More Fringe shows!
Agent November's Indoor Escape Game: Murder Mr E
This was a 30 minute pop up escape room. I ended up playing it solo on a gifted ticket from Hazel, for reasons I was never entirely clear about. But the important thing is that I finished it in 26 minutes, which is the fastest they'd seen a solo player finish, and generally faster than they expected.
A nice structural thing: as you solve bits, you get laminated bits of info that get put on a big deduction whiteboard - there are slots of the same shape and colour for them to fit in. When I was playing, I was barely thinking about the characters, so when I'd got them all, it was nice to then look at the board and go... hm! I can do some actual deduction here.
Pop up escape rooms are a funny format - escape rooms are all about building sets, and when they're a pop up, that's the thing you can't really do - everything has to be installed in a very temporary way. Like the most pure escape room thing is the discovery of a secret door which lets you into a whole other room. Impossible to do. But then again, constraints are what makes things interesting.
The Buddha Wears Prada
Went to see this after she flyered me and Alice. Feels good to see a show or two because the person doing it asked you to - something kind of levelling about it? Someone sees you queuing for ice cream, you have a little chat, you think - ah, she seems charming, sure, why not?
And in this case, I was thinking about cults anyway.
v buckenham
Yes, it's a show about cults. Really, it's just a short version of the story of her joining a Buddhist cult in the Rockies. Which is a pretty interesting story! I know more about cults now. It's definitely got the feel of a set that has been excavated from approximately 5 years of therapy sessions. But I also feel like the perfect form for this actually is a 2 hour long chatty podcast. With enough of a budget they can do a legal review after.
Mark Vigeant - Out There
The thing I loved the most about this was the aesthetic. It's about a YouTuber who's going out to the Alaskan wilderness, there to hunt and do survivalist shit and say "awesome" a lot. And the show you see - is mostly the one projected onto a screen, coming to you from the iPhone on his chest harness, lit by a head torch. The framing, the image, the performance - they're all spot on, in ways that makes the sight of, you know, the stage, the theatre, the audience that you see around the egdes almost feel kind of jarring.
The performance feels kind of split into two parts for me. There's the performance of the YouTuber, which is... I mean, it's a parody, but it's one which has genuine feeling behind it. The character is someone you genuinely feel for, and the performance is surprisingly powerful.
And there's also the crowd interaction. This is done with no acknowledgment in-character that we are in fact people, or there at all. We're the wilderness. I was in the second row, so mostly I was a lake. Waving a bit of shimmery blue fabric. Most people were trees, and waved around branches or leaves. Shoes were roots. One game young man was, well, game.
(A side recommendation - one thing this show made me think of was the episode of the podcast Imaginary Advice about a man making a podcast about the Baldwin Brothers)
This was the second show I saw which was built around visible cameras on stage. Funny to spot themes like this. Performance, and relating to performance, and the everyday performances we watch and do.
Sean Morley - Backchannel
Okay, I gotta hurry this up, I've been back in London for like a week now and the clock is ticking til the Fringe actually ends.
Anyway - this was great. I know he has a bit about how liking the show doesn't make you clever, but the show was maybe the cleverest thing I saw all fringe. Although admittedly I was mostly seeing clown shows.
Does some good looping self referential bits, talking about the nature of comedy and then making jokes out of that, and then making jokes out of the jokes. Until it builds up to... Twitch chat? He invented Twitch chat, but for a sweaty room. And then, driven wild by the chat, he invents Poster's Madness, but again, for standing in front of 30 people in a sweaty room.
Like I said - I liked this. I am now a fan and will seek out opportunities to see him again. But admittedly that's an easy thing to say, as halfway through the show, in the midst of everything going wrong, calling out - does someone know Javascript, can someone fix this? To me: do you know what a while loop is? I say yes. He says (but just to me this time): yes I know you do, I follow you on Bluesky. Which, for all I spent this Fringe sitting in the front row and feeling very relaxed about doing audience participation, was a new one on me. Hello Sean!
Oh, and another recurring theme - people making a good joke out of being the person who introduces themself.
(No) Refunds
This is the one where [unnamed friend] got to be the Very Special Boy! He bought (his partner bought) a special ticket which meant he was up on stage... competing in a gameshow all about trying to win back that ticket price.
A surreal gameshow that sometimes showed it's teeth, presented by a woman with a gleaming confident persona and a more downbeat man... wait, didn't I see this before?
No, not really. This was camp, it wasn't dom vibes. And when it broke down and revealed it was something else... it wasn't trying to be a trap snapping shut on the audience, it was about breaking the show down and finding a place of warmth and mutuality within the artifice.
Or maybe that's just the version I saw. Again, I think the tone of the show was very much set by the audience member who the show pivots on. And [unnamed friend] was very sweet in his role - pushing back, but also fundamentally willing. Like:
The host: are you actually complaining, or are you just being a little brat?
Him: ... no, I'm just being a brat. Carry on.
That's Clown
Late night clown showcase, different people on each night. I completely failed to hear the actual names of any of the people who performed. But I did enjoy the sexy priest who sang at us: Hey... you want my body? and then fed us a piece of gluten free vegan pretzel like it was a communion wafer. And I also enjoyed the final act where... wait. I forget. He was describing a desk? A weird, expansive desk? Then finally... a face? A terrifying face? This is like trying to remember a dream from a week ago.
God I love clowning. Just... go wherever you like with it, just commit to it. If there's some tension in the air... hunt it down, build it up. Find where it goes.
Clown Olympics
Okay, I guess I should explain the Clown Olympics. I have wanted to see this the last two years and missed it both times. So I was very excited to get to make it this time. It's not a show... it's a sporting competition. For clowns. In the meadows. For free. Just show up and watch. Piotr Sikora (Blizzard) is the main organiser. There are like 40 clowns taking place, across like a dozen countries. They compete for things such as "the most beautiful death" (that's the duck-shooting event) or "synchronised swimming". There are judges awarding points, and they take it (mostly) seriously.
But I mean, also it's for clowns. And you see the same people in each round. You root for them. Plotlines take place (the USA was joined by Mexico halfway through and suddenly took a sharp turn into telenovela).
Anyway, look at this cat we saw:
I love Edinburgh.
Enrico Touché - Hot Knees
A final show! Squeezed in with Ailsa before I had to get on a train. A PWYW thing, also in a yurt, not pre-booked. But it was silly, it was funny, it was charming. Built around miming. Lots of fun props. Like, if I told you the show opened by him taking off a succession of hats, each smaller than the last and concealed within the last. Until the final one, he picked it off his head and bit into it. It was liquorice. That's the kind of show it was.
Two things that do not especially speak to the quality of the show that will stay with me. One is that he had sewn the clicker for advancing the music cues into the lining of his jacket, so he could stealthily advance it on without needing tech. Just... great planning, great preparation, the show relied upon it. Yes. I only spotted it by chance, it was so well done.
And the second was that I noticed, on the briefcase he was hauling his more and more ridiculous props from... there was a ladybug. And for the next 15 minutes, the briefcase was opened, it was closed, it had hands grabbing onto it (fake hands attached to it), it was spun around and around... and I could not help but keep looking at this poor little ladybug. But it was fine! And eventually it flew off, safe and sound.
That's live performance, eh? People working real hard to solve small details, just to bring some joy to you. And then they're upstaged by a beetle.
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