Spank's Edinburgh Diary, Monday 19/08/2024

Reviewed today: Mervyn Stutter's Pick Of The Fringe, Ray O'Leary: Your Laughter Is Just Making Me Stronger, Sunlight, Timestalker.

Let's finally get around to addressing the elephant in the room: we don't usually start our Edinburgh week on a Sunday, do we? Well, you're right. Our original plan was to do a Saturday to Saturday run like we usually do. However, due to an admin error - and it's still up in the air as to who was responsible for that, but I'm saying it wasn't me - we're here doing a Sunday to Sunday week. Thinking it through, if we'd kept to our original plan, we'd have missed yesterday's unscheduled train chaos and next week's planned train shutdown, which is why I'm trying not to think about it too much.

Anyway, here's one knock-on consequence of starting our week on a Sunday: we get to do Mervyn Stutter's Pick Of The Fringe on a Monday, as we usually do on the first full day of our visit. Merv himself is in blistering form, calling on both Kander & Ebb and Taylor Swift for the tunes to a couple of furiously angry anti-Trump songs. It's a splendid opening to the show, but it won't hit those heights again till the very end. It's always going to be a lottery when you're seeing an anthology show pulled from seven different acts around the Fringe, and the balls are against us today.

Part of the problem is a traditional one: the more theatrical shows have to give you a flavour of their sixty minutes in a mere five, and generally do that by just giving you their opening scene. Sometimes that works: Little Squirt, a musical about one man's experiences in the world of sperm donation, sets out its stall entertainingly enough in its first song, but not so much as to tempt you into seeing any more of it. My Last Two Brain Cells, a comedy sketch show with a vague narrative throughline, gets the energy level up to a degree that you feel a full show of it might get a bit irritating. But that's nothing compared to Amando Houser's Delia Delia, which has to rely on Merv reading out the show's blurb to suggest that what we see here develops beyond some screeching noises and a lot of poorly defined symbolism.

Somewhere in between the theatrical and the comedy comes Pip Utton, whose latest one-man show depicts what it's like being At Home With Will Shakespeare. I've somehow managed to avoid Utton in all my years coming to Edinburgh, but you can see why his monologues go down well here, and they're bolstered by an amusingly confrontational interview with Stutter afterwards. On the more conventional comedy side, Abi Clarke: Role Model is a pleasantly self-aware life story from a former influencer (funny to think that eight years ago I saw a Finnish film about the job, without ever realising it had a name, or was even a real thing). Ketch Sketch features a series of mime-based gags from a former member of Japanese duo Gamarjobat, made disappointing by the fact that Ketch is doing exactly the same gags that the duo was doing here a decade ago. But after all these disappointments, we wrap up with Mark Thomas, in an extended interview where Merv takes him through some of the highlights of his career as an activist/prankster. You can feel there's a huge amount of love for Thomas in the room: he's evolved over the decades from a bollocks-to-Thatcher gag merchant to an incredibly fine storyteller, and his stories here send everyone out happy.

Sticking with comedy: two years ago, the main thread holding together the various stand-ups we were seeing was the Stand's year-long run of Saturday night lockdown live streams. Having spent so long watching dozens of Scottish comedians performing online, our 2022 Fringe was dedicated to seeing how many of them could deliver the goods live, from compere Mark Nelson downwards. This year, the theme to our comedy choices has to be Antipodean Taskmaster. Sure, in 2022 we made a point of catching the live show by Paul Williams, the assistant on Taskmaster New Zealand: but since then we've seen several seasons of the New Zealand version and two of the Australian one. That's an awful lot of comedians who were previously unknown to us, and guess what? Loads of them have come over to the Fringe this year, with 'star of Taskmaster [insert country here]' plastered all over their posters.

One of these is Ray O'Leary, who was a contestant on New Zealand season four. He's a good one to start off with, because you know exactly what you're getting with his comic persona - gags delivered in a deadpan monotone by a nervous chubby guy wearing a grey suit that's slightly too small for him. It's that monotone that allows him to constant surprise you with unexpected detours: at one point, he decides he should fight a member of the audience, but that initial choice goes off in all sorts of wild directions. It's a show that takes a while to get going - you feel that his lack of energy transmits to the crowd a little too effectively - but the verbal curveballs he keeps throwing in are increasingly great, with an absolute corker of a set closer at the end. 

Some of the initial lack of response to O'Leary's gags may just be from an audience that's still disorientated from the effort of finding the room in George Square where he was performing. Studios 4 and 5 in the Assembly complex have been carefully hidden away in a basement area, where the sign telling you that can only be seen if you're approaching the complex from one very specific angle. It's all indicative of the total chaos that George Square has collapsed into, with new venues being added all the time - and made even worse by the Edinburgh International Film Festival now being hidden away inside there in a similar fashion.

Since we were last year in 2022, the Film Festival has had some spectacular ups and downs: it went almost terminally bust in 2022, was reduced to an emergency programme as part of the International Festival in 2023, and now considers 2024 as being the year when it's having what amounts to a relaunch. We almost lost the Filmhouse, too: it's been dark for nearly two years now, but thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign it should be reopening later this year.

In the meantime, though, the festival is a bit short of places where it can show films. They're trying to spin this as giving the relaunched festival 'the spirit of the Fringe', which is meant to explain why we're seeing two films back to back in a university lecture theatre (complete with my favourite feature in an entertainment venue, a fold-out table so that you can take notes). 50 George Square is, quite frankly, a terrible place to see a film, with underpowered sound and dogshit sightlines: unless you're in one of the tiny number of unreserved front row seats, you're guaranteed to have someone's head blocking your view of part of the screen. People will accept that sort of thing for a Fringe show, sure, but not for a movie.

As a result of all this, I'm not in an ideal mood to watch Alice Lowe's Timestalker. The basic idea is sound, though not especially original - a woman (Lowe) falls in love with a man (Aneurin Barnard), it all ends terribly, and then it happens over and over again in different historical periods. But the film just cycles through variations on that idea without really developing them that much. It's got a few decent gags, but not enough for a comedy: and dramatically, it doesn't convince us of the passion that supposedly drives the story. It's just there, really, trying to persuade you that it deserves to be a feature rather than a short, and failing.

It turns out, though, that 50 George Square is perfectly fine as a screening room when you've got a decent film to watch. Who knew?

Here's the story of Nina Conti's directorial debut, Sunlight: a suicidal radio host and a woman in a monkey costume go on a road trip to dig up a corpse so that she can start her own business. It's the sort of kerrrazee one-line synopsis that most American indie movies from the last decade share, but they don't have the rapport that Nina Conti and Shenoah Allen have here.

Central to it all is the woman in the monkey costume, who's basically a full-sized version of the Monkey character that Conti uses in her ventriloquist act, complete with the same attitude and inventive swearing. Obviously a ventriloquist has previous form in giving life to inanimate objects, but it still seems miraculous how much of her film is given to reaction shots of the monkey - a mask with just one possible expression - and how much emotion she gets out of them. Co-writer and co-star Allen pitches his reactions to the escalating craziness perfectly, and it's the balance between the two characters that ultimately wins you over. For all the ridiculousness of the situation, you want these two - or is it three? - to come out of it in one piece.