Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2011 Part Two

Simon Munnery's Show, well, I was really drunk,and that just made it all the more magical. Especially the bubble hat. My favourite part- apart from the video of the Gillette eight bladed razor advert set in the 1940s- was the Sherlock Holmes monologue. Ace.
The Carroll Myth at Sweet on the Grassmarket was recommended to me by pals DBS. Great script, it was really well acted and staged -and the costumes were lovely. I liked all the instantly recognisable bits of Alice but also liked the not so recognisable bits. The Cheshire cat was cleverly done, played by three actresses in identicle cat suits just appearing in different parts of the room- including on the audience's lap!
Richard Herring, I see him every year, I saw him three times this year, and who knows maybe I'll see him again on Sunday or Monday! I went to recordings of his Edinburgh Podcast which are really great, two different comics on every day, one for chatting with and the other to do a five minute bit to promote their show. I saw Al Murray and he was great because he wasn't the one doing the five minute bit, he wasn't the pub landlord who Murray descibed jovially as "just a fucking idiot!" he was an Oxford boy talking to another Oxford boy and giggling. So much fun.
And of course I also saw Rich's excellent show, What Is Love, Anyway? Calum and I went and though Rich spends the entire hour just shouting it is very very good and he even managed to shout some quite sensitive stuff that sort of proves that Love is definitely something.
Faust/Us the one-man show of Doctor Faustus is so fucking terrifying and clever and exhausting and innovative I don't know how to review it! The show relies completely on Calum breathing in exactly the same places each night, the one hour projection of film, animation, puppetry and sound rolls while the actor acts around it playing all the characters convincingly with as little as a simple change of stance!
I think it's really brilliant that Calum has managed to use that animation degree even if it's just knowledge of how things work on screen. The film alone would be an amazing show but it's great that it's been useful for what he is actually going to do for the rest of his life, perform.
Fordie! I went to see Matt Forde's show Dishonourable Member and I fucking loved it. Though Matt must have sweat an entire ocean I still found myself a bit in love with him. That's what politics will do to a girl. Oh, is it just me? Just me who found Fordie's sports style commentary to an imaginary Labour Party win extremely emotional? Just me and Fordie who feel as strongly about Oasis as they do about the Labour Party? Yes. Fordie's show was for me, that's why I went on my own, the boy himself says that his opinions usually split the room, my opinions do too, that's why I came on my own, and it was brill. Bonus for the Alan Partridge sex jokes, we've all been there, mate.
Jon Richardson's written a book called It's Not Me, it's You. He's in Edinburgh doing some readings, no show this year, a book instead! I look forward to reading it all and agreeing with it all. Vis Fordie and the Labour Party, Jon Richardson and me are OCD buddies. Fuck, when it comes to cleaning and organising, I am up there with the mentalists. I get angry when I'm eating dinner because the plate I'm eating off is dirty- this sounds normal, of course you would be, that's disgusting! No. I mean that I have to clean everything I've used to cook with before I can eat the meal I've made and it bothers me that because the dinner is on the plate that plate now needs to be cleaned but I can't do it until after I've eaten it despite the fact I just DID all the washing up.
Yeah... Not even Jon would be that crazy.
Anyway, I hope he's ok, in the future I mean. I know I will be, because though I'm crazy, I enjoy washing up and cleaning up, and whoever I end up with will have to deal with the fact that I want to do those things- not to make their lives easier, but so I know it's done properly.

Jon Richardson: This Guy at Night (Soho Theatre)

Jon's routine about Home Alone 2 killed me.

He's tightened the show right up since the preview I saw in July, but I was pleased to hear new rambling ad-libs, I always find those the best bits.

He is a seriously funny and clever young man -and very cute.

Listen to his Sunday morning radio show.

John Lithgow: Stories By Heart (National Theatre)

I had a wonderful night at the theatre last night. Alison limped up to me in the National Theatre while I watched the jazz band playing in the foyer, we caught up over chocolate cake and a glass of wine, Charles Dance milled about -much to my delight- then we headed into the Lyttleton to see John Lithgow's one-man show.

He is a wonderful story teller, no doubt about it, I could have sat there all night listening to him! It actually felt strange to me that there was no encore! I've seen one-man plays before, but this didn't feel like a play, the bits when Lithgow was being himself, well, it was an acted memoir- he wrote it all, so I really wanted him to come out again and say "All right, one more, you crazy Limeys."

Lithgow started his show by telling his own stories, stories about his father, his father's youth and life running the Ohio Shakespeare Festival, then his decline. 2002; John Lithgow (a boy of 58 at the time) was nominated by his siblings to live with his parents and look after them for a month while his father recovered from an operation- he was nominated as he was the only one out of work at the time- Lithgow found the book of short stories that had been read to him as a child (the only prop in the play) on his parent's shelves and through telling them a bedtime story each night his father started to recover. He tells us the audience two very different stories from the book- but of course he doesn't use the book, he knows them by heart and he acts out all ten characters of the P.G. Wodehouse yarn and transforms himself into the barber from Ring Lardner's Haircut brilliantly.

So at the beginning when he's telling us about his family there's something schmaltzy about it that I think on a British stage doesn't work as well as it must have done in the Lincoln Centre, but surely he's allowed to be sentimental about his own family! It's only our attitude over here that made it a little close to cringey. Luckily straight after this dose of American schmaltz is a good helping of Uncle Fred and all is forgiven. It's a sign of a good storyteller, I could see every single character- even though obviously they were all John Lithgow- and it wasn't just the art of Wodehouse, Lithgow told it brilliantly. Wodehouse was made to be read aloud, TV and film adaptations lose everything because the funny is in the descriptions and narration not just the dialogue, so to have someone tell it and physically act it out at the same time, well, it was the BEST episode of Jackanory I'd ever seen -and that includes Rik Mayall.

In the second half Lithgow tells a different story, this is just one man talking, a barber giving a haircut. Lardner's story was obviously not as good as Wodehouse (nothing is) but it was personal to Lithgow (it was written with his home town in mind and he read it as a boy) and it was an excellent opportunity for him to showcase another character and a lot of excellent mime! He is a brilliant actor (comic actor of course) It was complete transformation from the character of "John Lithgow" who sang a a peppy ditty about murder and adultery before beginning his next tale, just by taking off his jacket he's suddenly a gossipy old Ohio barber. It was a great performance and very American compared to the Wodehouse, unfortunately the lights went off just at the crux of the story and Lithgow had to try and recreate the tension he'd just told- if I was him I'd friggin' kill the lighting guy, there were only two performances and that happens right before the end of the last one?! Anyway, he recovered it very well and we (the audience) were all gripped anyway, we all knew that wasn't the end, we were silently waiting to hear the rest of it in that second of darkness.

Probably because I'm a storyteller myself, or maybe not, maybe just because he was so good (or because I love P.G. Wodehouse!) I just loved it, I thought it was perfect theatre. First time for ages that I've come out of a theatre and thought 'that was perfect'. But it was.

You Can See the Hills (Young Vic)

This play, this theatre-experience, is the reason for mine and Anna's latest trip to London. Anna saw William Ash perform the one-man show last autumn in the back room of the Manchester Royal Exchange theatre.

Ashy talks you through his teenage years growing up in Oldham (near Manchester- mad for it, etc.). The play was written by Ash's old school friend Matthew Dunster with him in mind to perform it, I wonder how close William Ash is to Adam Ash the character he plays?

For some reason this play has been given a bad review from the Guardian, the closing line was something like this "...at half the length and twice the concentration, this could be a funny, satisfying evening rather than one that, like Adam's life, goes nowhere very slowly."

For fuck's sake, but this was exactly the point of the play- not the very slowly part, I don't know what the hell that is, I found him enthralling!- but the play is about the fact that there are so many children out there who are intelligent but because of circumstance, surroundings, class, etc. end up as wasted lives! I just don't think the London theatre-goers get it! The audience the night Anna and I went were made up of elderly toffs and very rich very fashionable young toffs. Idiot girls who giggled at the most inappropriate moments and old men who fell asleep!! I couldn't believe it! I mean, the performance was incredible! Ash sat there for two hours just telling us his story and I have memories of each scene he painted stronger in my mind than anything I've physically seen on stage! I could see every one of the characters he mentioned so fucking clearly! How the hell could people fall asleep!? Anna said that the audience in Manchester were all in tears through the traumatic stories, that the audience all spoke to Ash afterwards and told him how much they'd loved it, how good it was, how good he was.
It can't just be that Anna got it because she went to a rough northern comprehensive. It can't just be that I got it because at twelve all my pals (though at the public school) were from Oldham and I stayed the night there- I was exposed to my friend's junkie brother and his mates, her scary mates who probably went to Ashy's comp and, hung out in the park in the middle of the night scared I was going to be killed, and had to listen to her stories of losing her virginity at 13 behind some bins... I quickly made other friends. This is the Oldham Ash talks about. Exactly. But I went there once. You don't have to be from the North or from that working class background to understand what he's talking about, there are rough areas of London! You just have to have seen it! You just have to be aware of it! Who the fuck were the idiots at that play?!

William Ash is a wonderful actor and story teller, this play was a fantastic play, gripping, moving, it was all so fucking true.