currents are ones of deprivation, violence and death. As my first experience on the Fringe, this was a useful one, for whilst it had comedic elements to it, it was also thought-provoking in a way that straight comedy shows are generally not. It also provided me with a reminder of the harsh realities for the performers in the Fringe: including myself, the members of the audience numbered three. Numbers so small would have been bad enough in a venue that held only twenty or so seats; in a venue which might reasonably hold anything up to a hundred, it was downright awkward. I wouldn't say that I would have laughed any louder or more extensively than I did had there been more people in the audience, but given the very limited numbers there I was slightly conscious of the importance of my reaction to their performance. Fortunately the piece withstood such scrutiny and the time flew by. It was an enjoyable experience and a good introduction to what the Fringe is about.

http://www.gratedexpectations.co.uk/Site/Edinburgh_2013.html,  theSpace on North Bridge 11.35am, 50mins, until August 10th.

Show 2: Austentatious: An Improvised Jane Austen Novel

This was the show that I'd earmarked to see today. Given that it was down to be a free show and that it was a show that was returning to the Fringe after a successful run last year, I thought that it would be popular so made my way straight to the venue. Even though I arrived half an hour before the show was due to begin, the size of the queue outside of the venue told me that I wasn't going to feel like I had done at the previous show (that I was just as much on show as the actual performers were), something which was confirmed to me when I found out I was 91st in line. As the strapline to the show suggested, the show was an hour long improv based around a title suggested by that day's audience. Once everyone had made their way into the venue - no small task as it was standing room only - the day's title was pulled out of a basket. Double 00Darcy was the suggestion that was selected, and the glint in the performers' eyes as this was announced suggested that what was to follow would be good. I was not wrong. The show was both extremely well performed and hilarious, with only a few pauses from the cast to even hint that this was an improvised show rather than a scripted one. The attention to generic detail was superb in both aspects - Double 00Darcy had his tea shaken not stirred, the villainous seductress attempts to catch our hero's eyes with an exotic roundel and a foreign card game and the action climaxes at the Lancaster Ball, otherwise known as the Thunder Ball. It was an hour well spent and I'd definitely consider going to see this show again if I had more time in Edinburgh.

http://austentatiousimpro.com/, Laughing Horse @ The Counting House 1.30pm, 1 hr, until August 25th.

After Austentatious the plan had been to head up to see the Wicked Bodies and Witches exhibition. But the scheduling for Austentatious had changed from what it had originally been billed, so by the time it actually finished I realised that, given the time it was going to take to actually walk from the comedy venue to the gallery, I probably wouldn't have that much time to look round the exhibition. So I decided to just stick with Fringe shows for the rest of the day.

Show 3: Darren Walsh: I am a Giant

After pottering around the Royal Mile for a bit, looking at all the show promoters and the various stalls set up to part me from my money, I decided that it was time to head to another show. I had been very tempted by a show by one of the Austentatious guys, but I decided to save that for another day. Instead I thought I'd go for something pulled up from my Fringe app again and this show was the one that caught my attention. A much shorter show than most of the ones that I'd seen being advertised, it also offered something different from what I'd seen before with an emphasis on word play and sight gags in the advertising summary. The show was true to its promise and proved to be an amusing half hour of punnery and visual gags that, amongst others, managed to highlight the closeness of dolphins to the leader of the Nazi Party. For all that though, the show's premise was wearing off by the end and I'm not sure I could have stood an hours worth of that type of comedy (or that it would be possible to write an hours worth of comedy solely punning). A definite case of less is more here I think.

http://www.iamagiant.co.uk/, Heroes @ The Hive 4.45pm, 30 mins, until August 25th.

Show 4: Old Jewish Jokes

For my final show I decided to go for something completely different to the last show I had seen, and a gig promising traditional one-liners seemed like just the job. Ivor Dembina's show combines traditional joke telling and observational comedy by framing the gags he tells within a comedic narrative of his own personal experience. The humour was, yet again, pleasant and not near the knuckle, which is probably a good way to wind down the day. The venue itself is sited in a smallish room off a noisy bar, and that could be somewhat distracting. So it's to Dembina's credit that despite the background noise, and the double interruption of late-comers to the show, that he managed to hold his audience's attention throughout the gig. 

https://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/comedy/old-jewish-jokes, Laughing Horse @ Bar 50 6.00pm, 50 mins, until August 25th (excluding Tuesdays)

Day 1: The Verdict

So all in all it was a highly enjoyable day with some good picks. The best show of the days was, without a doubt, Austentatious; several times during yhe show I had to wipe away tears of laughter. I also learned a valuable lesson of Fringe festival going: 'free' shows aren't actually free in the traditional sense of the word. Although subsidised to a certain extent by festivals within the Fringe, performers at these shows stand at the exit to the show asking you to pay what you think the show is worth. It's so embarrassing to have to do the walk of shame out of the venue but not put anything in the pot because you don't have any or enough change! So tomorrow I will definitely make sure I have enough to not to have to do that!!!