We saddled up for another day of fringe action over the weekend -heading over with our friend Mike and catching acts on their 25th or so rendition – things were either flying or they were well & truly sick of being there.

We had an early start to catch a fantastic Korean physical theatre company’s interpretation of Woyzeck. The only props consited of fantastic simple wooden chairs which the cast used to great effect to create all manner of scenes and atmosphere – charting a working man’s decent into madness. The whole piece had a very architectural feel – not only with the use of furniture to create everything from a bed to a jail but also a cast dressed entirely in black. While it may have been more about the physicality than the meaning of the play it was still very impressive – especially at the end when the cast produced a series of still vingnettes of the entire show with only about 5 seconds changeover between each.
As the weather was kinder than on our last visit we were able to wander the city a bit more and visit a few elements of the visual art festival – including scoring some bloody marys for breakfast at the opening of Francesca Woodman & Richard Serra‘s show at the very posh Ingleby Gallery.
After a leisurely afternoon we packed in a tight program over the course of the evening. We started with an atrocious play, Killer Joe a traler trash americana drama with hammy acting and gratuitous nudity. Having endured our first truly bad performance of the Fringe we ducked in to a tiny basement to hear the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players (above) – an eccentric New York family band (…well dad can play & the daughter bashes the drums Meg White style) who collect slide sets from the 50′s through to the 80′s and base their songs on the images they find. With great banter between songs they were highly entertaining although their set was cut a little short.

Feeling rejuventated by the performance we scampered to the other end of Edinburgh for a late showing of Johnson & Boswell – Late but Live, based on the contrasting historical accounts of a journey to Scotland it was quite witty although the two performers weren’t able to sustain the pace towards the end.

By now it was midnight and as we lined up for a dose of low brow stand-up at Late and Live, and jammed into a packed and sweaty arena, with the smell of 25 days of 12 audiences a day lingering powerully I think perhaps we realised we had attempted one show too many. There were a couple of decent comedians but the MC was fairly awful, reinforcing my general antipathy towards standup. It highlighted how many of the poets at Luke Wright’s Poetry Party were far better comedians that much of the stand-ups performing at the Fringe.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 10:49 pm and is filed under architecture, music, scotland, tim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.