Tuesday 09.08.2011
Tone is feeling in need of some art-based refreshment so we go to the Fruitmarket gallery and see Ingride Calame’s solo show. Tone and I write a poetic qualitative response to try and move away from this quantitative evaluation that we have become enslaved to:
Tone – ‘Spirals fading in and out of each other like rockety maps. Wondering about the future. Thinking how long it must take to create something beautiful. Multiple images of distorted Europe (how appropriate right not). Colourful riots, pigment bashed against the wall. Thinking about breakfast in an airy gallery. I liked the colourful marble stairs.’
Fran – ‘Tiny islands off the coast of Nova Scotia. Each populated by pine trees and silence –interrupted by intermittent birdsong and the hum of mosquitoes that skim the sullen mossy floor. Leaching numerical graffiti bleeds down the alleyway wall. From the entrance, the roar of the traffic, stress of the street, mainroad mainstream drag. In the alley it is cold, dark, dank. The sun an occasional lunchtime visitor, admiring others peoples handiwork and slinking into cartographical day dreams.’
I like how Tone’s is less pretentious than mine to the point where she can’t quite escape the fact that she’s quite hungry and breakfast sneaks in. With breakfast in mind we go to the cafe across the road and then check out the Durer prints exhibition at the Scottish National gallery. I am quite taken by the drawing of the four animals that encapsulate the four humours – the melancholic elk, the sanguine rabbit, the choleric cat and the phlegmatic ox. What makes the Ox phlegmatic is it the chewing of the cud?
We head over to the venue and start flyering. We only received the flyers on Sunday and I am still struggling with the best method to utilise when flyering. The llama glove puppet lures people in but I worry it’s attracting the wrong crowd i.e. children. I flyer comedian Robin Ince and he looks at my flyer and goes ‘why should I come to your show?’ Slightly star-struck I mumble something about politics, science and llamas. He looks at my flyer and then looks at me and says ‘I’ll never see your show.’ I’m slightly taken aback until he says, ‘because I’m performing at exactly the same time.’ Oh Ince you kidder. I see Weaver across the road attracting vast hoards of kids in his cow suit. I have a vision of us performing in front of an assembly room of 12-year olds, sat on the floor with their legs crossed while Hardman injects his balls with saline solution.
I needn’t have worried however, as when 2.30 comes around all we have for an audience is one straight-faced Edinburgh man. Weave manages to recruit Matt the barmen (son of landlord Frank and the Buff’s clubs equivalent of Weaver) to double our audience to two. This is our most difficult audience so far. The Edinburgh guy seems resolutely stoic and Matt seems ambivalent to the prospect of an independent Scotland – perhaps if we’d been talking about an independent Pans he’d be more keen. We over compensate by ad-libbing too much.
Luckily half way through during the Richard II sketch an elderly Cheshire couple join the show. Wahoo it’s our target audience. Hardman, ever ready to insult new people on his first encounter, refers to them as ‘the old people’. However, he wins them over with a line about their fake tan. We’re both slightly dreading the Lumpman Joe finale but they take it well and at the end they come over and tell us that they’re members of the gateway theatre in Chester and we should think about putting it on in the small studio in the gateway. What started off as a potentially negative show, ended reasonably positively.
Show 4
Audience – 4
Money – £4.50
Fanzines sold – 0
Walkouts – 0
Afterwards we go for a drink in a generic Rose street pub.
Tone: ‘Fran is reeling out the politically incorrect humour now. Mainly about Our Troops (and an older right-leaning looking couple are having dinner over in the corner). Nervy.’
Me , make politically incorrect humour about our brave boys – surely not.
Generic Rose Street Pub (I’ll find out what it was called later).
Decor | 2.625 |
Atmos | 2 |
Booze | 2.875 |
Clientele | 2.25 |
Bar staff | 3 |
Average | 2.55 |
We move down the street to the gotherific black rose. However, although it may wear the trappings of goth I am most disappointed when I order a snakey B and am told that it’s too early in the day. I cannot believe this myth about the illegal nature of snake bite and a black continues in our enlightened times. Especially in Edinburgh New Town of all places – a product of the Enlightenment.
Hardman orders a Guinness and this leads to Weaver telling us about the fact that Guinness discourages the use of the shamrock logo in the foamy head of Guinness, because when it goes wrong it looks like a penis. I am enraged by this as I think that punters want the shamrock and Guinness discourages it seems like denying their customers what they want. However, Weaver argues it’s smart brand management. That Weave he’s all about the brand.
Tone and I head off to watch David Leddy’s – Untitled Love Story at St Georges west. I am quite sleepy at this stage and have no idea what this play is about. It turns out it’s set in Venice and it’s sort of about Peggy Guggenheim, a priest who practices Buddhist meditation, a PhD student whose husband has left her and a gay man who has an affair and gets some kind of STD. My favourite part of the show are the priests meditation bits – as I’ve long thought of the potential of hypnosis as part of theatre. I fall asleep in a couple but feel pretty relaxed throughout. However, the characters, Peggy Guggenheim aside are a bit generic and the show ends with a hideously gauche fountain prop.
Untitled Love Story | |
Theme | 3.5 |
Script | 2 |
Directing | 3.5 |
Acting | 2.25 |
Sexy | 2.25 |
Average | 2.7 |
Tone and I go searching along Rose Street for somewhere to eat. We settle on the 1780, which is a kind of Scottish bottle ale gastro pub filled with photos of the Irish. Service is slow but the food is good. I’ve had Haggis on every single day of the festival so far but on Tuesday I finally give in and have a lambshank – I can hear Baldwin making the chicken sound, then the turkey sound from far away in Stockport.
The 1780 | |
Decor | 4 |
Atmos | 2.75 |
Booze | 4.5 |
Clientelle | 2.75 |
Bar staff | 3.75 |
Average | 3.55 |
In a desperate bid to watch more comedy in between shows Tone and I rush to the Voodoo rooms where we find contortionist Chris Cross is just about to start his show. Billed as the Geordie Velociraptor Chris’ show consists of three weird tricks of the body and then a straight jacket escape. Tone thinks this is slim pickings for an hour long show. However, I’m impressed by the frankly disgusting stuff Chris Cross can do with his shoulders, particularly the KFC chicken bucket trick. He could do with some work on his jokes though – ‘where would we be if we didn’t have humour – Germany. No I’m only joking I hear that Germany’s a gas.’ Boooohhhh!
Chris Cross | |
Humour | 1.75 |
Skill | 4.25 |
Scotch | 2.75 |
Audience | 3 |
Sexy | 3.75 |
Overall | 3.1 |
We sprint back across town with Fran taking numerous wrong turns along the way but still make it in time to see the Audience by Belgian Company Ontroend Goed. The show begins with a brief tutorial for anyone who has never been in an audience before: ‘It’s acceptable to fall asleep, but not to snore’ etc. Then the performance begins with a roving camera scanning over the faces of the audience and actors voicing their thoughts ‘I want to be part of something beautiful’, ‘I’m beginning to look like my mother’. This part of the show is okay but after watching loads of stand-up comedy over the last few days I’m expecting something less gentle. Where are the inner monologues going ‘I am a dick’, ‘if I could kill all of you I would’ for example. This comes a little later when a self-help guru style character berates a girl in front row of the audience, calling her ‘ugly’ and then saying he won’t continue the show until she ‘uncrosses her legs’. This causes dissent in the audience, with much coughing and ‘cries of leave her alone.’ When he says that he will stop if someone is willing to stand-up and say ‘stop’ I do it, but worry that in a way it’s too easy for me to do this as I’ve been standing up in front of upwards of ten people for the past four. The show then concludes with a debate amongst the actors who are sitting in the audience and a music compilation conflating the crowds at football matches with those at fascist rallies. I really enjoyed Audience although I felt that there were several ideas spliced together that didn’t form a coherent whole. I particularly enjoyed the actor deliberately insulting the audience member below (note the high sexiness rating). And the complaints by members of the audience that they had paid money to watching her show were akin to football fans shouting ‘I’ve paid my money I’ll say what I want’, when they’re told to shut up for continuously harassing a player.
Audience
Theme 4.25
Script 3.5
Directing 4
Acting 3
Sexiness 4
Overall 3.75
We head on back over to the Voodoo rooms but see no sign of Weaver or Hardman, so we head on back to base camp.
