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Fringe show review thread - reviews may contain spoilers

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Eccentrica Gallumbits:
Ed Byrne at the Assembly Hall on the Mound

It's Fringe time again, and in the words of Ed Byrne, the Fringe box office has been the Terminal Five of the arts world this year (or words to that effect).

Haven't seen Ed Byrne for a few years. The last time I saw him was at the Playhouse and the sound was rubbish. We could hardly hear him, and what we could hear was old stuff we'd heard before in previous shows, so next time he was here I didn't bother. I'm glad I went tonight though

The title of the show was A Different Class and some of it was about class and where he fits into the class structure but most of it was just funny anecdotes. He was saying that he isn't really any particular class in Ireland - not poor and not posh, which basically means that when he was growing up, he didn't have a horse - the only people who have horses are posh rich people (although I think they probably have ponies unless they're really landed gentry) or people who have ten kids in a one-bedroomed flat in a tower block. There was some good stuff about his wedding, which was about spending an entire year arguing with his fianceé about stuff he didn't give a shit about it. And there was the absolute best bit - I didn't know, but apparently Michael Jackson's album Thriller was re=released this year as a 25 year anniversary edition with all the videos on dvd. He was talking about the video and all the zombies and the werewolf and all the scary stuff, and then pointed out that in the entire production of the album, the title track and the Thriller video, nobody, not Quincy Adams, not John Landers, nobody bothered to point out that really it shouldn't have been called Thriller, it should have been called Horror.

7/10 - consistent giggles, only one big laugh
 

Eccentrica Gallumbits:
Living With Johnny Depp


A one-woman play today with actress Joanne Mitchell. She plays Irish schoolgirl Shania who is completely obsessed with Johnny Depp and screws up her mocks by writing about him in her English exam. She also plays her teacher, the headmistress and her mother, and switches between the four characters instantly.

It was very bizarre. I thought the actress was very good, she managed to create 4 distinct characters and moved between each role very clearly. But, the script was awful, really bad, and for some reason she decided to put audience participation into it. She did a bit about being in McDonalds and made me be the McDonalds worker - all I had to do was stand there and then she told me what to say - "do you want the colouring in sheets?"and I said it and she carried on and I sat down. I like to think I made the part my own though. And someone else had to be her best friend and say one line as well. It added nothing to the show, and really I think it was quite unfair - you expect audience participation when you see a comedian, but you shouldn't have to worry about it at a play.

There were some laughs in it, but really, it was a bizarre and not very good hour. A complete re-write of the script to make it into something funny, coherent and understandable (some of it was quite difficult to follow) would have worked wonders and then we could have appreciated how good the woman was, rather than just coming out thinking "wow, that was bizarre."

4/10.

Eccentrica Gallumbits:
Rich Hall as Otis Lee Crenshaw at the Pleasance.

I like Rich Hall. He does very intelligent comedy, pointed but not malicious, and he's always very funny. Otis Lee Crenshaw is a character he does, the premise being that OLC is Rich Hall's Tennessee cousin who's spent his whole life in prison and been married 7 or 8 times, every time to a woman called Brenda. Now he's in a prison country and western band. The band used to be the Black Liars - they were really good, but now it's a different band, just a guitarist and a banjo player, plus OLC on vocals and keyboard. The banjo player and guitarist walked on and immediately started playing Duelling Banjos.

He does a little bit of audience banter, has a comedy chat with a couple of audience members and then makes up country and western songs around the info they gave him. Tonight was a housing officer called Michael from Nottingham, and an IT bloke called Ian from Ayr. He also does other songs, one about Roberta in the KKK, some others, and a fantastic one about whisky and how Scotland invented whisky and America ruined it.

It's very clever and very funny and I enjoyed it very much. 9/10.

 
 

Eccentrica Gallumbits:
Am I the only one seeing shows this year?  ???

Not Everything Is Significant.

Ben Moor's new one man play.

I've lost count of his Fringe plays. I know I've seen them all, and loved them all, but there are so many now I can't remember them all, which is sort of ironic given the theme of this one.

It's hard to explain. It's about a biographer, and it's narrated by Ben as the biographer and as the biographer's footnote-adder. The biographer finds a diary which details all his movements for the coming year up to 22nd September and finds himself doing what's listed for the dates even if he didn't intend to, and the footnote-adder becomes more and more entwined in it all so the lines between the separate narrations become more and more blurred. There are some very subtle, very funny bits in it, in that Ben way of being clever uses of words and plays on words and just little bits of taking real life just that step further - a drug called Addictin which has no effect on people whatsoever other than making them addicted to it, a theme park called FarmWorld with a tunnel of hens, poodling, which is like dogging only women dress men in sequinned collars and curl their eyelashes etc and a load more I've forgotten - not because it was unmemorable but because there was so much of it.

Some of it reminded me of the recent episodes of Doctor Who - Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead - the idea about having your future all written down in a diary and whether to look, or how far ahead you should look, although that was more me making associations than the script, I think. There was a lot about memory and immortality, and if you experience something and tell someone else, that perpetuates it, and how we share things and continue things and things continue to exist in memory, and how we continue to exist in our children, and the things that happen to us continue to be remembered after we're gone as long as we've told other people about them.

It was very clever, very complex, very funny, very beautiful and for some reason, I found it very, very moving. 10/10.

Wowbagger:

--- Quote from: Kirst on August 04, 2008, 06:14:00 PM ---Am I the only one seeing shows this year?  ???

--- End quote ---

Possibly, but please keep the reports coming.

We went three years ago. My son chose the Edinburgh Festival because he was a dialysis patient at the time and not far from Bruntsfield there is a dialysis unit aimed specifically at holidaymakers. He would have his dialysis from 8 a.m. to about lunch time and we would go to the shows afterwards.

We saw some superb stuff and other bits and pieces which were a bit iffy. There was a really good 1-woman show called "I miss Communism" which I think was one of the best things we saw. I think my sons thought other stuff was better, but the best things we saw were very good indeed.

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