Hello Spank and Pals
Missing you already - even though you
have not left London yet.
Regrets I have a few - have a great Edenfest - shame myself and
himself will not be there - but who knows
Looking forward to reading the Daily News - heard that stand-ups are turning into playwrights/actors - worth a queue or
two
Seapea
- email received 16/08/2002
So, no Seapea or Rob D this year: and no Old Lag either. (Not to mention Sylvia and Michele, who were originally meant to be coming but had to drop out for assorted personal reasons.) This makes for a surprisingly restrained journey up to Edinburgh - in fact, initially it's just myself, the Belated Birthday Girl and Lesley travelling together, meeting Lee up there and with the other four rolling in at intervals over the following two days.
As noted already, we took the decision early on to travel up by easyJet instead of by train: there's a slight price advantage, not to mention the reduced travelling time. And as Edinburgh journeys go, it's a pretty enjoyable one, if you don't count the killer wasp that attacked the BBG in the transit bus, the passenger who had some sort of seizure and had to be treated by paramedics on arrival (the BBG was convinced this was the wasp's fault again), and the plane landing at what appeared to be an 85 degree angle to the ground. To quote the captain at the end of it all, "My name's Alex. If you've enjoyed your flight with easyJet, please tell all your friends. If you haven't, I lied about my name."
So with all that out of the way, the three of us meet up with Lee in the Filmhouse bar, drop off all our stuff at the flats and get in the essential supplies. From then on we split up, as Lee and Lesley go off to do some exploring, while the BBG and I set off to catch some theatre in the main International Festival.
Regular readers will know just how relevant that previous sentence is. Four years ago, the collective psyches of Spank's Pals were scarred by a Festival drama production called Die Ahnlichen: a piece we'd geared ourselves up to believe would be two and a half hours of pretentious German tosh, only to discover that it was in fact four hours. Since then we've pretty much sworn off anything that the International Festival offers, which I believe is a pity, as I know from previous experience that it's not all like that.
So this evening we return to the original scene of the crime, the King's Theatre, to see Douglas Maxwell's new play Variety. Maxwell is a young Scottish writer who's made a name for himself over the last year or two with a couple of plays: the Fringe success Decky Does A Bronco (set and performed in a children's playground) and recent London hit Helmet (drawing on his former job in a computer games shop for both its theme and style). Variety, as befits a Festival play, covers a much larger canvas than anything else he's done, and to be honest he isn't quite up to the job. It doesn't help that Festival audiences tend to be much older than the people he normally writes for. When Helmet played in Soho earlier this year, Old Lag and I were the oldest people in a room crammed with eager viewers in their teens and twenties. Here, the audience is summed up by an old guy near us who panics at the sight of a smoke machine, and has to ask an usher if the building's on fire.
Variety is set in a music hall theatre in the 1920s, just at the point where cinema was starting to eat into its audiences. The theatres compromised by showing short silent films in between the acts, but the fear throughout the business was that once the pictures started to talk, the game would be up. The performers at this particular theatre are seriously excited when a man from a film company comes in to look at their show. Unfortunately, there's a major misunderstanding at work here. They think he's a talent scout looking for future movie stars: in fact, he's sizing up the theatre with a view to closing it down and opening a talkie cinema.
Maxwell tries to take on too much here, but there's a lot to like. Stagehand Harvey (Jimmy Harrison) is a friendly narrator figure throughout, and is responsible for one of the best gags when it's revealed how he's taking home five times his proper salary. Rab C Nesbitt regular John Kazek has a terrific time as the foul-mouthed comic Jack Salt, although the Festival audience can be heard audibly clenching their collective sphincters every time he says 'fuck'. And Peter Kelly, as the theatre boss Edward Todd, gets a show-stopping scene in which he argues how live entertainment is infinitely more important than the second-hand thrills of the movies. (On that theme, Maxwell is splendidly eloquent about the role of the theatre building itself, in the process virtually turning the King's Theatre into the tenth member of the cast.)
Unfortunately, the soap-style dilemmas of the individual members of the variety troupe - failed marriages, professional jealousy, tragic secrets, you know the score - are ladled a bit too thickly on top of what's already rich material, making it just that bit too crammed a play for comfort. Still, I'd rather we had over-ambitious playwrights than under-ambitious ones, and Maxwell's definitely a name to watch in the future. If you'd like to judge for yourself and have access to digital telly, you can see Variety this coming Wednesday (August 21st) on BBC 4.
After quickly touching base with 7sarah's Coven Of Bitches at the Filmhouse (hi Cozzer), we shoot across town to the kitsch stone-cladding of the Crowne Plaza hotel, a seriously un-rock 'n' roll venue in which to see John Otway commit career suicide. Not that this isn't a great show - it is - but it's all based around a dangerous idea that he's currently working on. Everyone knows one thing about Otway: in 1977, he had a Top 27 hit with Cor Baby That's Really Free, and has never made it into the charts again since. Otway has subsequently built a career around this whole reputation of his heroic inability to connect with the British record-buying public, and a small but loyal collection of fans love him for it.
It's now 25 years since that one hit, and Otway has decided it's time for another one, to coincide with his 50th birthday. So in collaboration with that loyal fanbase, he's making a seriously dedicated effort at having a second hit. He's produced a series of demos and sent them to fans, getting them to vote on the best song. He's got a huge promotional campaign on the go for the winning song, including a website [dead link], pre-printed order forms for retailers and this very tour itself. He's booked the London Palladium for Sunday October 6th, in anticipation of the announcement on that day that he's reached number one in the charts. As he gleefully announces from the stage, after twenty years of playing the Fringe, this will be his last performance there as a one-hit wonder. Will this change in fortunes completely destroy the reasons why people love him? Or - possibly worse - what kind of state will he be in if this whole campaign comes to nothing?
We'll find out at the end of September. In the meantime, the song's called Bunsen Burner, a Disco Inferno-sampling romp with some of the worst science-based puns ever heard in a pop record. I'll probably end up buying at least one copy, if not the three different formats he's using to hype the sales. As for the rest of Otway's show, it's best summed up by the title of his live album The Set Remains The Same: anyone who's seen him before knows what to expect, and all the usual highlights are here. The suicidal somersaults between verses of Cor Baby That's Really Free (still reverently referred to as The Hit, though presumably not for much longer): the dramatic reading of Blockbuster, enhanced by a double-bodied guitar held together by a Hoover ring: high leaps from the top of a stepladder during You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet: and dryly humourous support from guitarist Richard and roadie John. And the synchronised heckling of the hardcore fans is the icing on the cake. ("What can a man do when his woman has gone?" Otway sings during the genuinely touching Cheryl's Going Home. "Wank!" yells the audience.) It would be a crying shame if renewed success changed Otway forever: let's hope it doesn't.
Sadly, the combination of serially overrunning shows, a late dinner and Edinburgh's traditional Saturday Night Taxi Drought mean that our plans to catch a late-night movie - Japanese horror flick Dark Water, from the director of Ring - are royally scuppered. We console ourselves with watching the Tattoo fireworks just after midnight: though as both the BBG and myself are opposed to the whole militaristic nature of the event, we distance ourselves from it by watching the fireworks reflected in the windows of the Bank Of Scotland building. It's more fun than it sounds, promise.
Notes From Spank's Pals
The Belated Birthday Girl - Variety never really got fizzing, although there were some nice visuals, and the premise - a variety theatre turning over to a cinema, end of an era, all that - was a good one for a starting point. There seemed to be too much being packed into it: maybe one or two characters and sub-plots too many. And maybe the audience, who seemed to enjoy the old-fashioned variety acts more than the play itself, didn't help. But some of the acting was very good, and maybe on another night if the mood was right it might work better.
Lee - Dougie Maclean may have travelled the world but his music is firmly rooted in Scotland. Opening the first set accompanied only by his guitar, he sang simple songs shining with the truth - songs about leaving rural Scotland and coming back, songs about sons and fathers, songs about fighting storms at sea and the storms of life, and songs about the land. Then he was joined by 15 string and pipe musicians reworking old songs, and finishing with Perthshire Amber, a symphony in four movements evoking the natural beauty of Scotland and the spirit of her people. An absolutely wonderful experience and introduction to the Festival.
The Belated Birthday Girl - I'll be surprised if I see many comedy double acts which work better than John Otway and Richard Holgarth this Edinburgh Festival. Impeccable comedy timing in the banter between the songs definitely made the show at least as much fun as the songs themselves - though Otway's version of Blockbuster, complete with feeder lines from knowing fans, was hilarious. And where else do you get a 50 year old man performing somersaults with an electric guitar? As for the next hit Bunsen Burner, the biggest groan from me came at the carbon-dating line. I guess it would be nice to give Otway that second hit for his 50th birthday. Even if he did keep us waiting 25 minutes at the start, starting a chain of events which ultimately led to me missing the film Dark Water, which was to have ended the first night.
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