31 August 2012
Last week we were in Edinburgh for our biennial visit to the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe. We’ve been regular festival-goers since our first
trip to Edinburgh in 1994 but I think this was one of our best weeks. We
relaxed our pace a little, only seeing 22 shows this time, but either the
standard is improving or we are getting better at picking things to see. We
averaged 4.1 on our own personal 5-star rating system, and only saw 2 shows all
week that we rated lower than 4 stars. I think we also managed a greater mix of
artforms than ever before: we saw drama, stand-up comedy, improvisation,
poetry, spoken word, orchestral music, folk music, opera and two BBC Radio 4 shows.
There were many highlights but I think our favourite show was ‘The Boat Factory’,
a play by Dan Gordon, produced by Happenstance Theatre Company at Hill Street
Theatre, which looked at the history of the Harland and Wolff Shipyard in
Belfast. This two-hander told the story of an apprentice starting work at the
shipyard in the 1950s. It was funny, moving and fascinating with both actors,
Dan Gordon and Michael Condron, giving stunning performances as a range of
characters.
We also really enjoyed ‘Dr Quimpugh's Compendium of Peculiar
Afflictions’ – a delightfully silly new chamber opera by Martin Ward and Phil
Porter, produced by Petersham Playhouse, which we saw at Summerhall. Three
singers, accompanied by three musicians, portrayed an ageing doctor looking
back at his long career and remembering the many surreal, bizarre medical
conditions he had encountered and documented – like an operatic version of Oliver
Sacks’ ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’.
We saw an amazing performance
of Ferruccio Busoni’s ‘Piano Concerto’ by Garrick Ohlsson with the European
Union Youth Orchestra, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, at the Usher Hall (as part of the Edinburgh International Festival). This
mammoth, five movement concerto, composed in 1904, lasts 70 minutes and
finishes with a male voice choir singing a poem praising Allah. It’s a wonderfully
over-the-top piece of music and it was fascinating to witness this rare
performance with Ohlsson demonstrating outstanding technique and stamina and
the glorious sound of the men of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus creating a
brilliant climax.
The most bizarre moment of the week happened during ‘Austentatious’,
an improvised comedy show which re-enacts the ‘lost novels’ of Jane Austen. We
were part of a full-house packed into a room above a pub watching the actors creating
the story of ‘Vanity and Virtue’ when a live pigeon emerged from behind a
curtain and flew in a panic above our heads before flying into an unsuspecting musician
who screamed and bolted from his position at the side of the stage. Shocked by
this sudden intrusion, in a split second I think we all moved through a range
of emotions – from surprise to terror to hysterical laughter – as we tried to
work out whether this was part of the act. The funniest thing was the
immobility of the male members of the cast as the women took control of the
situation, threw a shawl over the bird and carried it outside. At the end of
the show one of the actors said “every performance of Austentatious is
different but we’ve truly never had that happen before!”.
This narrowly pipped our
experience at ‘Midnight at the Board’s Head’ in which Fine Chisel Theatre
combined the pub scenes from ‘Henry IV Parts One and Two’ with a host of other
extracts from Shakespeare plays to create a show in the cabaret bar at Zoo
Southside which ended with the entire audience on its feet, re-enacting the
Battle of Agincourt with balloons and party poppers!
As well as all this we enjoyed
the excellent folk trio Bellevue Rendezvous, the play ‘Wojtek the Bear’, the
remarkable life story of Hervé Goffings, the excellent Martin Oldfield as ‘Pierrepoint’,
the last hangman, Liz Lochhead reading her own poetry, Mark Lawson interviewing
Ian McEwan and the brilliant Jasper Fforde speaking at the Edinburgh
International Book Festival.
