Postcards from the Edinburgh Fringe 2015, Week 1…
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I'm sitting in The Royal Dick pub in Summerhall,
typing this with a bandaged finger injury that wouldn't look out of place in
The Beano. The perils of cutting out quotes to put on your posters and fliers.
But that tells you where
we are in our Fringe adventure. We have quotes to put on posters and flyers.
Printed out on sheets of A4, formatted in such a way as to maximise use of
paper and aesthetic clarity. Cut out with a scalpel craft knife (rather than scissors) for
precision and neatness. Spattered with blood because I
wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing and almost sliced the end of my
finger off. Effective marketing. (Thanks to John for the first aid).
**
So I guess the obvious question is how did it
go? How did we do with our
first-ever-public-performance-of-this-version-also-being-press-night?
I think we did well. The show was ready to go in
front of an audience and begin that stage of its development. The get-in had
gone to schedule (shout out to the Northern Stage staff and technical & front-of-house volunteers
– they are great). Jerry and Stacey did brilliantly, buoyed by a supportive
audience. They got themselves in to trouble a couple of times, got themselves
out of it without the audience noticing (I think), they found new stuff and we immediately learned
some stuff about the show.
In terms of that first audience, some of whom were going to be writing about the show, it was a shame that our
programmes were still enroute from the printers. It feels to me like an
important and useful thing to know about the show that it is/has been performed
by different combinations of nationalities (UK and Portuguese at least), and
that the two roles aren’t written as gendered. The programme implicitly tells
you that:
Some of the reviews are great, some are good and
only one that I’ve seen has been really grumpy about the show, but gave it the
same number of stars as some reviews that seemed to quite like it. Ah, star ratings. I’ve
succumbed a little here. Much as I hate them, at the Edinburgh Fringe it is
almost impossible to ignore them when it comes to selling your show. If you
only put good quotes on a flyer, as we've tried to do in the past, it looks at a glance (I think) like you haven’t
got anything better than a three star review. ‘Better than a three star review.’
I hate that it makes me think like that. But in such a competitive marketplace,
you need better than a three star review. So I’ve relented and we’ve started
putting star ratings on the flyers and posters – but always with a quote. Because
– here’s the stupidly obvious thing again – we want people to come and see the
show, and think about it, and talk about it.
And… my two favourite quotes from the reviews
that I have read (I’ve not read all of them), aren’t really ones that would
work on a flyer:
"What would you do if you and a member of the opposite sex were tasked with starting the human race all over again? That is, er, possibly the scenario posited by Third Angel and Mala Voadora’s ‘The Paradise Project’..." Time Out
It's the 'possibly', of course, that I like in that one. And this:
"It is interesting to note that conception and design of The Paradise Project is credited jointly to both collaborating companies and the two performers, implying that the creation of the design was an intrinsic part of the devising of the piece. This is how it feels – words, physical action, and visual imagery seamlessly interweaved. Both actors are totally at home in their stage environment, a delight to watch and listen to – you really do forget they are acting a lot of the time, which is perhaps the highest compliment." Total Theatre
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And people are coming to see it – I think more
than saw either the first week of The Lad Lit Project or What I Heard About the
World – and, from what they tell us, thinking about it, and talking about it.
There have been some very nice tweets, too:
But
most of my favourite feedback has come from conversations. Like all of our
work, (all work?), it’s a bit of an audience divider. Some people find it a
little distant, a bit hard work even. It really struck me this year that the
standard Edinburgh Fringe show length of an hour (rather than the 70 minutes I
think of as full length) is partly to get a cheaper venue slot, but it’s partly
in deference to the fact that audience members will often be seeing your show
as one of four, five or six per day. It's partly just about how long you can ask people to sit and watch and listen.
We’ve carried on working on the show a
little each day, trimming, tweaking, and playing with the mood of it. And
whilst it still doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve, we have moved the heart
of it closer to the surface. Jerry and Stacey have been finding those understated
moments of kindness and awareness that tell us a bit more about how
these two people are 'in this together'.
A thing I’ve found myself saying a lot this week
is, “Of all the work we’ve made, The
Paradise Project the most like a play.” To which I usually add, “Because it’s
a play.” The biggest, most sprawling devising process we’ve been part of has
produced the most clearly written show. Person A and Person B mainly talk to each other. They
don’t face out much. They only occasionally make eye contact with the audience.
Talking to Jerry about this a few days in we
noted that all of the work we’d seen so far, and this has remained true for me
all week, all of the work we’d seen, turns right out to face and embrace the
audience, and say "I/we are telling you this story". And this is a territory that
we’re very comfortable in, that we’ve played in for a long time. We like work
that acknowledges the audience.
But with The Paradise Project, whilst the show itself acknowledges the audience, the performers/characters don't do it as much in our other work. Because to turn out to face the people in the room makes much
less sense to us in this instance, less sense in their world. They’re working this out alone. Although we see they are being at
least observed or recorded some of the time. We’ve talked a lot about this in the
process of making the show, and other members of the team think
differently, but for me, the show works when it feels like someone might be
listening, someone could be hearing them, but they never know if/when that is
the case. There’s optimism in that.
**
Now I’m in the car heading back to Sheffield,
after a flying visit over to the west coast. Leaving Jerry and Stacey to build
Paradise alone for a bit. Hilary and I are tagging Admin and Production Trainee
Liz in as we go, and she’ll help them out for a week, and then Rachael gets
to Edinburgh on the 24th. I’ll be back to see the last two
performances. It's always weird leaving a show, and I don't think I'll ever get
used to it. During show time, there’s a strange awareness that it’s going on,
somewhere else.
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What else? A fire alarm went off in the last few
minutes of the show on Friday, and we had to evacuate the audience. We put the last scene on this blog for them. Five times as many people have clicked onto
that post as were in the audience.
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I was really pleased to have been part of Here Is The News From Over There, this year’s Northern Stage show, building on the
model of The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project that I was part of two years
ago. It feels like a really important piece – one that is funny, chaotic, engaging
and intelligent all at the same time. It’s different every night. I made a
piece with Maya Zbib from Zoukak Theatre, who I’ve written about before, here.
There’s a Storify of our tale, never take a skull home, here.
**
The whole Northern Stage programme is great. Sadly
I didn’t get to see Key Change, but the reviews and conversation around that
piece are brilliant. I was really pleased to have been a small part of team
making Daniel Bye’s Going Viral, which is doing really well. I saw an early
performance of Zendeh’s Cinema which blended spoken and signed performance beautifully, in a very upsetting story. Five Feet In Front feels like a coming of age show
for The Letter Room – a vengeance fuelled hoedown. And Tamasha’s My Name Is… is
a masterclass in understated emotional and intelligent stage performance and verbatim
theatre.
I had a brilliant day in Summerhall's Anatomy Lecture Theatre watching The Gospel According To Jesus Queen of Heaven by
Jo Clifford (the most beautiful and caring start to the day, whilst also being
quietly and strongly subversive), Portraits in Motion (which I’ve been wanting
to see since standing listening to Volker Gerling's applause go on and on after a
performance in Germany – whilst I was waiting to go on to the adjacent stage to perform
The Lad Lit Project – "follow that"; it is just brilliant work and I was not
disappointed) followed by Shit Theatre’s Women’s Hour which is the smartest,
funniest and most entertaining hour of rage I’ve seen in a long time. I highly
recommend that as a morning/afternoon combo. (Then come and see us next door.)
Elsewhere in Summerhall Ellie Dubois' Ringside is an exquisite and unsettling one-to-one performance with a trapeze artist. It's booked up, but well worth trying to get a return. Beautiful. Flanagan Collective’s Fable is a lovely hour’s
story telling (which unexpectedly bounces off my ongoing obsession with the Voyager space probes).
We saw the preview and it’s probably properly magical by now. Barrel Organ are one of the talks of the Fringe with Some People Talk About Violence - they are really striking performers, and for me, more than the form, the way the the theme of the title is explored is what speaks of their maturity and potential.
It seems pointless to recommend Bryony Kimmings and Tim Grayburn's Fake It 'Til You Make It as it is properly sold out, but if you can get a return then go, it's emotional and important work.
Our kids (6 and 9) really enjoyed The Tap Dancing Mermaid (sit near the front if you can) at Summerhall, The Hogswallops at Circus Hub (we saw a slightly shaky first show, but the zimmer-frame trapeze scene is remarkable), the Trash Test Dummies (also Circus Hub and great fun) and both Tianna The Traveller and Basketball Man performing outside on The Mound.
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And now I'm back in the office in Sheffield, putting the links into this blogpost and catching up with all the non-Edinburgh Fringe jobs. Nice, but weird.
