Edinburgh Fringe is exhausting but wonderful. Taking a show up there can be a daunting experience, whether it be to the main Fringe festival itself (which sounds like an oxymoron), or to the parallel ‘Free Fringe’ run by Peter Buckley-Hill. It can be revelatory in terms of your stamina and limitations as a performer, the constant drinking and hangovers in conjunction with daily performances can be draining, but it’s also a fairly seminal tick in terms of the bucket list cross-offs.
Of course, traversing the Fringe and its treats isn’t just about your own production: there is some of the most exciting theatre, comedy, cabaret and experimental performance work in the world gathered together in the Scottish capital each August. Some of the highlights we managed to catch during our mid-festival week in Edinburgh included gay comedian Stephen Bailey’s ‘Neon Heart’, (The Gilded Balloon, 4.15pm), which traced with a certain camp hilarity the wrath and sorrow of a gay broken heart.
The Penis Monologues (The George Next Door, 6.05pm) was a rough and ready Free Fringe show told by four straight middle-aged blokes, which managed to be uniquely engaging and insightful, despite its provocative title. It told all four men’s various anecdotes about learning life through their penises, through child’s play to adolescent sexual awakening to visiting brothels. Recommended.
Over on the Cabaret side of things, the fabulous Eggs Collective wowed all with their very funny and surprisingly deep three-woman show about a drunk girl’s night out (The Counting House, midnight). Kicking off the day and shaking away the shackles of last night, and reality, was London spoken word artist Charlie Dupré’s The Philosorap Cabaret (The Banshee Labyrinth, 12pm), a one-man show where he interviews various philosophers in non-sacrosanct ways, including a rap battle between God and Richard Dawkins.
For a more traditionally theatrical play, The Tulip Tree (The Space, 4.10pm) was an excellent telling of the untold love story of Enoch Powell, written by up-and-coming playwright Oliver Michell. If you like theatre and performance, and get the chance next year, get yourself up to Edinburgh!
• Edinburgh Fringe Festival Highlights
1st – 25th August, 2014
www.edfringe.com / www.freefringe.org.uk
