It may be the biggest arts festival in the world, this Edinburgh Festival Fringe but Mannix Flynn was not happy. He said there had been noise in the venue right through his show. He said there was pandemonium from the bar: "What kind of festival can't get you a quiet room? I came here to give my show to the people of Edinburgh and the people of Edinburgh have f---ed off. Like the Northerners on the Twelfth. All that's left is a load of foreigners and a few tourists."
The Dublin-born actor has performed little in recent years. His show Talking To The Wall (running at the Honeycomb at the Gilded Balloon until the end of the Edinburgh Festival on August 30th) about the progress of a working-class Dubliner through reform school and prison, marks his return to the professional stage. The show had a workshop performance at the Da Club in Dublin earlier in the year but this time it comes directed by Garrett Keogh and designed by the fashion photographer, Perry Ogden. It is bound for the Temple Bar Music Centre during the Dublin Theatre Festival.
But it is not in the theatre festival. Flynn does not like festivals and he certainly doesn't like the biggest one in the world. On Monday night he went public with these opinions on BBC's Edinburgh Nights show, voicing the frustration which many performers on the Fringe must feel. Having moved heaven and earth to get here, he was faced with poor conditions for his performance and poor audiences, despite featuring on The List's theatre Hit List.
Very few shows actually fight their way into the light. Ironically, however, it now looks like Flynn's will be one of them. Yesterday morning I opened my copy of The Scotsman to find a tabloid-size picture of Flynn, and a five-star review under the heading "The Main Event": "For all its horror," writes Owen Dudley Edwards, "it is an achievement as dazzling as any Ireland has sent to Edinburgh." Punters rely on those star ratings in The Scotsman more than anything else in deciding what to see; Flynn's show will probably pack out. It's the kind of twist to a story which does the heart good.
