Picking a show in Edinburgh can be pot luck, but among the mediocre and the downright awful, there are many gems. Deirdre Falvey randomly selects a few of the better shows at the Fringe
The Edinburgh Fringe is about many things, and one of those is the solo performance, whether comic or dramatic. It's a festival city of worlds within worlds, where the television festival, say, co-exists alongside the International Festival, alongside the Tattoo (not to mention the books, film or jazz festivals), with hardly an intersection to speak of. And within the Fringe festival, the comedy revolves around the Big One. After 25 years it's hard to stop thinking of it as the Perrier, but it's now, cumbersomely, called the If.Comeddies award, named after its new title sponsor, Intelligent Finance; the logo italicises the eddies bit, in an effort to encourage the adoption of a shortened, informal "eddies", but, as some Canadian film award has apparently already bagged the name and is in a bit of a tizzy about it all, the final nomenclature is still up in the air, so to speak.
Not so the winner, Canadian Phil Nichol, who was announced on Saturday at midnight, for his show The Naked Racist at the full-time comedy venue the Stand. The hard-working (he did up to four shows a day all month) Nichol's fast-moving show is about his break-up and a lonely, debauched and druggy Amsterdam weekend, and it ends with Nichol - and a rake of the crew and front-of-house people - getting their kit off, hippy-dippy style, for the finale on the "stage" of the tiny venue. He and the other nominees for the £8,000 (€11,827) prize - Irish softie David O'Doherty (way-hey), second-generation British-Bengali GP Paul Sinha, verbal and physical sketch troupe We Are Klang, and charming stand-up Russell Howard, along with Best Newcomer winner Josie Long - do the usual nominees' shows (the Intelligent Finance Comedy Awards Season) in the West End this autumn, followed by a UK tour. Former Galway Arts Festival director Rose Parkinson, who's producing those shows, having worked on the awards in Edinburgh with award director Nica Burns all month - "it's been a bit of a mad roller-coaster," she says, "but a great experience" - would like if there was a possibility to bring the nominees' show to Ireland too, as part of the tour.
Doug Stanhope, self-styled comedy hardman and 2008 US presidential hopeful, had a raft of excellent reviews early on and was speculated about as an If.Comeddies nominee, but in the heel of the hunt he didn't make the shortlist. He was at the George's Square theatre in the university area, a venue whose lack of convivial mood he moaned about (when I saw him, at least) so much that he almost willed a poor atmosphere into being. He's a comic who sometimes sabotages his own gigs, and whose shows are erratic in quality: witness his Kilkenny comedy festival experiences in June - which, apparently, he referred to in some shows (and does so on his website).
Not much point in rehashing his or anyone else's version of the mess he made of trying to push the boundaries (he did a half-cocked routine on statutory rape, in the middle of the Mr A controversy) - a fair enough thing to be doing in a world of safe and cosy comedy. Though his own version, on his website, of the Irish reaction just seems to show that he didn't get the issue. He can be a terrific performer, all the same, and one who comes with so much pre-show publicity about risqué material that you wonder why some people walk out of his shows - he's only delivering on the promise to offend. For all that he's a memorable comic with style and edge, it's not abundantly clear that he has any real message ar anything more significant to say than most comics.
FURTHERING THE DESIRE to stretch comedy, Stanhope and Brian Hennigan had a regular late-night show at the Fringe called The Unbookables ("Some comedians go too far . . . nightly") featuring a range of comics doing darker material and exploring subjects and attitudes that are not the focus of safe, mainsteam comedy. It's the sort of thing that could be brilliant, or could be a desperate mess. Sadly, the night I planned to go the show was cancelled, so it was, in all senses, unbookable.
Solo performers often mine their own life, or some version of it, for material. And some of it's clearly fantasy. How to Butcher Your Loved Ones was the cheery, upbeat title of newcomer - hell, he looked 17, even if he was in his 20s - Andrew Lawrence's show. A skinny redhead with oodles of talent, he was a bundle of nervous, madly gleeful energy and dark humour, with a voice that sounds like it's on helium, a bag of accents and some musical numbers. He made the If.Comeddies Newcomer list, deservedly so, and you'd want to watch where he might crop up next (and hope his first Edinburgh show isn't a flash in the pan).
From first-timers to elder lemons. Comic-poet John Hegley's been going to the Fringe since 1989, and his experience shows. His Elevenses show is great entertainment - working the audience, reading his word-play poetry, putting it all into the context of his parents, daughter, childhood. He has the manner of an acerbic, droll schoolteacher (one of the audience asked him if he ever was one; why would I, when I can do this and behave like one? he replied).
Amy Lame's Mama Cass Family Singers was a semi-theatrical solo comedy show which also mined Lame's family story; her siblings and parents even feature in video inserts in the show. But reality somewhere finds its way up a one-way street as she develops her family story of how she and her two sisters and brothers were kidnapped by Mama Cass who made them into an obese child musical sensation for two years. A delicious fantasy with sassy attitude.
But thank God, all the same, for a stand-up who's not afraid to interact with some pressing realities: the truth figures fascinatingly in Shappi Khorsandi's stand-up show at the Pleasance. An Iranian who grew up in west London, her assured, entertaining - and informative - show ranges over her own family (her father was a banned dissident and her eventful family life of exile involved fleeing persecution and death threats) and Iran's histories (how the Arabs imposed Islam, the various Shahs and the Ayatollah), with various intersections between the two.
Obviously, in the current political climate, her show has an added pungency; refreshingly, she has a sparky mind of her own, and is scathing, for example, about the fight for girls to have the right to go to school wearing "a sleeping bag". Shappi is both Iranian and a nice middle-class English girl, and she manages to bridge the chasm with smart humour and basic good sense.
A MORE USUAL middle-class background is the breeding ground for Lucy Porter's show, How to be Good. She opens dressed as a carrot - the show is, she tells us, modestly sponsored by the British Carrot-growers' Association, because of her concern about the creeping commercialism of entertainment. She ranges amusingly over her various attempts to do the right thing, and how she falls down or is thwarted, ending with her own eulogy. A charming, likeable, entertaining show, with a theme that captures a current topic even if doesn't go anywhere with it.
Also charming was quick-talking Russell Howard, another If.Comeddies nomineee, with a joke-dense set of mostly usual stand-up fare about life's little quirks. Good natured, and eschewing the vicious streak you find in some current stand-up.
It's not always the performer's own life, thankfully, at the heart of a solo show. Aidan Dooley's theatre show Tom Crean, about the Irish Antarctic explorer, which won a Fringe First, is one such example. And although the worlds of comedy and theatre do not often interact, sometimes there's an attempt to cross the border. Comic Daniel Kitson cropped up at the Traverse, Scotland's home of new theatre writing, with C90. It wasn't billed as stand-up comedy, and is clearly a marker from him that he wants to spread his wings, in writing terms.
The solo show tells the story of Henry, on his last day in his job cataloguing compilation tapes which mysteriously appear in his office. Well written, with nicely delineated characters, and a bit of intrigue thrown in, it had excellent reviews and won a Fringe First. But I kept wondering about the emperor's clothes - and why is this on the stage rather than the page? It was a good short story, well enough told, and nicely staged, but really, so what? Couldn't it have been on radio? Solo shows are essentially undramatic, untheatrical, in form. And this one just underlined that.
David O'Doherty's nominated show, too, is loosely autobiographical, in a self-conscious and really silly sort of way. Invoking Dylan's Chronicles as a framework for a number of odd incidents from his own life: buying a laptop, "meeting himself" on radio (hearing an interview he'd no memory of doing in the early morning), being born 12 days before Tiger Woods, visualising his own, "least sad" funeral. All adding up to a lovely, gentle show punctuated with his characteristic "very low-energy musical whimsy" on his small electronic keyboard. An incidental, funny line in his show is supposed to be typical of all Irish plays - "oh no, our daughter is pregnant from swimming in the Protestant swimming pool".
In fact, it's probably in theatre at the Fringe, particularly, that reality is firmly engaged. But that's another story.
Interview with David O'Doherty, Friday
Words get in the way
Long Life: There's a lot of moaning, shuffling, grunting, staggering, creaking, muttering and straining in Long Life. The New Riga Theatre's show at Edinburgh International Festival is a two-hour wordless piece set in a Latvian older people's apartment block. This may not sound at all promising, but director Alvis Hermanis's production is a riveting, moving - and very funny - piece of work. Based on extensive workshopping, it deals with an unglamorous subject: how old people live, how people deal with ageing. It follows a day in the life of five characters in a most deliciously cluttered set, encompassing the living spaces of two couples and one individual. The five appear to be very, very old - every move is tortuous and shaky - and what starts as horror at the disintegration of the human body, gradually becomes admiration for the individuals, their spirit and how they lead their lives. The ensemble looked at curtain call to be in their 20s, and didn't seem to wear a huge amount of make-up; it is amazing how body movement alone can be so ageing.
This is director Brian McMaster's last EIF after 15 years - his successor is Jonathan Mills - and this week includes the world premiere of Calixto Bieto's Platform. The Jack Tinker Spirit cf the Fringe Award was, unexpectedly, presented to McMaster by Fringe director Paul Gudgin.
The Convent: The Convent, from innovative Norwegian Jo Strømgren Kompani (who brought The Hospital to the Dublin Fringe a few years ago) at Aurora Nova, is set in a convent in the back of beyond, where three nuns are living in a small convent, where any divine harmony there has disappeared along with the food and water. The trio speak in a nonsense language that sounds a bit like Swiss-German, but isn't. Sounds dreary? Think again, think three religious alone on an island and the interplay and bitchiness and madness involved. It's far removed from Ted, but something in it evoked a memory. The Convent is beautiful, exceedingly funny and a bit bonkers.
The Aurora Nova strand of the Fringe - cutting-edge physical theatre and dance, at a couple of venues in the beautiful St Stephen's church on the edge of town, and programmed by Dublin Fringe Festival director Wolfgang Hoffman - won a bunch of awards at this year's Fringe, including a Fringe First for CoisCéim's Knots.
Ron Mueck: Confront your inner humanity with Melbourne sculptor Ron Mueck's startling figures with great presence and vulnerability at the Royal Scottish Academy: both enormous, perfectly detailed figures and miniatures. A newborn, a contemplative woman in bed, a naked man lost in a boat. Technically amazing, and emotionally moving. Mueck holds up an unsettling mirror to the viewer (until Oct 1).
Being There: Harry Benson's 50 Years of Photojournalism is a stunning show at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (until Jan 7) from a Scottish photojournalist who went to the US to snap the Beatles on tour, never came back, but found himself in the right place at the right time - such as when Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
The Edinburgh International Festival runs until Sunday, finishing with the traditional fireworks concert. www.edinburghfestivals.co.uk has information and reviews on all of the Edinburgh festivals plus links to the individual festival sites
