Monday
A tale of two powerful women as the Edinburgh fringe enters its opening week. Nica Burns is a West End producer and the impresario behind the Edinburgh comedy awards. The fringe launches each year with her state-of-the-comedy-nation address, which this year hymned the art form’s ongoing dominance of the festival. Fair enough: it needs the exposure. “I love this festival,” says Burns, because “there is nowhere else for comedians, but also comedy as genre, to get the full spotlight on them”.
Forgive her bullish mood. The Edinburgh comedy awards, forever seeking new sponsors, lives or dies by the name recognition of former winners, and after the globe-straddling success with Baby Reindeer of Richard Gadd (awards champ in 2016), it has a new alumnus to crow about.
Speaking of crowing, Liz Truss is in town – but across the Scottish border, her Ten Years to Save the West shtick is even less likely to fly. The flash-in-the-pan PM was heckled today at her fringe appearance on Iain Dale’s All Talk chatshow, and responded to her harasser (“just apologise”, they interjected) by saying: “That is why the country is in the mess we are in.” Pot, meet kettle.
An Edinburgh comedy award may not be forthcoming – but another gripping Netflix serial about heckles, harassment and a woman’s psychological breakdown? Who would bet against it?
Tuesday
Everywhere, posters. Everywhere, a show. The Edinburgh fringe is a topsy-turvy world (or tapsalteerie, as we Scots say), where instead of art being a break from life, it’s the other way around. Between dawn and dusk, I’m more often in a show than not. And when I’m not, I’m assailed with images of shows, shows on the street, flyers for shows. Privilege though it is to be here – and I bow to no one in my love for this event – real life, life not being entertained, becomes something you occasionally crave.
Except this year, perhaps. Because real life beyond the fringe bubble (I’m told) does not look lovely right now. The far-right riots happening elsewhere in the UK have barely registered here in the Scottish capital. This doesn’t feel like an especially political year at the festival, give or take Sam Ward’s oblique take on xenophobia, Nation, at the Summerhall venue, none of whose reviews have failed to mention its unwanted topicality. Maybe next year we’ll see artists respond to this summer’s upheaval? Until then, the far-right disturbances must take their place alongside the 2011 riots, the Kursk disaster, the Russian invasion of Georgia and a dozen other headline-grabbing crises that happened in August and were seemingly only ever dimly perceived by fringe-goers.
Wednesday
I’m absolutely loving what consent culture has done to audience participation. For most of my life as a comedy reviewer, I’ve had to cower in the stalls, terrified of the abusive relationship between (some) comedians and their audience. “The commercialisation of schadenfreude,” as Daniel Kitson recently described audience participation, putting his finger on the laughter of guilt and relief audiences tend to emit when one of our number is dragooned onstage and humiliated for LOLs.
Audience participation – or (euphemistically) “interactive performance” – is hipper than ever, but it’s starting to feel as if someone has had a word with its practitioners. Because you don’t get manhandled on stage any more. You get asked politely. OK, so the antic Aussie comic Garry Starr wants someone to get naked with him on stage. But if you don’t want to – oh, glory be! – you don’t have to. “Shut up and give me a kiss!” Natalie Palamides instructed an audience stooge at her show, before adding, with due ceremony: “If you feel comfortable doing so.” After two decades, a critic’s buttocks begin to unclench.
Thursday
Where’s the buzz at this year’s fringe? That’s what we’re all here for: the unheard-of discovery that gets everyone talking. I’m still chasing but have not yet cornered my quarry. The buzziest show is Joe Kent-Walters’ late-night recreation of a Rotherham working men’s club turned portal to hell, Frankie Monroe: Live!!!, and there’s great work from Katie Norris with Farm Fatale and Jordan Brookes with his pretend Titanic musical, Fontanelle. There are household names in town (Bobby Davro! Miriam Margolyes!) but no one looks to them for thrills.
One fellow critic tells me with haunted eyes of a show that runs for several hours until two in the morning, and features a man methodically consuming three wheels of cheese. Is that buzz, or trauma? It’s not clear.
The most talked-about show in the run-up to the fringe was the play Terf, which imagines the Harry Potter cast confronting JK Rowling about her “transphobic bullshit”. It has not thrived on contact with critics.
Also in town, the trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, reprising the backlash she experienced when she became the face of Bud Light in America last year. The fringe is fabulously queerer than even a handful of years ago.
I even heard it said this week that the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, for years a bastion of machismo and trad values, now makes for camp, Eurovision-style viewing. The lesbian comic – and fringe veteran – Zoë Coombs Marr reflects on the changed landscape in her new show, delighted but also discombobulated that in modern comedy she tends to attract more affirmation nowadays than laughter. And that queer doesn’t feel very, well, queer any more.
Friday
The fringe is a marathon, not a sprint – or used to be. Probably in response to the vast cost of spending a month here, there’s a growing trend towards shows doing shorter runs in Edinburgh. When the Taskmaster star Sam Campbell won the comedy award two summers ago, it raised hackles that he did so having performed for only a fortnight. Tonight, another ex awards champ, Rose (Starstruck) Matafeo opens a short stint of her keenly anticipated new show. And in the theatre programme, it is opening night of Willy’s Candy Spectacular, a musical about the duff Willy Wonka Chocolate Experience in Glasgow earlier this year – which includes in its cast performers who staffed that notorious “attraction” alongside former child stars from the 1971 Gene Wilder film.
Another, even shorter run, is raising a stink. Jimmy Carr also opens in Edinburgh tonight – but not as part of the fringe. He’s playing three nights, and five performances, at £40 per ticket, at the huge Playhouse theatre (capacity: 3,000 seats). Laughs Funny, the show is called, but fringe comedy promoters are not laughing at the prospect of underpopulated auditoriums, as 15,000 audience members give their money and time to the man off the telly instead. Carr cut his teeth at this festival, way back when, and this incursion on its territory is not considered in keeping with the famous “spirit of the fringe”.
“Oompa, Loompa, doom-pa-dee-da,” as someone once said: “If you’re not greedy, you will go far.” Never too late to learn that lesson, Jimmy!
