Fringe Review 5 – 6 – All Days Become One Day

I’m home, I’ve slept for twelve hours, I’ve failed to keep a daily blog. But here’s the round-up of what I saw on Friday and Saturday.

After my final show on Friday I took my only trip out to the Stafford Centre in New Town to see Hannah Chutzpah’s ‘Asking Nicely’, a show about permission delivered from a feminist perspective, which sounds like it might be short on laughs but which is actually full of light-touch humour and bubbly poems. This is a show that falls into a model I have decided to unilaterally declare as ‘the poetic lecture’. Basically, a poet takes some of their existing work (and maybe writes some new stuff too, ratios may vary) and links the poems together with a unifying theme, often one that links to their own lived experience. Tina Sederholm’s The Good Delusion, Rose Condo’s The Geography Of Me, and Sophia Blackwell’s Becoming Wonder Woman would all fall under this heading. The best ones are marked by several common features – clarity and coherence of the overall structure, non-threatening audience participation activities, effective use of props. Of the ones I’ve seen, Hannah’s has been most obviously set up as a pseudo-lecture, with white lab coat and all, and I really rather liked that. I also really liked her hand-drawn A2 sketchpad illustrations! And I’ve found myself looking around for any instances in my own behaviour where I seek permission, so it’s made me think. Belter.

So, whizz back up towards Cowgate, filling a stray half-hour with a dip into a real lecture from the Sceptics Society about de-bunking psychics and alternative therapists, part of the science and rationalism strand within the PBH Free Fringe. Very enjoyable, and funny, it was a bit unnerving to see so little difference between this and some other stand-up shows! Hmmm. (Starts thinking about lecture formats for next year’s Fringe…)

Then on to see ‘Shame’ by John Berkavich at Underbelly. Berkavitch has no need of little me reviewing the show, there are plenty of reviews to be read here, and all you have to do is mention his name to get an immediate gush of how fantastic the show is. It is, it’s bloody impressive, slick, super-high-tech in comparison to nearly all other spoken word shows (it’s not Free Fringe, obvs), massively entertaining and ultra-cool the way he uses his breakdance team of three as Greek chorus/living stage set. I particularly liked the way they transformed into a cappuccino machine at one point, a bicycle at another. So what is this mean little corner of me that wants to break it down? Mini-meanie-me. I’m just going to say it – take away the dancers and the tech, and this is a show with good but not amazing writing, well-delivered but sometimes with an unlikeable and confrontational tone, using a cut-up flash-back narrative structure that is now standard in contemporary theatre, dealing with an emotional subject in a fairly glib and superficial way, using anecdotal examples that are uniformly predictable. Phew. And now I wait for the gods to strike me down. Don’t worry, my opinion has as much weight as thistledown.

That was Friday.

Saturday started off as a shitty, shitty, upsetting day for me for various reasons that I won’t bore you with. However, I made two excellent decisions – firstly to drop in on the Scottish National Gallery for their Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition ’25 Years of Contemporary Scottish Art’, and secondly to go to ‘Talk About Something You Like’ by Byron Vincent at the Pleasance. Sitting in a room for an hour laughing till I piggy-snorted at stories of someone else’s enduring mental health issues proved a real tonic. This show has all the real bravery (ugh, horrid word), the genuine honesty and vulnerability that Berkavich claims at the end of Shame, but I don’t believe Berkavitch for a second. So he was a bit of a shit. He’s not lying in front of me re-enacting his failed suicide attempt, breaking my heart and still fucking making me laugh. ‘Talk About Something You Like’ takes its title from a set of hilariously inappropriate ‘top tips’ for patients incarcerated in a secure mental hospital, where our hero spent time after being sectioned. Vincent’s trademark talent is for gallows humour delivered in swooping, hyperbolic, surreal similes – seriously, he’s so very good at it. And yes, it’s all true, so you have to laugh or else you’ll cry. Fuck it, do both.

A Nicholson Street saunter took me up to Kingshall to see Fringe First award-winning play ‘Confirmation’ by Chris Thorpe, sometime partner in crime with the spoken word loveliness that is Hannah Jane Walker. It’s about confirmation bias, the human tendency to see the world in ways which reinforce our prejudices, assumptions and received beliefs. Chris seeks out someone who is ideologically as far away from his own belief system as possible – a neo-Nazi, but an intelligent one – and the two of them talk, exposing both the unbridgeable rifts between their world views and also the surprisingly extensive areas of overlap. For a more in-depth look at the piece, including Chris’ own thoughts, please go here, and then for god’s sake SEE THE SHOW. Really. It’s mind-blowingly good. I’m still finding it popping up in my head for another little chew-over. Please go.

And that was all I could manager before the BBC Slam final, where I got to the last bout but lost out to worthy opponent David Lee Morgan, whose show ‘Pornography & Heartbreak’ I’ve already mentioned on a an earlier blog.

Things I didn’t see and should have done, and now feel very guilty about – ‘Be Kind To Yourself’ by Tim Clare, ‘What The Fuck Is This’ and ‘Crap Time Lord’ both by Richard Tyrone Jones, and probably a metric fuckton more. But enough. It’s good to be home. Godspeed to the manics still up there doing the full run, you have more stamina than me, mateys.