Walking around Edinburgh this month, you might have noticed the unusual number of standup comedians performing their shows outdoors. These natural basement-dwellers have been flushed out of their venues by various fire alarms and outages, including a city-wide power cut that caused the partial deflation of the giant purple cow inflatable in George Square. Oh, the humanity.
It would be only too easy to view the inflatable as a metaphor for the bloat of the festival itself, slowly collapsing under its own weight. But, as several performers have told me, their improvised gigs seemed to rekindle a sense of adventure that hasn’t been seen at the fringe in years. Much has been said about the dying spirit of the festival, with the spiralling cost of rent and general corporatisation. Maybe a massive power cut is what it needed after all?
Olaf Falafel, whose show at the Pear Tree was plunged into darkness during the power outage, continued performing by the light of his audience’s phones. “It felt like the kind of fringe moment that those who were there will tell all their friends about,” he said.
I myself suffered a fire alarm before one of my standup shows (My Gift to You) at Underbelly Bristo Square – though I didn’t have a moment of inspiration like Falafel. My audience queued outside the venue, and I avoided eye contact with them until the beeping stopped. Perhaps I missed an opportunity to seize the day.
As we waited to be given the go-ahead for my set, I watched the political and musical comedian Will Sebag-Montefiore perform his show, Will of the People, with an acoustic guitar from the steps of Bristo Square. His crowd was clapping and laughing, unlike my queue. He seemed at home performing his alfresco rap about Theresa May while in character as a Tory MP.
“It felt very, very fringey,” Will told me later. “I managed to get through a bunch of the material, a lot of which normally uses backing tracks. Instead, I just used my gumption. It went down well.”
Political comedy does rely on context, he said, so there are limits to performing it to random pedestrians. “There was a moment where I had to clarify that I wasn’t doing hate speech. I said some things in character as a Tory MP that I don’t necessarily agree with myself. The show had gathered probably double the amount of people that had bought tickets. It felt necessary to explain these weren’t my views, given the current horrible racism in the country.”
The irony isn’t lost on Sebag-Montefiore that he has paid a hefty fee for his venue and yet the show’s most memorable moment so far has happened outside of it. “I’m tempted to get someone to vape next to a fire alarm every show,” he said. “But I wouldn’t pay to perform it outside. I think there’s something special about mistakes. This would never have happened with one of my online videos.”
Elsewhere, Stefania Licari, who is performing her show Trust Me, I’m a Comedian at Bristo Square, found her power-cut experience to be oddly liberating. “It’s a very feminist show and extremely personal,” she said. “The narrative is about running an ultramarathon, but the drive of the show is the celebration of the voices of women, especially women in my family who haven’t had a voice. To be able to shout my material aloud outside was an experience that is hard to describe in words. I really felt the soul of the show, and I felt empowered.”
For some of the more chaotic acts at the fringe, emergency evacuations can improve a show. An unrelated fire alarm hit Nate Kitch’s Tomorrow Might Not Happen; Now at Gilded Balloon. “My show is quite fragmented anyway,” he said, “so the alarm became an absurd extension of it.” Kitch’s show is “all about the fourth dimension”, which includes a joke in which he leaves the room around the 30-minute mark. If the show is going well, he’ll then start to “work the room” from outside. It was at this point that the alarm went off. “People said: ‘I think he’s done this on purpose.’ Even my tech thought it was part of the show. I had to tell the Gilded Balloon staff I didn’t do it. I don’t think anyone knows whether I’m being serious or not, which I quite enjoy.”
Kitch took his show outside the building and on to Potterrow. “I thought: ‘I’ve paid a lot of money to do this, I’m not going to stop.’ Then other people who weren’t at the show started getting onboard. “I ended up playing to the biggest crowd I’ve ever played to at the fringe,” Kitch said. “Sadly, most hadn’t come to see me.” The comic and his new audience were spontaneously unified on the pavement as he described to them the jokes they’d missed. “One person said: ‘This is Beckettian!’”
It’s certainly not a heckle you’d hear elsewhere on the circuit.
• Alfie Packham: My Gift to You is at Underbelly, Bristo Square, Edinburgh, until 26 August
• All our Edinburgh festival reviews
