fringe benefits

The Edinburgh Fringe is one of my favourite places in the world. Although that statement does come with the caveat that there are a bunch of places in the world I still haven't been, it cannot be denied that the Fringe makes me so excited I do that thing where my hands wave about and my voice goes all high-pitched; let me tell you, the internet, that is MIGHTY EXCITED. I've been every summer for the last four years, either watching or performing, which I suppose makes it my annual holiday destination in much the same way that some people visit the south of France every year or whatever, except that it rains a shit ton more in Edinburgh than on your average holibags location of choice (I got back yesterday morning and some of the things I own are still damp). When I think of the best and the worst theatre and comedy that I've seen in my life, so much of both have been at the Fringe - trapped in tiny hot rooms where the door's too near the stage and there's too much audience on either side of you, thinking, 'can I leave? no, no, I can't possibly, but when will this end'; packed into venues that used to be conference rooms and backs of pubs and myriad other things, crying with laughter; stuffing my face with too much pie. I include the bad as well as the good in my remembrances because in a lot of ways they're just as important. I like that I've seen terrible, terrible things in Edinburgh because I like that it exists as a platform for Anyone Who Wants to Make Theatre to just do it and it's right that inevitably some of those things don't work. If theatre was easy, there'd be no point slogging away at it, would there? It should be hard. It should fail sometimes. That's why it's art.

This year I went to the Fringe for six days, travelling up with my boyfriend on Thursday night, on the overnight coach from London to Edinburgh, which was a little bit rough, because how can it not be, but better than I expected. We arrived at 7.30am and saw shows pretty solidly for two days. Some had been made by our friends, some by people we were fans of and with some of them we had absolutely no idea what to expect; in addition to this, we socialised, had a few drinks, ate pie (how many times can I mention pie in this blog? Let's get a tally going: ii), got flyered a LOT and went on and on about how beautiful Edinburgh is. I have been known to shriek "look at the VISTAS" almost constantly in that city. Look at them though!! After he went home to do Real Life Stuff (i.e. earn money like a grown-up), I stayed on for a few extra days with my friends, who are working at the Pleasance and being put up in student halls. I've been a punter and a performer at the Fringe but I've never been staff, and I've got to say that while it looks awesome in lots of ways it also looks super tough - my friends are flyering for sometimes twelve, thirteen hours a day on the Pleasance's street team and I am amazed they're not dead. Be nice to the flyerers, guys; you've been in the rain for ten minutes between venues, and yes it's shit, but they've been in it all day for the last million days. The older I get, the more I realise the extent to which hungover students are the glue holding the Fringe together.

Anyway, I could go on and on and ON about how great Edinburgh is and how much I love it - you may have guessed this - but that won't get us anywhere and, contrary to appearances, I do actually have stuff to get done. So I'm going rely on the preserve of the blogger, i.e. some arbitrary self-imposed rules, and instead name my Top Five Fringe Shows 2011. Although I've talked about theatre a lot here, I'm actually a massive comedy fan too - I just find the former easier to talk about because I know more about how it's put together and works, whereas I love comedy in the same way I love magic, in total ignorance of how they have managed to do this thing - so I was almost tempted to do three comedy and three theatre. But five is the perfect arbitrary self-imposed number, I'm afraid. So, in no particular order (and entirely subjectively), here are my five favourite shows from this year's Edinburgh Festival:
1) Translunar Paradise, 15.40 at the Pleasance Dome, then touring the UK I think? A beautiful story about love and bereavement told entirely without words, using only mime, live accordion music, masks and movement, and it made me cry lots. There are only two actors (and one accordionist) on stage, playing a couple who have grown old together - the actors use incredibly realistic hand-held masks in the old-age sequences which can easily be removed to show that the line between youth and age is actually not a huge one. It was just stunningly performed and all I can say is that if you have the opportunity to see it, you should take it. Aside from being charming and ridiculously well staged, rehearsed, directed and performed, it is genuinely one of the most moving pieces of theatre I have ever seen.
2) Alex Horne: Seven Years in the Bathroom, 20.20 at the Pleasance Courtyard. Alex Horne has a very likeable manner and I was pretty certain that I would enjoy the show even before it began, because just watching him talk is enjoyable. I've been aware of Horne for a little while; I'd seen We Need Answers, his BBC4 forgotten sports programme and was generally aware of his involvement with the Cowards/Mark Watson ex-Footlights set. But this show far outstripped my expectations - in addition to his engaging persona, Horne's chosen conceit works really well. It is that the average man will live for 79 years and spend 7 of those in the bathroom, and he then breaks down not only the average amount of time spent doing most things (sleeping, eating, driving, whatever) but also divides the hour of his show into the equivalent percentages of time spent doing these things. If that makes sense. So, 5 minutes in the bathroom, however many minutes 'working' or 'dreaming'... He eats a Rustler's burger, gets an audience member to paint his portrait and another to do the housework, a panda talks with his voice - it's really quite something. And the main thing, of course, is that it's very, very, very funny. Also on the night we saw it he accidentally covered two audience members in sauce and I nearly fell off my chair.
3) Swamp Juice, 14.00 at the Underbelly. A very charming, weirdly exhilarating show, ostensibly for kids, but also for wide-eyed grown-up kids like me. Bunk Puppets, the company, had a piece up last year called Sticks and Stones and Broken Bones, which was also very beautiful and even made me do a little cry (this list is making me look like a wussy, but in reality I am extremely tough and manly and in my defence I was quite hungover that day); both are one-man shows performed by Mr. Bunk himself, a semi-mute clown character played by Montreal's Jeff Achtem. In both shows, he brings a bunch of shadow puppets to life; Swamp Juice is more narrative-based than its predecessor and the finale is stunning - first he brings the puppets out into the audience, with various audience members having to hold things up to create the scenery, and then HE MAKES THE SHADOWS GO 3D. I think Swamp Juice is my favourite for that reason (you've never heard a room of so many adults go "ohhh my gooooodddd" with such pure amazed happiness), but Sticks and Stones is returning to the Fringe for a brief run at the Udderbelly towards the end of the month and is also very, very worth watching. In conclusion: I love puppets so so much and Bunk Puppets shows are better than real life.
4) Humphrey Ker is Dymock Watson: Nazi Smasher!, 19.15 at the Pleasance Courtyard. All three members of my favourite sketch troupe The Penny Dreadfuls have gone solo this year, which is sad in some ways (no Penny Dreadfuls show!) and great in others (three hours of Dreadfuls instead of one!), but mostly it is Interesting. I've been a big fan of theirs since 2008 - can't recommend their Brothers Faversham radio show highly enough - and seeing the very different directions all of their shows have gone in is fascinating. Thom Tuck's confessional Straight to DVD show, in which he discusses straight-to-DVD Disney films and heartbreak, and David Reed's Shamblehouse, off-the-wall one-man sketch comedy featuring a moving doughnut acrobatics tale, are both very funny and very much worth watching, as well as being admirably different to what I think of as characterising their previous work. But Ker's show is just so silly, so tightly written, packed with ridiculous accents and a tiny Romanian dog that it was one of the highlights of my Fringe. It's slightly Milliganesque in its pure beautiful silliness and it made me laugh so, so much.
5) The Behemoth, 16.45 at the Pleasance Courtyard. I'd seen John-Luke Roberts and Nadia Kamil do a few bits and pieces at Latitude 2009 and 2010 and couldn't wait to finally see their whole show because they just make me laugh so much; I saw John-Luke Roberts' solo show last year and loved it, but seeing them together is even better. Much like my last recommendation, it's glorious silliness throughout, right from the beginning, which features a truly special rendition of Stand By Me. After we left, my boyfriend was like, 'You know when you can tell from the first minute that you're going to like something...?' In addition to the show being generally hilarious, Roberts and Kamil have a fantastic rapport and make each other laugh a lot on stage, which I LOVE. I adore the transience of comedy, the feeling that the performance you see is special for you as an audience, so when something goes awry or people adlib it is just my favourite thing, and they were great at it. Also (and here's a shallow extra point for you), ALL of Nadia Kamil's outfits are super awesome. Ugh it's hard to talk about comedy, isn't it? Because just saying "it was really funny!!" doesn't really sum up why that is true, but we quoted this show a lot throughout the rest of the Fringe because it is packed with good stuff and I can't wait to see future offerings from them.

Some honourable mentions of things that very nearly made the list go to Death Song by You Need Me theatre company (I've seen and adored everything YNM have done after stumbling across How it Ended in 2008 and definitely not crying everywhere because, as we have discussed, I am So Manly), the brilliant Max and Ivan are Holmes & Watson and high-energy one-man-show Bane. Also I wanted to mention LUDS' Cagebirds, 13.35 at Greenside, which everyone should definitely see, but I felt this blog post had come a little late to do so properly, as it closes tomorrow; nonetheless, it's full of my friends and they're all bloody great in it, so GO if you can.

In conclusion: Edinburgh is great, I love lots of stuff, my body is still trying to process all the pie carbs I put into it (pie tally: iii) and I'm not sure my brain has recovered yet from two overnight coaches and lots of late nights. Bring on the next Fringe please.

a week in the life of the lady lozopus: day four

This one is late, i.e. it's now Saturday and all the photos are from Friday, but by the time I got back to my room at half three this morning I was just like ughhhhh sleep please. Ended up seeing a Beatles tribute act in the cavern with flatmate/halls friends, which was mad and surreal and far, far more fun than it had any right to be. oh yes.


9.53; Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip Ease My 10am Lecture Pain


15.32; Eating Some Lunch, Listening to Ben Goldacre Talk About Rentokil


19.01; Red Onion Puff Pastry Tarts And Roast Potatoes, Victoryyy


21.24; Rehearsing Again, Roisin Looks Coy With A Ladle


23.10; Briefly Home To Dump Stuff & It's Time For Some Pro Plus


00.39; Somehow End Up In The Cavern Watching The Mersey Beatles


01.25; You Know You Twist So Fine


01.52; Pile-On In The Street I Don't Even Know

Off to see Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip tonight. Exciting!

a week in the life of the lady lozopus: day three

Today was a very odd day, but lots of fun. I went to see the drama soc production of A Doll's House because my plans to see a magician went awry; I tackled student finance; I got to know some castmates; my kitchen was overtaken by drunken and insane med students from my flatmate's Footloose production. Hmm.

Wednesday, 17th March:


10.24; Blow-Drying


13.07; Sunny Day, Flowers, Lads Playing Football on the Green


14.44; Curse You, Student Finance, I Am Your Master


15.35; That'll Be Our Evening Plans Scuppered, Then


16.22; Vague Attempts to Read Henry IV Followed Swiftly By Accidental Nap


18.58; Straight From The Pan Yeah That's Right


20.30; Attempts To Photograph The Stage Failed, So Here Is My Blurry Ticket Stub Instead


00.23; Camera Comandeered By Hilarious Drunk Housemate

I wish I was going to get more than about six hours sleep tonight. sigh.

a week in the life of the lady lozopus: day two

I'm back again! Slightly more exciting day today; I had rehearsals, so there are actually pictures from bits of the day after the sun had set. Yeahhh rock and rolllll

Tuesday, 16th March:


9.34; Awake But Not Happy About It


10.42; Blurry, Pre-Tutorial Photo of My Unexciting Haircut (Finally)


11.59; My Shadow & I Are Home For Lunch


14.08; Tea, Cake, Vonnegut


20.38; Time To Rehearse/Alex Puzzled By Absence of Eggs


22.05; Let's Run Part Two Again


22.50; Post-Rehearsals Drinks in Guild

he walked into the echo.

Far too little time today - have to go to the library in a minute & print tomorrow's lecture notes before the drama social tonight, AUGH - but I didn't want to miss a week. So here, long-promised, is a bit of Larkin. For a while, I thought this was my favourite poem; these days I'm dreadful at picking a favourite anything, and don't have one, but if I bothered to make lists it would definitely still be up there.

Love Songs in Age

by Philip Larkin

She kept her songs, they kept so little space, 
  The covers pleased her: 
One bleached from lying in a sunny place, 
One marked in circles by a vase of water, 
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her, 
  And coloured, by her daughter - 
So they had waited, till, in widowhood 
She found them, looking for something else, and stood 

Relearning how each frank submissive chord 
  Had ushered in 
Word after sprawling hyphenated word, 
And the unfailing sense of being young 
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein 
  That hidden freshness sung, 
That certainty of time laid up in store 
As when she played them first. But, even more, 

The glare of that much-mentionned brilliance, love, 
  Broke out, to show 
Its bright incipience sailing above, 
Still promising to solve, and satisfy, 
And set unchangeably in order. So 
  To pile them back, to cry, 
Was hard, without lamely admitting how 
It had not done so then, and could not now. 

in the first taxi he was alone tra-la.

The great housing debate seems to have wound itself mercifully down and, though the whole process has been (and continues to be) fraught with bizarre difficulties, we should, SHOULD, be going to sign the contracts in about an hour. I am excited/terrified/convinced that something will go wrong. What an unpleasant thing house-hunting is! The whole fuss was combined with a rotten fortnight of exams and basically I'm pretty freaking excited that January's in the past, not least because February is looking pretty good.

Tonight is the drama society's first meeting of the semester - I can't wait to go and see everybody again - and then this weekend I've a friend coming to stay. The future's bright/orange, is what I'm saying. She arrives on  Friday and then the two of us are going, with one of my flatmates, to see Ghost Stories at the Liverpool Playhouse. HMMM. It's supposed to be the Scariest Play Ever to Scare, and we're all gigantic cowards, so I'm sure it will be an interesting experience. Also, gigantic coward I may be, but I love horror (good horror, I mean. I'd take From Beyond the Grave over Hostel any day of the week), and I adore both of the writer-directors' work. Jeremy Dyson's books of short stories are brilliantly creepy and funny by turns, and I do believe he's also adapting my favourite Jonathan Coe novel for telly at the moment, as well as being one quarter of The League of Gentlemen - so, an all-round-excellent chap, then. And Andy Nyman, perhaps best known for his collaborations with Derren Brown, is... Yeah.

So, I've been thinking a lot about scary things, this week, and unnerving things, and (as ever) trying to pick this week's piece of writing. I might've chosen an extract from one of Dyson's short stories - there's a particular one about the London Underground in Never Trust a Rabbit that just ended me when I was fifteen - if I'd not stupidly left my copies at home. In the end, I decided on a piece by Louis MacNeice.

Couldn't find it online anywhere, so I had to type it up, which has slightly cut down the amount of time I have to talk about it, but basically: MacNeice was a successful poet of the 1930s whose work faltered after the war, as happened to many of his contemporaries, and recovered in an interesting and rather melancholic way. He wrote a body of poems belonging to a genre he termed "the thumbnail nightmare": brief, unnerving little pieces, and sparse in explanation. Perhaps my favourite of his thumbnail nightmares is this, written in 1961:

After the Crash
 
When he came to he knew
Time must have passed because
The asphalt was high with hemlock
Through which he crawled to his crash
Helmet and found it no more
Than his wrinkled hand what it was.

Yet life seemed still going on:
He could hear the signals bounce
Back from the moon and the hens
Fire themselves black in the batteries
And the silence of small blind cats
Debating whether to pounce.

Then he looked up and marked
The gigantic scales in the sky,
The pan on the left dead empty
And the pan on the right dead empty,
And knew in the dead, dead calm
It was too late to die.

Perhaps a little less subtle than Macneice's more well-known "The Taxis", but I still think it's beautifully done and something about it gives me the shivers.

Have to run now, unfortunately, but before I do: people who've been reading for a while (if there are any, etc etc) may remember my friend Celia, who I mentioned I used to talk to a lot about a lot of things, but we'd both gotten terribly busy lately and it was all a dreadful shame. WELL. It turns out, she actually came across this blog, and meant to call me for ages, and yesterday evening we had a lovely catch-up; after we got off the phone, I booked some train tickets to go and visit her in March. Which is rather a nice postscript, I think, for anyone who likes that sort of thing.

as changed itself to past without a word.

First night of my first ever play at university was tonight, which I spent tottering about the place with grey-sprayed hair and faux wrinkles and a big fake limp and oh, it was excellent fun. The Crucible's gone from being something I tentatively enjoyed to something I really rather liked, to something I looked forward to, to finally - after all this time - something I adore and am heartbroken to see the beginning of the end of. I'm going to miss it/the cast so freaking much and feel utterly privileged to have been involved. Touchingly, one of my housemates came along alone this evening (he says he will come again on Friday with everyone else) and met me at the stage door afterwards with a Double Decker, and the show went WELL and ugh, I love doing it so much.

HOWEVER. After all the joys of this afternoon/evening, I came home only to be relaunched into yet more conversations about the great housing debate of '09 - something that has been ambling along for days now. The stress of everyone from our group of friends trying to work out who's living with who is genuinely doing my head in; we're supposed to live in a seven, which I think (and all my non-first year friends have told me) is too many by far and, really, you shouldn't go above five-ish due to the mess, the stress, the attempts to coordinate that many people's wildly divergent wants and needs, you know. Too much. Pretty much everyone in the Prospective Flatmates camp thinks that I am making a fuss over nothing by wanting to split us in two, but I cannot face living with so many people, I genuinely think it'll cause so much fuss and hassle and the house will be ungood and, just, ugh. But I have nobody else to live with. At the moment, it looks like my choice is going to be: live in a house of seven or live in a gosh darned box. Or go into halls again or something, but obviously I wouldn't do THAT if I could avoid it. The whole situation is depressing me so much, when all I want to do is get excited about ~*~theatre~*~ and christmas. CHRISTMAS.

I'm not even that excited about Christmas Actual Holidays, for a whole set of other reasons which I don't really want to detail on here in, you know, public and that, although I am excited about all the friends & plays & comedy I'll be able to see in a week. But, yeah. I just feel like there's all these Issues at home and now all these Issues at university and I really can't be bothered with any of it any more. I just want to sleep forever.

AND MY HAIR IS FULL OF GREY-SPRAY. STILL.

Basically this whole stupid post can be summed up like this:

Dear Life,

Be less up and down for just five minutes, please? Please.

Love,
Me xxx

we don't want perfection, we want knitting.

I accidentally stayed out until 3am on Friday, got rather drunker than I intended (it just sort of hit me; one of those evenings, I suppose, where it inexplicably does) and was in an - let us be delicate and say an interesting state, when my family arrived on Saturday morning. Not awful, not even the worst this week, but I did have a cracking headache - unusual for me, I never get them - and hadn't had even nearly enough sleep. Thank the gods of hats and irn bru, anyway, because I survived, albeit rather narrowly.

It was an odd beast, the prospect of my family visiting; I love them but I don't really suffer from homesickness, for whatever reason, and could probably survive okay on the odd phonecall hither and thither. Some of my flatmates call home almost every day, but I just don't need to: I suppose I've always been allowed a lot of freedom, running off to London all the time from the age of about fifteen and Edinburgh when I was seventeen and Glasgow every new years, etc etc. But unlike a lot of my friends up here, I'm an only child, so my parents are able to come and see me because they sort of may as well, if that makes sense - they've not got a lot else on?

Anyway, the long and short of it is that we had a lovely time, a nice meal and I showed them (it was my mother and grandparents, by the by, interested parties) around a little. Most adorably of all, they brought me an utterly unexpected sort of "care package" - a big cardboard box filled with a few foods and useful things, some nice shower gel, lots of exciting tea and canned gin & tonics. How sweet is that?!

So currently, it is a Sunday night and I'm putting off doing my washing because it means going on the biggest walk ever to find change for the machines and it is FAR too jolly cold. Instead, I'm listening to The Smiths, writing one of these new-fangled blog things and drinking green tea with "a hint of lemon". Rather more than a hint if you ask me. It's like I'm entering some kind of competition to be the tweest person ever - today, my flatmate and I went for lunch in a cute little cafe and then to a day of knitting at the Bluecoat, sort of our local arts centre. It was a collaboration between the Festival of Nordic Art and Culture (NICE) and a local knitting shop called Purlesque; I can already knit with needles, or at the very least hold my own with a simple straight or purl, though I've not attempted anything particularly interesting yet. Still, I learned to finger-knit and my flatmate, a newcomer, received an interesting introduction to something I adore. They run a knitting circle at a local tea shop on tuesday nights & I think I might go: university is a very intense experience, and wonderful of course, but it can't help to meet and socialise with people who are slightly outside of it.

picture from here.

The highlight for me, anyway, was meeting this fellow and adding a few lines to the terribly interesting piece of knitting art on the left there, which he told me he's been working on for about two years. Anyone and everyone could just roll up, add to it a bit and move on - a really beautiful piece of collaborative art. Made me wish I'd discovered the Bluecoat earlier than last week: so much seems to be happening there all the time, it's a really lovely place. Flatmate and I just spent a cheerful hour or so there, listening to them play charming music - Bob Dylan, Bon Iver, I was very happy - having a bit of a chat, meeting people and learning. An excellent afternoon. I'm considering writing about it/him for the English Soc magazine, if I ever get around to writing anything at all for them; my friend said that I could, that they need writers rather desperately, but I'm so dreadfully unfocused.

Must be quiet now and get on with things, but before I do, the reasons for making this post are twofold:
1) my previous one was too depressing to leave up there. I didn't feel down when I wrote it or anything, but it reads incredibly bleakly and I don't want wandering passers-by to think I have given up on all of it and ended myself.
2) I mustn't get too caught up in all the fun of university - because it really is fun, it is, so much, especially now that I'm getting to know & love my excellent cast better and better all the time - and forget just how much there is to DO in a city. Lots of things! I don't want to look back on these three years with any regrets. Or at least...with as few as I can manage, I suppose.

ha.