Edinburgh Fringe

Edinburgh Fringe 2023: A long overdue return to the best festival on the planet

The last time I experienced the sensory overload that is Edinburgh Fringe was in 2017 and while a lot has changed since then, the arrival in the city is still heralded by an avalanche of flyers for shows. Without fail, these shows are always on in five minutes and are always guaranteed to be absolutely hilarious. It was reassuring to see the Fringe in full flow and to realise that the chaos remains intact. 

Flyer overload

I battled my way to The Edinburgh Larder first for food and had a delicious Scottish breakfast, swerving the haggis and black pudding, much to the disappointment of the friendly chap serving. At that moment, I felt very much like an English tourist, but the ingredients. Oh my god, the ingredients. After food, I headed to Calton Hill, which I’d never been to before, despite visiting Edinburgh at least six times. From the hill, there are views of the city from every direction, including the quite awful poo emoji building, walnut whip or whatever it is. Happily, the poo is not visible from all angles and there’s enough beauty in Edinburgh to spare. Just visible in the distance are the bridges across the firth of forth, Arthur’s seat and the Old Town. Put all of this together, and Edinburgh surely has the most enviable views of any city in the UK. The weather was not exactly glorious but it was a real change from what the forecasts had been predicting. Within minutes, fluffy clouds turned what the Scottish might call a braw day into a dreich one. I fled the hill, taking shelter in The Advocate pub and almost immediately, the sun returned. Welcome to Edinburgh!

I had missed the fringe a great deal in my time away and had spent quite some time in advance booking shows and trying to work out what would be unmissable – harder said than done when I arrived just a few days after the festival started. The idea of turning up with nothing booked and over 3000 shows to choose from is too scary for words. Our first show was Reuben Solo, but as we had some time to kill, we thought we would see JD Shapiro with a show called If it ain’t woke, don’t fix it. With an edgy title like this, it was sure to be an incredible hour. The staff at the venue informed us that he’d simply not bothered to turn up for his shows. Maybe his non-arrival was an elaborate show in itself and I was inadvertently part of an art project? Reuben Solo did show up and this was a fun hour of a loud and often chaotic Aussie performing a show that had little in the way of flow. His easy rapport with the audience and his stunning abilities with a graph papered over any cracks for a strong start to the festival.

Our second show was Tamsyn Kelly – Crying at TK Maxx. The show was more on the personal side and Tamsyn is a good storyteller and has a good ability to form stories into a cohesive set, but the delivery lacked confidence to make the material shine. Tamsyn laughed a lot at her own material, which always confuses me; after months of writing and performing, it probably wouldn’t be that funny. But she’s a likeable presence and early in her career. She has daddy issues, which gives her something in common with Simon Amstell who was at the fringe to work on new content. For £18! His lines, even ones not fully formed, are so sharp and polished, you realise just how good he is at comedy. He would tell us that he’s a star, can sleep with whoever he likes and is very important, but he’d then remember that he needs us more than we need him. He needs the validation from an adoring audience, while he’s on a journey of healing and growing. His transition from bubbly but acerbic host on Channel 4 to a man on stage telling us he loves ‘bobbing up and down on a dick’ has been a remarkable one. While his current themes, of family, sex and drugs are familiar, his delivery is so controlled and charming that he remains intensely watchable. 

On our second morning we were offered free tickets to ‘a show about pirates’ that was starting soon so we went along. The venue was a minimal affair inside a hotel conference room with a box that said Sand! on it, thus flawlessly transporting us to a desert island. Two pirates come on stage and perform something akin to a poem with occasional funny moments. The writing and performances were good but the story shied away from the theme that pirates are pretty gay – this could have been developed further but what was there was charming. Most remarkable was the American accents at the end; I totally bought the Scottish accent from one performer and the other accent, a sort of strangled cockney, was nothing if not intriguing. 

In the afternoon, we watched Christopher Bliss, a novelist who is so busy writing books that he has no time to read other people’s novels. He’s a fan of the 3-page novel of the sort that gives the twist away in the title, such as ‘Karen turns out to be the ghost’ and through the show he reads us his novels, and gives remarkable advice to budding authors. It’s all silly fun that never takes itself seriously. 

Straight after Christopher Bliss was Tom Ballard, who I saw a few years back. He also doesn’t take himself seriously, opening with stories of him having sex with a male witch. Ballard takes great joy in being open and explicit and I suspect he might not be familiar with having a filter, which I am grateful for. Ballard muses on the Queen’s death, where it could be said he wasn’t a fan but he also takes aim at Rupert Murdoch and other billionaires, to great effect. He’s very loud and even when he asked if he was too loud, the audience all agreed he wasn’t too loud because Ballard is a force of nature. There’s also an angry edge to his work and his material on why capitalism is a disaster is both funny and thought provoking. A raucous standout at the fringe. 

The absolute standout of the fringe though, was Patti Harrison. Her show is called My Huge Tits Huge Because They Are Infected Not Fake! and I am sure I booked tickets for this show based on the title and ridiculous poster alone. I am glad I did because this is a strange beast of a show. Patti comes on with her phone by her side, advising us that the show is a work in progress and that we aren’t to look at her huge tits as there is a perfectly good reason for them being huge. She leads us down different ideas and ramblings, promising that the show will begin at some point. Throughout the show, she continues to say she will begin soon, while being in the middle of a story about her experiences with a therapist before wildly veering off to an aside about how she hates the British accent, or her love affair with a Hollywood star. It’s such a tightly controlled show that you are never able to work out where Patti will go next. She breaks into songs at a few points and unusually for a comedy show, they are funny and stick in your head. This is comedy of the highest order and I loved the experience of laughing uncontrollably at various points while the audience member next to me remained stony faced. The end of the show brings together what themes Patti has touched upon in a crescendo of chaos and screaming. As often happens to me when I enjoy a show, I have now become obsessed with Patti and will be telling everyone that will listen – and those that won’t – that this is a show that needs to be seen.

Top 3 of Edinburgh Festival 2017

Writing about Edinburgh is making me wistful, knowing it’s going on right now makes me both happy and sad. The festival really is the most wonderful bug and it’s a given that i’ll be heading back to Scotland next year for more. Here are my top three shows I saw, in order of totally subjective feelings.

Joseph Morpurgo – Hammerhead. (Pleasance Courtyard, 8pm)

Multimedia comedy is something Jospeh Morpurgo has turned into an art form, and this is the third show I’ve seen from him. Hammerhead is an unhinged masterpiece of stage craft and audience participation. His first show, Odessa, saw him weave a story about a Texan town out of a few minutes of old video footage. His second, Soothing Sounds for Baby, was his take on Desert Island Discs, with an increasingly drunk Kirsty Young. It didn’t win the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2015, which is either a terrible oversight or an indication of how good the competition was. Hammerhead is something of a change in direction as we are invited to a post-show Q&A where Morpurgo plays a monstrous, flailing actor who has just played all the parts in a 9 hour version of Frankenstein, including “the concept of wet”. As audience members are picked out to read questions, the actor’s ego grows at first as adoring fans congratulate him, then rapidly collapses when the questions turn nasty. His fictional Frankenstein production is an unmitigated disaster, and Morpurgo demonstrates this with some painfully funny projections and video pieces, questions from sources as varied as the dark web and defunct messaging services. His explanation of why his flyers were made on Microsoft Excel pushed me over the edge and, having failed to hear some jokes through laughing too much at the previous one, Hammerhead is something I will be seeing again.

In short, Morpurgo is one of the funniest and freshest performers around. Hammerhead is an exquisitely crafted hour of brilliance, where he toys with comedic conventions as easily as a cat would play with a ball of string.

Adam Hess – Cactus. (Heroes at the Hive, 6pm)

Sara Pascoe and John Robins dated, then broke up. This year their shows delve deeply into their breakups, making the most of their misery for all to see. Adam Hess wrote a show loosely about his own breakup, but doesn’t come close to the level of intimacy, choosing to focus the comedy around his own reactions to breaking up. It’s a brilliant hour of one-liners one after the other and a reminder that comics draw energy from the darker edges of life. There’s a tinge of tragedy in how Hess drinks to forget from a “world’s best nephew” mug when we discover the mug was from a charity shop. In this show, he turns every situation into something funny, with a greatly likeable stage presence.

Jon Pointing – Act Natural. (Pleasance Courtyard, 7.15pm)

Another comic monster is born! Pointing plays an hour as the ghastly Kayden Hunter in a drama workshop where his ego is the main star. It’s a brilliant take down of those self-satisfied presenters we’ve surely all seen, reminding me of an inspirational speaker I once saw reduce two woman to tears and piss off an entire room with his bizarre declarations like “I’m an outstanding teacher but none of you here seem to see it” and the like. Excellent stuff.

Edinburgh Festival 2017 part 3

Being at the festival from Sunday through to Friday can be full on, so we split the time by taking a day trip to somewhere where I’m less likely to be covered in flyers. In the first year I went to Leith, via the gorgeous Dean Village. Last year we took a train to Berwick-upon-Tweed and endured a storm and rain shower that reminded us of the glories of British summer holidays. This year we went to North Berwick, a 40 minute train journey away. It’s home to the Scottish Sealife Centre as well as the chance to take boats out to Bass Rock, a volcanic rock home to a large flock of gannets. The beach at North Berwick is wonderful, a soothing counterpoint to the relentless nature of the festival. Photos of the day are at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbutler

Back in the city, we went to see Annie McGrath’s Ambivert. I had previously seen McGrath as part of sketch comedy duo Twins, who performed a great show in 2015 and a luke-warm show in 2016. In 2017, McGrath is not quite firing on all cylinders, perhaps because the audience is just twelve strong; to put this in context, it’s the smallest fringe audience I’ve ever been part of. Her show has a fundamental flaw to it, which is that she feels her generation has it all really good and the best they can complain about is a lack of wifi. If she’s on about the generation who suffer zero hours contracts, student debt, insecure housing and high levels of anxiety and depression, and who will have to go through the nonsense that is Brexit… if she’s on about those, then she’s way out of touch with reality. She plays the posh girl well, but when she plays ignorant, too, the show just can’t work. Another theme is that she is an ambivert , which is neither an extrovert or an introvert. In a sense, she’s right down the middle, which is exactly where this show lies.

Later on, we go from an empty attic to a bustling basement to see Mae Martin’s Dope, which is a superb hour of deeply intimate and hilarious insights into Mae’s life, all going back to a childhood that sounds both loving and unconventional. Martin delivers a show rich in visual imagery, we learn that she was obsessed by Bette Midler as a kid and discover that not only did Martin wear an outfit that makes her sound like a weird Victorian child – all waistcoats and stiff shirts – but she also spent much of her youth sneaking into stand up shows and slowly developing obsessions about the comedians she’s watching. When told she was a “groupie”, she wonders if groupie means peer. Martin’s delivery is so joyful and positive that it’s a surprise when the show starts to venture into the territory of addiction. Addiction comes in many forms, from being addicted to an idea, to people, to substances. Martin confronts all of this brilliantly, and in the process I’m sure she will have reminded many of the audience of their own childhood obsessions. It’s remarkable this show is on as part of the free fringe, but I would expect those days are soon to be over.

North Berwick

Edinburgh Festival 2017 Part 1

Edinburgh in August can easily pass for the centre of the world, and no other city comes close to giving itself up in the way Edinburgh does. Only a World cup or Olympic host city can match the intensity of tourists and events, and to those cities, that generally happens just once. So, Edinburgh in August is where aliens would naturally head if they needed to find the main boss of the earth. More likely than not, they’d be flyered by an improv group who label themselves “witsters” (Oxford Imps, I’m glaring at you), asked if they want to watch “a chat show where a dinosaur is just one of the hilarious guests”, a suggestion which would push any self-respecting alien invader over the edge, or get invited to a show starting in “five minutes” – always, always five minutes – where Peter Pan meets Fatal Attraction. In Penge.

Welcome to the Edinburgh Fringe! It’s just one of the festivals taking place in August. Others include the Edinburgh Art Festival, the Royal Military Tattoo, the International Festival and the Free Fringe. Tickets sold last year for the Fringe reached 2,500,000 and as it’s the 70th anniversary of the first fringe this year, it’ll surely be even bigger. Cast your mind back to 1947, where a war-ravaged Britain was just recovering from years of hell, under the miserable spell of austerity and still having food rationed and reflect on what a fantastic idea it was to create a festival to give people some excitement. The first festival had its own fringe, where small acts not invited to the main party found venues around the city to perform in. 70 years later, it’s the biggest arts festival in the world and such an enjoyable and enriching experience, I imagine it’ll remain a central part of my summer plans.

This was my third Edinburgh Festival and over six days, I saw fourteen shows and took a day trip to North Berwick. On our first day, sort of fresh from a 4-and-a-half-hour train journey from London, we headed to our first show, Sarah Kendall’s One-Seventeen. Used to shouting, lots of swearing and the standard tricks of comics, Kendall’s work was a gentle introduction to proceedings and it is soon clear that Kendall is a skilled storyteller rather than a comedian and even though the main thread of her story is about divorce, everything in the show is quite low-key. From hamsters on their death beds to her son’s behaviour, this is a well written and at times poetic show, but one that lacks any defining passion.

Tapes! On sale!

Later in the evening, we trekked to the beautiful Assembly Halls, all Harry Potter on the outside and a bit crumbly on the inside to see Mark Steel. His show sets out the template that so many comics seem to do > come on with a massive grin > proceed to tell everyone how shit your life is > go pretty personal about your ex > slap hand against head and go “oh, you know what it’s like” > do some observational comedy. Steel added lots of sharp one-liners and plenty of surreal ideas into the mix but his delivery style showed he was out of touch when talking about transgender people but when he was on topics like politics or unsolicited calls from PPI companies, he really shone. As the show centred on his recent gruesome breakup, some distance from that would probably make the show more funny and less bitter.

The view from the Mound

Our second day included one play and two stand up shows. We started with The Dreamer, by Gecko Theatre Company. Having seen their beautiful show Institute, I was very excited to see what they would do when teamed up with a Chinese theatre company. The results are little less than breathtaking; the show opens with Chinese screen dividers being used to project a visually stunning backstory to the audience. Images come and go, stories are guessed at and the screens are whipped away. We’re suddenly in an office and somehow the performers have tricked us into thinking we know what we’re seeing. The level of precision on display is a constant surprise; the performers are always two steps ahead of the audience in making movements that delight and move everyone in the room. You may not get a chance to see Gecko at Edinburgh, but they perform regularly and are sensational.

Back to comedy for the rest of the day, with Jon Pointing’s debut solo show. Pointing plays Cayden Hunter, a drama coach/guru/mentor who likes to touch himself and demands adoration from the audience, giving irritated glances to us if we aren’t thrilled enough by his work. The show’s format is a drama workshop and he takes us through ways to be better actors, walking us through his life so far as a devised piece of physical theatre that is both cringe-worthy and hilarious. As with all ghastly comic creations, seeing Cayden fall apart is hugely enjoyable and Pointing doesn’t disappoint as the ego comes crashing back down to the room. His ending, another devised theatre piece of his death, leaves the audience wanting more.

Edinburgh is both a great festival city and a beautiful city

In the evening we see Adam Riches, Winner of the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2011. This is his first stand-up show since 2014’s Adam of the Riches and there’s an intensity to Riches’ work that places him in a league of his own, especially when it comes to audience participation. In the past, audience members have been made to play swingball, have fed him food “like starlings do” (for avoidance of doubt, yes, he wanted audience members to feed him food from their mouths) and shower him on stage. Riches pulls up a man onto the stage, to take part in a sketch about sniping, but the audience member is visibly uncomfortable, at one point saying to Riches “I’m not your fucking friend”. But through his charm and command of the room, Riches stops this from becoming a disaster before grabbing another audience member to take over. Audience participation is usually something people hate and while Riches makes the audience do silly things, he is constantly laughing along with them before doing stupid things himself; there’s a generosity and warmth to his show that makes him one of the finest comedians on the circuit. It is wonderful to have him back.