Here are some thoughts about the shows I saw in Edinburgh this month

…as opposed to providing you with my more general feels about the thing and where I sit within it, for that can be located elsewhere.

I had two trips to Edinburgh this August — firstly with work the first week and then again making a couple of day trips last Friday and Saturday, commuting in from Glasgow. (The last train, at 00:30, on a Friday night you can get a forward facing table seat; the 22:30 train back on a Saturday night and you can just about fit in but are praying folks will get off at Linlithgow.)

I know someone whose writing and roundup on his visit this year will be centred on a disconnect, a malaise and the perennial problem-turned-meme of the echo chamber of left-liberal thought, which makes sense given his political interests and the things that interest the publication he will be writing for. But I suppose lots of the things I saw, and were meant to see and had heard about weren’t so much about politics as done professionally, but about communicating and, crucially, listening, (re)gaining an intimacy when it feels like absolutely everything is up for grabs, except for the nuances of our internal lives.

Breach Theatre’s Tank is about what happens when man decides what dolphins need is to talk like and with man, from what I’ve gathered; Us/Them is a Belgian theatre company explaining the Beslan school massacre in English through the perspective of children but performed by two adults; FK Alexander’s I Could Go On Singing (Somewhere Over the Rainbow) is a touching reminder of what it means to demand of our female stars that we feel when seeing them live that she was doing it to us, just for us. Not to mention the reaffirming of existence when you are too ‘monstrous [of a] woof’ for the history books and your family, as in How to Win Against History.

I really enjoyed Sh!t Theatre’s Letters to Windsor House and the most lasting part of it for me (aside from the Romanian rap and the Rob Jecock song) was the idea of the postbox as the place in which they as performers could speak their minds. And I realised how often that moment of letting an envelope or a postcard slip into one of those red boxes on the street means hope but also the potential to flop: maybe the apology won’t be accepted, despite the baked goods; maybe the paperwork wasn’t quite right and the bank needs more from you; maybe the sign off wasn’t too forward and they’ll reply in kind.

People of a certain ilk beat themselves up a lot about not expanding horizons or sticking to listening to only voices they understand and are comforted by. It’s probably true, but I’m in a position where, I’m guessing due to the fact not all my siblings were born in the same country or decade, we didn’t all go to university or share the same religion or belief system, the rank panic of ‘I only know me’ hasn’t hit me quite to the same extent. But I will say that there is a problem of lots of the hyped work being almost exclusively of a certain type of demographic. It’s not enough to mention ‘diversity’ in theatre after seeing a stale production that’s largely white and Oxbridge dominated; surely there is something to be said about the whiteness of our bright yung thing theatre, be it British (or, more accurately, English) and often Russell Group or else by the Belgians and programmed at Summerhall? ‘White’ isn’t a synonym for ‘crap’ or ‘half-baked’ or ‘not alt-theatre enough’ (or even, she whispers, ‘narrow in aspect’) and I sometimes worry that elision demands anyone who doesn’t fit that mould to be an extra-special good and innovative theatremaker, which doesn’t feel like equalling the playing field to me.

And it’s for this reason that, while possibly the start of something interesting, Josie Long’s work-in-progress was a bit of a failed experiment. Trying to start a political conversation going with a divergence of views in Paines Plough’s Roundabout [a subset of Summerhall — incidentally I should mention some of the older audience members at that venue can be needlessly snooty, but that’s a whole other thing about property-owning broadsheet readers and their assumptions about the yung NOT FOR HERE this has a clear point], wasn’t going to work. And the trick about the lack of fairness from the fact checkers left a slightly sour taste in my mouth, partly because I don’t think Oxbridge comedy is in a place to be pointing at white male assumed rationality.

For better or for worse, their careers have been shaped and guided by where they went to uni and Oxford and Cambridge almost embed the Impartial White Middle Class Man narrative during weekly supervisions and tutorials, with extra-curricular scenes that match the syllabuses. It would’ve been more impressive to know that they actually did have non-white friends funny enough and point-of-information enough to fulfil the role. As it was, I think there were more white people with dreadlocks in the audience than visible BME folk. The search for the audience to match the rhetoric continues (see: Chris Thorpe’s ultimately limited Confirmation; white working class male voices aren’t the loudest, but we (‘we,’ what a loaded term) are asked to remember that. The assumption of that play is that the pendulum has swung but also that those in the room are to be relatively unaffected by the hard-right activism the show’s…protagonist is involved in). She remains charming and funny though.

I am complicit in the narrow fringe darling thing, and the best I did during this fringe was see work featuring voices, accents, I don’t often hear on stage. Both were at the Traverse, so not exactly niche venues (although I did meet someone who had done six years who had not been to either there or Summerhall this year — just as I try and see something not to my taste or try and see non-theatre, so I think comedy folks should too. Performance practices and practitioners have a lot to learn from one another imo. But maybe comedy feels more accessible? And also, Salome, maybe people have jobs which means they can’t just see everything as well you know…idk idk I’ll hopefully be finding out more about this in the coming months…that is indeed a hint).

Greater Belfast was a delightfully imperfect show, but wow atmospheric and cross-situation. Gig, stand up, spoken word = ‘play’. It was all worth it for that ending, though. I’ve never seen the flotsam of harbourside life captured in such a true way live before, echoes of refrains heard earlier on in the piece being called back, the back-swash of waves, the sounds of men after men, talking work but not exactly conversing with each other, again, the water. The show was like a greatest hits of the city and the area more broadly: ‘grand,’ a word I’ve had join my vocab after working for a Belfast-turned-Glasgow resident; the Undertones. Heaney, bless him, and thanks be to naff GCSE anthologies.

Alternating between a contemporary Glasgow club (looking at my receipts from last week it turns out even Cabaret Voltaire is owned by G1 group? they are ubiquitous, I swear) and Fela Kuti’s Shrine club/Kalakuta compound and site of free love (for him, of course) Expensive Shit. Women go out to get noticed and to escape in both, but men own and command the sexual, financial and economic power. The Shimmy Club used to have two-way mirrors installed in the women’s toilet area, so that men paying hundreds to rent out a private room could watch women fixing their makeup and getting ready to go back to dance. Linking the two scenes is the Glasgow club’s toilet attendant. Overall, I didn’t love it and felt the script could do with a bit more tightening, in this case allowing for a bit more ambiguity as the actors had too many rather obvious things to say, but it definitely had something to say.

So too did How (Not) to Live in Surburbia which I think captured so beautifully the horribleness of being in a loop of self-sabotaging behaviour, surrounded by perfectly good citizens, there to chastise for minor infractions, but there being no bigger authority there when you’re at using-a-bin-liner-as-a-sleeping-bag levels of rock bottom. But, I should add, with all the humour and olive trees you’d want of an afternoon.

I grow tired and will stop writing now. Prod me through the power of comment to share your thoughts. Eventually I’ll type up my knottier opinions to the fringe.