SUNDAY 30TH AUGUST
SHOW 19
VENUE - BOB’S “HEROES” OF THE FRINGE THE HIVE
Before
The Last Show. I never like the last show of the Edinburgh Fringe run. It always feels a day too long. If I finish on the Monday I wish I finished on the Sunday. If I finish on the Sunday I wish I finished on the Saturday. I have never finished on the Saturday. Maybe if I finished on the Saturday I would want to finish on the Friday? Or maybe I would be grateful that I was finishing on a Saturday - the busiest day of the week - and count my blessings? It is difficult to take the last day seriously. There is per little at stake anymore. There will be no more reviews. There will be no more buzz. No more momentum. The final days of the Fringe have a sagging energy anyway. Everybody knows the jig is up.
Yesterday was Saturday, the busiest day of the week. Last year at the Free Fringe my highest grossing bucket was on the final Saturday. Yesterday, the final Saturday this year, I cancelled my show after six people showed up. I was at the New Waverley Arches and didn’t feel that I could possibly sustain a show for an hour in that space with an audience of six so I cancelled it. It is the only time in my Edinburgh history that I have cancelled anything. I have been having shall we say “venue problems”. Having been thrown out of my regular venue and regular time slot, audiences have been finding it increasingly difficult to locate my show. It is actually a clever piece of performance art. In the myriad of Edinburgh shows and venues, the show that finally is impossible to find and thus never actually goes ahead.
So tonight, I am not sure it will go ahead at all. At best I give it 50:50. I can tell by the flop of my limbs and the shuffling of my feet that my body doesn’t think the show will go ahead. But what does my body know anyway? Has it ever produced a fringe show? No it hasn’t. Fuck my body! But tonight I really want it to go ahead. I want to end my Fringe on a full stop instead of a series of venue disasters.
An audience shows up. I am genuinely glad. I have a 50 minute slot instead of my previous hour slot. I have re-edited the show as a result. But we start 5 minutes late giving me just 45 minutes to do a previously hour long show.
During
Right off the bat I am wasting time like nobody’s business. I am bantering with the audience about North Korea. There is nothing in my show about North Korea. However there is a woman in the audience from Korea. I rightly guess South Korea because she is here instead of being in a gulag. There is a man who claims to be from North Korea. I severely doubt it. He has a Scottish accent. Also if most people in the free world cannot find my venue, I doubt whether a person from a totalitarian state can. But I run with the whole North Korean theme. Enjoying it, being silly, being playful. Aware that it is eating into much needed time. Aware I don’t really have enough time to do the show proper so this is a self-indulgence. Nevertheless, the start is working better than ever. I strike the right tone with this North Korea stuff that engages the audience and sets up a realistic expectation. As I am doing it, I am thinking this is how I should have opened the show all along. I must remember what I am doing. But even now I am struggling to remember what it was I was doing. I was trying to give the audience an event and not just worry about the material. This is what I should have done all along. I suppose an Edinburgh show is like bringing up kids. Only after it is over do you realise how you should have done it.
The audience comprises of different levels of enthusiasm. There are some people who are fans and some who are skeptical but by the end of the ad-libbing I feel I have built sufficient trust and good will to launch into the show proper. This could be retrospective justification. I may simply be excited my Fringe is nearly over?
Now to the show. The audience are energetic and fun, they are laughing in all the right places. They don’t feel like a final Sunday of the fringe audience at all. They are a good audience but don’t feel real in some way. I am paranoid they are too easy and have been primed in some away. Are being over generous out of sympathy for my recent venue travails? But no they aren’t too easy. I am having to work. They do punish me for minor faults. If the delivery isn’t on the money the energy slips. But maybe they are doing that to fake realism? They just seem a little too good for their size. The right hand side are more PC than the left. At points the right hand side are more easily offended. There is one woman whose face is a weather vein of good taste. So there are moments when she doesn’t approve and her face registers her distaste. So she must be real, right? But maybe she is more inbuilt resistance? There is something plastic about this audience. I can’t quite put my finger on it? Its like somebody briefed them in advance where to laugh.
It is like my audience have been replaced by robots who know how to be an audience. Maybe I am going mad? Three days ago I was convinced I was going mad but I am over that now. Unless being over it is just another level of madness? There is a woman at the back on the audience. I can’t see her but I can feel her presence. She laughs occasionally but when she does, she really buys into it. For some reason her approval means more than the other members of the audience. She doesn’t feel like she is a robot. She seems authentic.
Perhaps the AIDS material can shake them off? I can perform this different ways to different effects. I will see now if the audience respond. But even here the audience produce a gamut of human emotions. Recognition, bewilderment, disapproval, approval, tension, relief.
The show continues to go well but I have to work at it enough to keep me on my toes.
As I finish the driving material I am aware of a certain commotion at the back, a certain distraction. The stage lights are pretty bright and I have trouble seeing the back of the room nevertheless I can make out a figure in the gloom. He/she, I think it is he, is standing at the back of the central aisle. In my memory he is holding a torch and shining it at me. This almost certainly didn’t happen and is an embellishment of my mind. There are others further back. Who are they? They don’t have the air of punters? I soon realise they are door staff who are here to get me out. I have now run over my allotted time.
I am sort of reminded of the last ever Beatles gig. The one on the roof of a building. The one where police officers arrived but didn’t do anything except cause an atmosphere. This time it isn’t police officers but door staff. They too are causing an atmosphere. They don’t realise I have a high tolerance to a bit of an atmosphere.
I know I should finish by eleven but a) We started late b) It is the last show c) If I was a stickler for the rules would I have been thrown out of PBH Free Fringe in the first place?
I am determined to finish the show and not cut and run. I reckon I can wrap it up in ten minutes. I dare them to stop the show. I somehow know they won’t interrupt me as long as the audience are enjoying it. But I also know that the moment the audience aren’t enjoying it the security will be on me like a pack of hyenas. This gives the end a certain added jeopardy. I run through ways of re-editing the end of the show in my mind. Perhaps I can tie everything together in a shorter edited form. But this is already the shorter edited form. Could I edited it down still further while serving all the relevant call backs and giving it sufficient build? Probably. But do I want to? No.
I thank the audience and say goodnight to a healthy round of applause. But as the applause fades and I walk from the stage the exit music doesn’t start. I walk straight to sound booth to see what the problem is. My iPad has been disconnected by the venue staff. I now see that the venue staff are wearing high visibility jackets. For some reason this detail annoys me. I couldn’t see the jackets were high visibility in the stage lights. The jackets weren’t that high visibility, were they? There are five of them. They stand around awkwardly. They have a semi-hostile attitude to me. They are not quite sure why they are hostile to me. But they clearly don’t think that I should be doing what it is I am doing, and if I should be doing it nobody told them I should be doing it, and even if they were told, “it’s nothing to do with me mate in any case, take it up with some manager or other, I’m just a bloke in a high vis vest.” I don’t wish to remonstrate with them in front of the audience as I don’t wish to sour the atmosphere. The staff have their job to do. They have to clear the room to make way for a disco that nobody ever attends. I think it is the same people who haven’t been attending this disco that also haven’t been attending my shows. I actually have a lot of sympathy with the door staff. These punters that don’t turn up can be really testing. The show ends in a melee of officialdom, red-tape and needless confusion. The perfect end to my fringe 2015.
After
I rushed the last ten minutes as a sort of compromise between wanting to complete the show and not wanting to have the show ended by security staff. I now feel that this was the worst of all worlds. It would have been better to take my time and been dragged off by security or reworked the end to a shorter version. I think that rushing at the end dragged down what was otherwise a strong final performance.
No comments:
Post a Comment