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Strange brew

The weirdest week in Scotland

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Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday


Monday

I WAKE up, eat a quick breakfast and leave my flat to go to the gas chamber: just another day at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, the biggest live-arts festival in the world.

The Fringe is famous for plays that attempt (sometimes strain) to shock. The menu this year includes titles like “Gentlemen and Strippers” and “Shitty Deal Puppet Theatre Company's Complete History of Oppressed People Everywhere!” But the show getting the most attention for pushing the boundaries of good taste pulls off an impressive feat: it finds a new way to exploit the Holocaust.

"The Factory” asks you to interact

“The Factory,” mounted by the Badac Theatre Company, a producer of plays “based around human rights issues,” turns the death camps of Auschwitz into interactive theatre. “Tony N' Tina's Wedding” meets “Schindler's List.”

The papers have been full of preview stories, and the critics have generally praised it, raving about the intensity of the experience. The Guardian even promoted the piece with a flattering profile only one page after a review that lambasted the moral purpose of “Charlie Victor Romeo,” a skilfully produced docudrama based on black-box transcripts from real plane crashes.

“The Factory” has only one commercial problem: there's another show called “The Factory,” an avant-garde multimedia dance piece, playing a few blocks away, leading to some unfortunate misunderstandings. When I attended the dance-theatre version of “The Factory,” last week, a bespectacled hipster, standing in front of me in line, shouted jokingly “To the gas chamber!” before entering the theatre, making him, I would guess, the first person to ever be disappointed that he didn't wind up at Auschwitz.

Anyhow, there's no dancing at the other “Factory,” but the audience seemed equally enthusiastic. My wife decided to stay at home, so I stood next to a cheerful Scottish tour guide who told me, “I fancy seeing the reality of it.” Before entering the dank basement, where we were to meet our end, an usher broke the mood by asking gently if any of us were claustrophobic. No, we're fine, but thanks for asking, said a very game middle-aged woman. These Nazis were very polite.

Inside the dark, cool basement was the kind of stylish industrial lighting that you might find at a New York coffee bar. Banging on metal plates like members of “Stomp,” several angry, scowling Nazis, repeating a few obscenities in a stylised shout, herded us into rows. We were yelled at and pushed around a little, sent into increasingly smaller rooms of this cavernous brick underworld. But the actors playing Jews got the worst of it, dragged several feet, bullied and forced to strip. One actress, dressed in dusty stripes, looked around at the audience, imploring us: “We must do something. What do we do—walk to our death?”

Minutes later, the guard took her down the stairs and into another room. She continued to wail, talking to herself about the need to “die with dignity.” One audience member teared up and for some, it was clearly a gruesome, ugly sight, but I couldn't help but notice that behind her on the wall there was a white sign that read “No smoking.”

After being gassed by the Nazis, I thought it would be uplifting to then be entertained by some Israelis, so I walked a few hundred feet away to a different theatre in the same complex, The Pleasance Courtyard, to see “The Aluminium Show,” a spectacle so mindless and insubstantial that it could have only been created by a people secure in their future. Following in the footsteps of “Blue Man Group” and other such international wordless entertainments, this show features a team of athletic puppeteers who manipulate a variety of shiny wormlike tubes which flop, dance, fall from the rafters and pop out into the audience.

The aluminium is also put to use as couture clothes in a fashion show and turns into a cannon that fires sheets of foil into the audience. Pillow-shaped and round aluminium balls levitate on stage and join together to form a giant puppet monster.

The makers of the show ran out of good ideas about thirty minutes in (how many clever things can you do with aluminium, for god's sake?) but judging by the reactions of the kids in the audience, chances are the show will transfer to London, then off-Broadway and keep running to the delight of tourists—Jew and gentile, black and white, child and childish—until the end of time.


Tuesday

UNLIKE every other theatre festival in the world, the Edinburgh Fringe completely takes over its host city. In an age when theatre has been pushed to the periphery of the culture, it's jarring to see actors rehearsing Brecht in line for morning coffee, flocks of school-age drama students singing Stephen Sondheim in a back alley and most strikingly, marketing departments—usually comprised of actors in the shows being marketed—absolutely everywhere.

Blanketing the city like beggars in Calcutta, this army of promoters, fresh-faced and smiling, pass out flyers, chat you up and exude a very familiar brand of desperation. That may be part of the reason that not one of them has ever, as far as I can tell, convinced a single person to see a show.

PA

Yes, it's art

Still, they plod on. They get in your way, mumble incoherently and generally seem unable to articulate what makes their show different from the other 2,087. The Scotsman, bible of all things Fringe, even tried to help these aspiring stars this week by offering a tongue-in-cheek column of advice which including instructions such as “Wear as little as possible” and “If someone refuses to take a flyer speak an obscenity loudly as they pass—they may look back. You want that.”

Founded as a small, scrappy alternative to the more establishment International Festival, the Fringe began as a loose confederation of eight companies in 1947. It took a decade before they set up a collective box office and another one before they hired a full-time administrator.

In its original constitution, a radical document for its time, the Fringe announced that it “did not come together so that groups could be vetted, or invited.” The Edinburgh experiment has become one of the greatest success stories in theatres, spawning festivals all over the world, some of which depart from its defiantly democratic spirit. When the founders of the New York Fringe announced that they would curate (God forbid!) they were immediately branded sell-outs, spawning another short-lived festival that stayed true to the roots of Edinburgh.

The Fringe remains open to anyone who has enough money to mount a production, but its idealistic early days are long gone; it has become a big business. In my first two days this year, I saw major West End and Broadway producers and an off-Broadway artistic director searching for the next big thing. And this is the first year in history that comedy events outnumber drama, the heart and soul of the festival that has been gradually overtaken by the much more reliable ticket-selling entertainment of stand-up jokers.

Drama just wasn't selling. On my first night, I saw a one-man show that received a good write-up in the Scotsman. It had an audience of three, one of whom (all right, it was me) walked out. Avoiding artistic vetting can have its drawbacks.

About an hour after I left my flat to dive into the chaos of the festival, I was confronted by two awkward girls wielding glossy brochures and the wild-eyed expressions of true believers. They started pitching immediately, telling me about the fantastic piece of physical theatre that they were starring in only a few blocks away. I took their literature and asked what it was all about. They looked momentarily stumped, before one piped up, “Commercialism and consumerism.” They didn't laugh when I told them those were my two favourite things.

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Wednesday

YOU can always spot critics at the Fringe: they walk quickly, with the unmistakable weight of failure on their shoulders. They are thinking about all the shows they should have seen, wondering whether they could rise earlier, sleep less, read more pre-show press. Comparing schedules with a reviewer from London leaves me ashamed: she packs five shows into each day. “That's nothing,” she says generously. “Most people I know see ten.” Ten!?!

Dominic Hill, the new artistic director of the Traverse Theatre, the main home of serious drama at the Fringe, deplores this sort of bulk reviewing: how can you possibly appreciate any show when ten minutes before curtain your mind is wandering to transit strategies for the next one?

"Once and for All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen"

He has a point. I try to limit my schedule to three or four a day. Today they were all at the Traverse, where I began with the madness of puberty and finished with the punishing sanity of yuppiedom.

“Once and for All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen” is a dopey title about, as you might have guessed, teenagers. But it's a different kind of teenage drama, without excessive cliquishness, slangy banter or other clichés of the genre. This is the rare play about teenagers that actually seems like it was created by teenagers—and that's because it was.

Produced by a Belgian company and starring thirteen floppy-haired, loose-limbed kids, the show begins with ten minutes of what looks like total chaos. To the music of Velvet Underground, the kids flirt, shout, tease, roller-skate, shake pom-poms, rip off their clothes, fight, roll around and make a fantastic mess. It just looks like random play, but that is part of the set-up.

When the music stops, these sweaty, aggressive little nightmares, dressed in high socks and tight clothes, return to their starting places and do the same thing again. Watching it a second time, a complex network of relationships emerges. You now see that small stories are being told.

This is less a play than a series of choreographed vignettes illustrating how teenagers are stereotyped and underestimated. The kids seem both younger and frighteningly older than they are, curious and sexually frank, violent (sometimes playfully, sometimes not) and insistent on pushing limits even when there are none. At one point, an actress, looking desperate and slightly hopeless, pipes up, “I'm afraid that I'll do the same as everyone before me—like my parents.”

Of course she will—and that's a subtext of this deliberately repetitive show. These ferocious, energetic and completely natural performers act out sexual experiences and drug highs that are sometimes hard for adults to watch. By the end, I'm not sure whether their parents should be ashamed or congratulated.

“Architecting” was next on the schedule. It revived memories of university: talking glibly about books and tossing around half-formed ideas. The TEAM—an American troupe influenced by avant-garde companies like The Wooster Group and Elevator Repair Service—seems lost for most of this play, which spins a bunch of stories around “Gone with the Wind”, including a hackneyed plotline about a sleazy Hollywood producer remaking the book for the screen. There are ideas here, but they just hang in the air, amounting to nothing more than a theatrical bull session.

Daniel Kitson, a gifted comic, displays more focus in “66a Church Road,” my final show of the day. Surrounded by suitcases and warmly lit, this nerdy, bearded performer looks like a head of hair with some glasses peeking out. The show's subject is real estate, and he sticks to it, probes it, digs into it, analyses it until this simple, amusing tale of a house rented and lost acquires the depth of a sensitively observed short story. After nine months of looking, Mr Kitson has found the perfect flat, describing it as “the longest relationship of his life.”

The most memorable parts of the show are not the one-liners (though some are quite funny) but his ode to the importance of home. Estate agents don't understand it; they turn the romance of domesticity into meaningless jargon. “What all of us ever really want,” he says in the show's simplest and most meaningful line, “is something lovely.”

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Thursday

WEARING white makeup and a demonic smile, Martyn Jacques, who fronts a British band called the Tiger Lilies (pictured below), looks like the Joker in middle age. His two main instruments are a jittery accordion and a screeching, otherworldly falsetto that is best known for scaring little kids in “Shockheaded Peter”, a musical based on ten terrifying 19th-century German children's stories.

But Mr Jacques's band is definitely not suitable for children. Even fragile adults may also want to stay away. For while his songlist comprises touching ballads and rollicking pop tunes, morally, Mr Jacques is happily one-note—filth, degradation and more filth.

At a recent performance of his new show “The Seven Deadly Sins” I attended at the Fringe, his drummer ate his own excrement (or at least a very convincing stage prop). The audience loved it. An obscene puppet show and a podgy stripper who kept up a patter of ribald jokes also proved popular. The trouble began when the foul-mouthed puppets—a pair of homosexual lovers named Punch and Jude—pretended to beat a baby doll to death.

Photo by bLUE

Leave their dolls alone

A woman in the front row who apparently had seen enough rose from her seat and snatched the baby doll. Seeing this unfold, Mr Jacques, looking angrier than usual, leapt into the audience, wrestled the baby from her arms and stomped back onstage. Everyone laughed, but it soon became clear that this was not part of the show.

The woman, undeterred, returned to the stage, grabbed the baby and taunted Mr Jacques with it. Bad idea. The angry singer growled at this woman like a demented animal. He stopped the show and glared at her, then summoned security after calling her a vile name.

The Tiger Lilies are part of long tradition of foul-mouthed and sexually suggestive performers who have played in the famous Spiegeltent, a glass, velvet and brocade tent built in 1920. Thick with Weimar-era decadence, this Fringe mainstay sits inside the The Spiegel Garden, a popular open-air complex with a crowded bar, a mighty tree and a collection of circus sideshows offering all variety of lurid and naughty entertainments. As awkward as Mr Jacques's outburst was, it reminded me that in live theatre, there's nothing quite as exciting as something going wrong. Much of the Spiegeltent's appeal rests on precisely this prospect of entertaining error.

At the tiny Marquis De Side show (puns are popular here), a goofy Australian who calls himself the Balloonitic promises to stuff himself inside a household balloon. Of course, once he gets in, he can't get out.

The Tiger Lilies opened for the big extravaganza at the Garden this year: “La Clique,” an astounding late-night entertainment that includes a contortionist who puts his body through a tennis racket, a half-dressed hunk acrobat, a naked magician who pulls red napkins out of various orifices and a Spanish entertainer who cracks jokes and juggles to the music of Queen. All of the performers stick to a similar narrative: a boast, followed by a problem, and then triumph. As rough and raw as it seems, this show is polished drama.

Flirtatious and politically incorrect, La Clique is a throwback to old-style sideshows before those pretentious French-Canadians from Cirque de Soleil cleaned up the big top with bland, family-friendly elegance. These tawdry and talented young performers call themselves shysters and whores and make dumb jokes about foreign accents. They have done their small part to make the circus disreputable again.

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Friday

SOMETIMES you don't need a gimmick. Many of the most popular shows at this year's Fringe were simple affairs featuring an actor telling a story against a bare backdrop. “Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved”—written by and starring Mr Golaszewski (pictured below)—has been a surprise hit despite a storyline that sounds impossible to market: an actor sees a hot girl in a bar, falls hard but, sadly, it doesn't work out. That's it. By all accounts, this show should have got lost in the mix.

But this performer does such a charming job of describing something so universal (the first rush of love) that he's become an audience favourite. He describes Betty, the object of his affection, with awe, and then lingers on their meeting. When she “actually, soberly, willingly” kisses him, he compares it to “being the first guy to wear glasses.” Exiting this brief show into the rain that drenched the city all week, boyfriends and girlfriends poked each other in recognition.

Next up was another modest solo show, “Gilbert, Or Death by Obituary”, staged in a dingy little room at the Radisson, across from the men's toilet. After giving my name to the person at a desk that passed for a box office, I was told it was not on the list. Normally, this would be a problem but the ticketing situation at the Fringe this year was so riddled with errors—The Scotsman even suggested it put the Fringe director's job in jeopardy—that anyone could talk their way into complimentary tickets. So as soon as I frowned, the manager shook his head apologetically and sent me through the door.

Michael Vukadinovich, an American playwright, wrote this refreshing little blast of whimsy, which centres on the sad case of an obituary writer who lives in an area where people don't die. Our hero, played a little nervously by Kevin Broberg, seems lost, suffering from a lack of purpose, until an older lady calls in the death of her husband. He can hardly contain his glee.

Gentle absurdity is the dominant style here. Gilbert lives in a place called Towncity, which is run by a Mayor Corrupt. His campaign promises don't exactly pander. “I won't kill you in your sleep,” he promises. “Even the Kennedys couldn't promise you that.”

The heart of the story is the relationship between Gilbert and a woman facing her own death. Mapped with quiet, poetic touch, their scenes together have the offbeat comic tone of an indie film like “Juno”. Little of what she says is true, but the stories she tells reveal everything. The power of a good lie is also a theme in a much darker work at the Traverse Theatre.

“The New Electric Ballroom,” a melancholy fable by an extremely talented Irish playwright named Enda Walsh, features three sisters living in an isolated rural fishing town. It has received raves for its baroque, elegant language and moving performances. Mr Walsh's reputation has been heating up lately, with the success of last year's Fringe hit “The Walworth Farce,” a tragedy wrapped inside a comedy about a family who perform the same romantic play about their lives every day inside their ramshackle London apartment. He works with the same conceit in “Ballroom,” a companion piece, though with less inventiveness.

Breda and Clara, the older sisters, tell the stories of their youthful infatuations gone wrong as if they were characters in a Hollywood movie. They seem trapped by their stories—a common theme in Irish drama—and paralysed by what Mr Walsh calls the “terrible necessity” of the need to tell stories. And while Mr Walsh imbues his characters with a real empathy, one gets the sense that he may be stuck as well, repeating the same story again and again. Maybe that was his plan all along.