The Edinburgh fringe is always a highlight of my year. Where else but in this melting pot of stress and cider will you see a comedian down a pint of red wine, strip naked, then tape a bread knife to their face – or experience a 12-hour, live-art show that starts with a nude woman covered in snails?
With the fringe cancelled this year, I feel somewhat hollow, and not just because I’m usually out and about in the city reviewing it all. So, in glorious denial, I’m refusing to accept that it’s not happening, and instead will attempt to recreate the experience from home, away from the bustling crowds and dark venues full of sweaty strangers. I’m bingeing as many shows as I can, but it’s just me alone in my room. At least I’m starting off with the average-sized fringe audience.
How is this possible? Well, this year a number of venues (ZOO, Gilded Balloon, theSpace) have launched rolling online programmes, with a mixture of old recordings, new films and live performances. No queues and a front row seat guaranteed. Still, I miss getting to the wrong venue, then having to race up three hills and arrive late, sweaty and full of adrenaline. Doing laps up and down the stairs doesn’t quite have the same effect. Sadly, the place I miss the most is one I can’t go to virtually. Unable to spend my evenings in Summerhall’s glowing courtyard, I make a donation to save the venue instead.
After wading through a handful of shows I’d rather forget, I stumble on some gems. Coded Dreams, part of ZOO TV, is a beautiful short dance film that leaves you longing for intimate touch and open landscapes. Luke Evans and Jake Humphreys grapple with each other’s bodies as dreamlike editing flicks them between woods and water, physical space collapsing in on itself.
Underground, an eco-fable told through shadow puppetry, is part of theSpace’s programme. A delicate depiction of the rewilding of Earth, it’s written and directed by Amy Wakeman and Patricia Lain, who would have been making their fringe debut this year. In the very funny Zeroko, by Masashi Kadoya and Keisuke Hamaguchi, a writer’s hands keep running away from his body. Part of EdFringe Japan’s offering, it’s a wonderfully silly duet. Another not to miss is Hope Dickson Leach’s shimmering film Ghost Light, part of the Edinburgh international festival. It’s a treasure of a piece that celebrates stories old, new, and as yet untold.
Several companies have made audio pieces designed to be listened to at home. Less a play and more playful ASMR, Play in Your Bathtub is incredibly soothing, with plinky piano and a mixture of whispered and soft-spoken speech. Another audio piece, Darkfield Radio, is an episodic binaural show made by the team behind Seance and Flights. Voiced by Christopher Brett Bailey, it’s an intriguing, creepy start to a supernatural story.
When I start to get lonely, I rally my pub quiz team. They join me on Zoom for Swamp Motel’s brilliant Plymouth Point, a virtual escape room that ramps up the tension so effectively that we’re all screeching by the end. Completely exhilarating, and a serious challenge. Reminded of how much watching with other people adds to the experience of a show, I ask my parents if they’ll stay up late drinking with me and seeing what strange cabaret we can find online. Instead, they watch old episodes of Line of Duty and go to bed before dark.
With my brain dizzy from non-stop screens, I ask for help from some fringe veterans. Aside from shows, how do you recreate the experience of the festival? “I would rig up a watering can from the ceiling,” comedian Jack Rooke advises, “and then every time I came into my bedroom it would rain on me a little bit, so I’m just perpetually damp.” This is a recurring theme. “Be really, really wet and cold,” orders Rebecca Biscuit, who, with Louise Mothersole, makes up Sh!t Theatre. “Then turn your heating up really high and shut all of the windows and open the oven door.”
Last year I danced on tables with Sh!t Theatre, singing loudly to Bruce Springsteen and stuffing pizza after an interview for their show. Now, we’re reduced to fuzzy video. Perhaps it’s apt; when I ask how to recreate the feel of the fringe, disappointment and discomfort feature heavily. “Start drinking early and keep going. But if you go to the toilet during a show,” says Mothersole, “you’re not allowed to come back in and finish.” For the authentic fringe experience, they insist, a healthy dose of envy is vital too. “Print out all of your peers’ greatest achievements,” Biscuit instructs, “and poster them all around the wall. Anyone your age you’ve ever met, anyone you’ve ever been to school with, their marriages, their kids, their jobs: all over the walls.”
Sh!t Theatre’s 2016 fringe-first winning Letters to Windsor House is streaming throughout August, and later this month, Rooke is performing at Shedinburgh, Francesca Moody’s curation of shows streamed live from sheds across the country. Shedinburgh’s profits will go towards helping new artists get to the fringe in 2021.
At a place as emotionally and financially bankrupting as the fringe, funding pots like this are vital for supporting new work, says playwright and actor Yolanda Mercy, whose Underbelly Untapped-winning solo show, Quarter Life Crisis, is another Shedinburgh commission, and has just been programmed for the new season at London’s Bridge Theatre. “Without Underbelly Untapped, I wouldn’t have been able to go to the fringe,” she says frankly. “Obviously it couldn’t happen this year, but I really miss it. It was an honour to call that beautiful city my home for a month.”
I’m missing it too. Mum can overcharge me for lukewarm coffee and a shrivelled bacon sandwich, and try to press the newspaper in my hand every morning like a flyer, but something’s still lacking.
Back to shows and perhaps the most reliable platform for exciting work online this year is Fringe of Colour. A collection of films and performances organised by Jess Brough, the clips are released weekly, and for a tenner you get access to the whole month’s programme. The Toussaint Douglass Show is a perfectly pitched, terribly green-screened sketch comedy. With brilliantly blunt humour, Douglass illuminates the ridiculousness of lockdown.
In the simple but sophisticated Fortune Online, Sean Wai Keung crumbles fortune cookies and reads out the little rolls of paper. Instead of prophecies, he reads a collection of facts, both personal and political, which reveal how the west’s attribution of fortune cookies as being generically Asian feeds into a hostile culture of racism. Also on Fringe of Colour is Somebody Jones’ play Black Women Dating White Men, directed by Khadifa Wong. Framed as verbatim Zoom chats, these nuanced conversations between five young black women about the obstacles they face with their white long-term partners are engaging, funny, blunt and thoughtful.
Finally, a rare opportunity to leave the house comes with Ben Hart & Friends at the New Normal festival, a mini festival of cancelled Edinburgh shows in south London. Hart is a deft, delicate storyteller, as well as a nimble magician, and he hosts an evening that reminds you how much magic is rooted in comedy. Taking place in the stunning courtyard at the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, it’s weirdly moving to be in a real live audience for the first time since the start of lockdown, to see people’s thrill at being together again, and to hear the performers’ gratitude to everyone for being there.
After almost five months of a much slower pace of life, it is a pleasure to have so many things to rush to, to be late to, to walk out of, to miss. In my cider-soaked efforts to recreate the fringe, I’ve found new artists, new shows, and new hopes for next year. But I can’t help it: the people are what really make the fringe. The strangers you meet in queues. The artists you chat to in bars. The friends you collapse with at the end of the day. However many shows you watch at home, nothing can quite recreate the feeling of being squeezed together on a balmy August evening in an Edinburgh courtyard, the light fading behind you, telling stories about stories, and revelling in the togetherness of it all.
