EDINBURGH FRINGE: 28TH AUGUST 2015

FRIDAY 28TH AUGUST

SHOW 18

VENUE: NEW WAVERLY ARCHES

TIME: 8PM

AUDIENCE: 9 

Before

Having completed two shows in my new venue - The Hive - I am now relocating again for Friday and Saturday. The good people of Freestival have kindly agreed to house me in the New Waverley Arches. The new ‘new’ venue comprises four rooms, each located in its own arch underneath Jeffrey Street. I am an intimate of Edinburgh but even these arches are new to me. In Edinburgh there seems no end to arches and caves. The room is rather similar in capacity to the Just the Tonic Caves but the roof of the arch is far higher. There are, rather appropriately, large religious style murals along either side of the room. The venue is near to the Canons’s Gait and is also similar to my original time slot. But the venue is new this year and so largely unknown. And although centrally located, between the Royal Mile and Waverley station, it feels strangely out of the way. 

I arrive about half an hour before my show. I go into my room and do a sound check, set up the music, prance about the stage, sit in the audience chairs, see what it is like for them, go back on stage, prance about some more, go behind the curtain, prance about back stage. I find a hole in the curtain I look through it and spy on the theoretical audience who are yet to arrive. I rather like this room and it has a back stage area which none of my other venues have had this year. I can see possibilities for alternative intros, starts, off stage bits. It feels more theatrical. Will anybody come? 

I walk out into the courtyard to try and drum up some business. A couple in their thirties arrive with my flyer. “We couldn’t find you. We looked everywhere. We asked at the old venue. When I mentioned your name the barman looked like I’d handed him a shit.” 

I try to make light of this while offering some background info on the venue debacle. But the fact is a member of my audience just called me a shit and the show hasn’t started yet. 

I survey the rest of my audience. I know that some of them shouldn’t be here. That it is not for them. Some of them have stumbled in by mistake. I no longer have a venue I am operating a Venus flytrap. 

There are nine audience here. Two of them are my friends who have seen the show before. There are seven audience here. Two of them are a septuagenarian couple who are very proper and not cut out for stand-up comedy at all. There are five audience here. Three of them are women in their sixties. They think they will like my show. They will like it up to a point and then not like it after that. They will feel betrayed for ever liking it in the first place. There are two audience here. They are both a couple in their thirties. They went to the old venue. They asked for me, the barman looked at them like he had been presented with a shit. Then they told me about it. They called me a shit. There is no audience here. Normally nine people would be enough to go ahead with but the ceiling is very high and height absorbs noise, absorbs laughter, absorbs energy. “Please welcome to the stage Stephen Carlin.”

During

“Look folks there are only nine of us here (really none). It’s up to you. We can go ahead if you want. I am happy to go ahead but you’ll have to carry the show. Carry the whole audience, just the nine of you. So if you’d rather not, no biggie, just say…”

“Oh yes we want to go ahead” they nod. This appears to be some customer focused survey. It is nothing of the kind. I am dipping their hands in the blood. Now we are all responsible for what is about to unfold. And what is about to unfold? I don’t know. Some kind of uphill struggle. But I know the challenges ahead. I know the realities of a nine people audience in and a large cavernous ceiling, for an hour. A nine people audience when some of them shouldn’t be here. They don’t. Democracy is power in the hands of the ignorant. 

There is a sense even from the start, that the more accessible parts, the less controversial parts, the more user friendly parts are coming across as being on the edge of acceptability.  I can sense that the audience feels that they are being racy for liking the more innocuous parts of the show. What happens when I get to the parts that are in genuinely poor taste? What then. I am having to guide this audience by hand.

I sort of cajole this audience through this show. I flatter them, I am giving them all a “we’re all men/women of the world here” nod. The trouble is they are not men and women of my world. My friends are in the audience; they don’t count. The couple in their thirties would be at home in my audience; as some of the more cautious elements. The three woman in their sixties have no business being at this show. They could enjoy me in a club set- if they were sat up the back. The older couple, I feel are so far from any kind of reference point that maybe they will accidentally like it? But I fear never wishing to attend any live performance again. 

I am giving it a lot of “we’re all friends here”.

But I can see how people start selling pyramid schemes. This show is a giant pyramid scheme and I am trying to flog it to punters who are too clued up about their own tastes. 

There is a mood of “isn’t this all very jolly?” The trouble is I know what is over the horizon. I know when I get to certain parts of the material, the fragile camaraderie is going to shatter. 

I am having flash forwards to doing the AIDS material and I just can’t see it working. I just can’t see these nine people scattered across this fifty seater room taking it. I just see a train wreck. I just see the end of the gig as we know it, all momentum and good will gone. I keep running different scenarios in my head. Different ways of saying it. Different edits of it. Different moods. Different deliveries. I speculate about what could happen between here and the AIDS material that could make the audience well disposed towards it. Nothing is going to happen. They won’t like it. I play chess. I am trying to think 10 moves ahead. “Well if I say this and they laugh at that, and then they go for this.” None of them end with the audience liking the AIDS material. And AIDS is looming like a deadline. Twenty minutes away now, fifteen, now ten. Nothing is changing I cannot see it working. I think about re-ordering the material, sticking AIDS later, moving it closer. No still it won’t work. Now the point where I will have to do AIDS is drawing closer and I still haven’t come up with a way of making it work. But I have to do it right? It is the show. I can’t not do it because they won’t like it; I keep assessing this audience. I keep getting the same answer back: they are not going to like AIDS. I draw on the experience of every gig I have ever done. On the thousands of times I have been on stage. On the thousands of audiences. I run through the memory banks. The same answer keeps coming back. They are not going to like AIDS and after that they will not like anything and you’ll never get them back. I try asking myself the question a different way but it makes no difference, they will not like AIDS. I feel that a bomb is counting down to zero. It is going to blow up in my face. That any wire I cut will still lead to it blowing up in my face. 

And still it comes nearer. And still I have no solution. And then it occurs to me. Just don’t do it. Just don’t do AIDS. But isn’t that bottling it? Isn’t that the opposite of what you are supposed to do? To be fair the show can work without it. I have still not resolved what I am going to do. 

Then it comes. I come to the bit where I should do the AIDS routine and I do the opening line “And I’ll tell you something else that is none of your business.” And then I just cut straight to the Bad Driver routine and side skip AIDS. And the audience are looking at me. All big eyes. A bunch of innocents not knowing what nearly went off. And I saved them from it. And I saved me from getting nothing in the bucket. But I bottled it and it doesn’t feel good. Maybe it feels like this to thwart a terrorist attack and nobody thanks you and you secretly resent yourself? 

After

I think that not doing the AIDS material was a good call. I think it would have wrecked the show. It wouldn’t be like awkwardness in a big audience which is still an energy you can play with. This would just fizzle out. It was a good call. It was not bottling it. Sometimes it is difficult to know where wisdom begins and cowardice ends.