6.36am, Wednesday 22 August, 2012. Five
year old. “Mummy, I know it's not morning time, so we're just going
to stay in bed.”
6.51am Five year old again. “Mummy, I
need a poo.”
10.10am Paperbelle, Assembly Botanic
Gardens. It's like a treasure hunt, or a game of hide-and-seek: from
the gate to a building nestled within the gardens we follow a trail
of paper dolls, attached to signposts and trees, beckoning us along.
Inside is a giant wendy house constructed of paper, the door closed
to us, which makes it triply enticing. This is how you get people
excited about going to the theatre.
Inside the house is a black-and-white
world, a beautiful cartoon rendering of a sitting room with a
radiator and a radio, a painting and a window, and a guitarist in the
corner (Ben Talbot-Dunn) playing like he's a member of Vampire
Weekend. We sit on creamy coloured cushions and
giggle as Paperbelle flutters about like a will-o'-the-wisp,
disappearing into drawers, sliding between secret cracks in the
walls. When colour starts to erupt across the room, spilling out
beneath the fish bowl and beaming behind the alcove door, it's
impossible not to compare it to Catherine
Wheels' White, one of the best kids' shows I've
seen. Paperbelle is less intricate than White but more buoyant; my
littles are less hypnotised by it but more entertained. At the end,
we have to leave behind the cushions, now a riot of red and blue and
yellow and green, but can take away our very own Paperbelle puppets.
I hope she's as cheeky when we get her home.
12pm Bigmouth, Summerhall. Hoisted on
the back wall of the dreaded Demonstration Room is a chalk board –
I don't at first realise it's electronic – on which are scrawled a
sequence of names and dates. Socrates, Pericles, King Bedouin. John F
Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. Osama Bin
Laden, George W Bush, Ann Coulter. It's not until two have been
scrubbed off that I realise these are the speakers; Flemish actor
Valentijn Dhaenens is simply their conduit. Even though I have
started writing about Edinburgh, I'm still not taking notes, so what follows is mostly what I
scribbled down that evening, the brightest bolts of lightning in an
electrifying performance.
Socrates, embracing death, asking only
that his sons, should they embrace the government he rejects, be
abused. King Bedouin of Belgium, abdicating – sorrowfully,
tenderly, respectfully – because he cannot bring himself to ratify
the legalisation of abortion, even though both houses of his
parliament have voted in favour of the new law. Snap straight from
there to Patrice
Lumumba declaring the independence of Congo
from its colonial rulers, Belgium, in a speech whose shimmering hope,
for peace, unity, a future without violence, is devastating. (And
that's before I knew Lumumba was assassinated, on Belgian orders, six
months later.)
Goebbels addressing the women of
Germany in a voice so sickly soft it's disturbing, spliced with
George S Patton's diametrically opposed, no less disturbing,
assertion that all American men are fighters, ready for war.
And now it's the 1960s Americans and
it's civil rights and it's civil strife and a gun keeps firing, pow
pow pow. They all sound the same. Whatever it is they're saying,
whatever their argument or standpoint, these men all sound the same.
So by the time Dhaenens reaches Bin Laden, and he talks about seeing
Israel attack Lebanon and innocent children being killed, his hatred
of the Americans who support Israel begins to sound almost...
reasonable. And that is terrifying.
Bigmouth's potency as an investigation
of political oratory lies in its ability to be contradictory things
at once: subtle yet rich, sly yet overt, light yet dense. It's an
impeccable performance: Dhaenens' accent and facility with language
are exquisite, the selected texts searing. But the best, the very
best thing about the show is the musical soundtrack he creates
between and around the words. He slides from one microphone to
another, discovering a slightly different resonance with each one,
looping his voice for percussive melody, underscoring it with the
harsher rap and tap of fingers and knuckles on table. And when he
sings, his baritone resonates across your skin and thrums in your
veins.
2pm The lost half-hour. I should be
writing. Instead, I'm sulking. Even though I bought the ticket weeks
ago, I don't want to see Daniel Kitson. I could be seeing so many
other things now. The
List, for starters. I'm only seeing him because
I feel I should, because people I love rave about him in a way that
makes me think I'm missing something. The last time I saw him was
some years ago, just at the moment when he was making the shift from
stand-up to “theatre”, and all I remember was feeling bored. And
before you ask – and I know you're going to ask, because everyone
else has – I can't remember if it was the one with the armchair or
the one with the C90 tapes or both. Either way, I don't remember him
saying anything illuminating. Grump grumpy grump.
2.30pm As of 1.52pm GMT on Friday April
27th 2012, This Show Has No Title, the Traverse. Of course it's
brilliant. X There's lots of sparkly ad-libbing:
he spots a 12-year-old boy and asks his grown-ups, entirely
reasonably, what on earth made them think a piece of self-obsessed
meta-theatre would be suitable for him? He looks cheerfully around
the audience: “If you're bored, have your own thoughts, that's what
I'd do.”
Contrary to expectation, I'm not bored
at all. In fact, I can hardly keep up with him: he races through his
script, commenting on it as he goes, quoting his own reviews with a
little snark each time. The whole thing ought to be horribly
naval-gazing, but I find it blissful, because what it's really about
is the appalling insecurity of writing. It's like the 30s chapter of
Paradigm yesterday: a demonstration of being consumed by the fear of
repetition, fraught with the desire to challenge yourself, yet
seduced by the possibility of just cynically giving the punters what
they already know. There's a big explosive speech in which he says
all this explicitly, but what makes it so winning is that he
expresses it throughout, in every characterisation and every small
aside. And the best, the very best thing about this show is the
phrase “mixed-ability tautology”: the excessive use of
adjectives, some smart, some dumb. My writing suffers from it too.
4.20pm A Thousand Shards of Glass,
Northern Stage at St Stephen's. It's such a delight to be back in a
room with Lucy Ellinson after the joy of Oh the Humanity. But this
time, I'm much less sure about the material she's delivering. She's
such a gentle performer, it feels as though she's holding our hands
through the story, guiding us tenderly across its fraught terrain.
Which is odd, because that's not who her character is. But who is her
character? A freedom fighter, a terrorist, a member of the secret
service, a revolutionary, a spy? Enemy, or friend?
About 20 minutes in, I realise what I'm
actually watching is an action movie, re-created in sounds (Lewis
Gibson) and words (Ben Pacey). It's really exciting to see a woman
perform that – better still, a woman wearing a lovely pink jumper
with blue branches embroidered on it, and not a video-game cartoon
with a cinched waist and a balconette bra. (A woman, Jane
Packman, has directed it, too.) As helicopters
hover menacingly overhead and she races from a bustling desert city
to an office block I don't know where, as she passes from three
dimensions to a fourth, I find myself thinking about Christopher
Nolan's Inception,
and how I couldn't decide if it was the worst film I'd ever seen
(which it probably was, for the first half) or a work of staggering
genius (which it just might have been, for the second half). I feel
similarly, but not precisely, inconclusive about this.
5.30pm Outside Northern Stage are
Kieran Hurley, Daniel Bye, Lucy Ellinson and Chris Thorpe. I could
hardly be with a nicer group of people. But I feel so agonisingly
self-conscious I run away hardly saying goodbye. For the first time
in Edinburgh I have a proper conversation with Lyn Gardner, only on
the phone but better than nothing. We talk a lot about Mess, and
about Monkey Bars, especially how the latter makes us think not so
much about children but about adults, and what adults fail to
articulate. Walking across the bridges, “chup chup chup”
ricochets through my head. Ouch.
7.10pm Back to Hunt and Darton to do my
final 30 minutes of Paper Stages volunteering. I don't know whether
it's because I feel rotten, or if homesickness is kicking in, but
when Hunt or Darton asks me to help with the washing up, I think:
yes, that's exactly what I want to do. Even so, it feels an absurd way to access theatre. Rinsing a handful of cutlery, I
find myself thinking: the things I do for the love of Andy
Field.
7.50pm As part of tonight's performance
package, Five Minutes To Move Me, Rachael
Clerke is running her own debating society. I
propose the motion that we should be radically changing our behaviour
for the sake of the planet and future generations. She argues fuck
it: she loves swimming, so doesn't care if British shores go under
water; shopping at Primark cheers her up; and kids don't appreciate
anything grown-ups do for them anyway, so why bother? We laugh, agree
to disagree, and score it a draw.
8.40pm This is why Hunt and Darton is
so brilliant. I'm sharing a table with three young Edinburghians, who
have just wandered in because the door is open and they can get a
beer. They're busily gossiping about this person and that when Hunt
and Darton join them at the table and start performing. There are
poems: “Mum's getting married, Dad's getting divorced, my sister's
pregnant. Hmmm....”; “Someone threw a potato at my head. Cunt.”
And there's a physical piece, Jockey, for which the two women bend
over like horses, whipping to the finish. The three young
Edinburghians find it all deeply discombobulating, which only adds to
the fun.
9pm Bingo night with Scottee. Bingo, it
transpires, is stupefyingly dull. This would be, too, apart from two
things: I'm sitting opposite the very wonderful Amy
Lame, and Scottee
is calling the numbers, from the bingo app on his phone, to the style
of whatever happens to be playing on some ropey compilation on
Spotify that includes songs by B*Witched and Sinead O'Connor. He's
dressed in gold sequins and tosses his head imperiously and the
person who accidentally calls bingo too early has their card
confiscated and he keeps shouting rude things at Amy, who wins a box
of Ritz crackers. I still haven't seen The Shit. But right now, this
is just what I need.
Scottee finishes and Five Minutes To
Move Me starts again. I can't remember what Tom
Marshman called his piece, but it was dedicated
to Anna
Pavlova, Russian ballet dancer and, more
importantly, inspiration for one of my favourite desserts.
Pleasingly, there's a plate heaped with meringue, cream and
raspberries on the table between us. Marshman tells me a little of
Pavlova's biography, then gives me a set of headphones to listen to the Swan Lake theme while he feeds me spoonfuls of pavlova.
At first I have the giggles, it's all too silly. But something about
the swoop of the music and the tenderness of being fed gets me in the
heart. I find myself thinking about religious ceremonies, the
consuming of bread and wine in church, the body and blood of Christ.
I'm having a religious experience to meringue and Tchaikovsky. It is
insane, but utterly magical.
And then there's Greg
Sinclair's performance, A Piece of You. Before
us is a blank sheet of music manuscript paper. Greg asks me questions
and starts to fill the staves with marks: a tick for how I feel,
“Naughty” for my favourite word, a sun and three stick figures
for a favourite memory. And these marks become the musical notes for
a fragment of cello music that makes me feel, just momentarily, like
I'm levitating.
10am, Thursday 23 August, 2012
This is a stupid way to see art. This
is my final morning in Edinburgh – we leave on the 1.30pm train –
and the plan is this: start at the National Gallery for Van
Gogh to Kandinsky, swing by Collective for one
more look at Paradigm, fly through the Fruitmarket for Dieter
Roth, all in time for The Curious Scrapbook of
Josephine Bean at 11. It shouldn't work but does, for two reasons. A
lot of the art in the Van Gogh to Kandinsky show is not very good,
which means it's easy to whizz round but still have time to marvel:
at an odd, jittery Mondrian landscape I haven't encountered before;
an unexpected, icy landscape by Strindberg; a murky Whistler. And:
Dieter Roth's show either needs several hours or a few minutes.
Several hours would allow you the luxury of becoming part of the life
he documents on a bank of television screens, each one recording a
quietly mundane day in his final year alive. You would be the silent
guest at his kitchen table, the quiet observer in his studio, the
companion at his bedside. The films are so immediate and tender, even
in a few minutes you feel that sense of kinship with him.
11am The Curious Scrapbook of Josephine
Bean, Traverse at Scottish Book Trust. This is supposed to be a
children's show, for 7s-up, but adults outnumber small people by
approximately 5:1. This makes me uncomfortable. Not that my children
are here: they're too small. I'd thought about bringing the
five-year-old but I'm glad I didn't: this is an incredibly intricate
show, and I wouldn't have wanted to miss a detail.
It's sort of a detective story: Shona
Reppe plays a scrapologist, someone who creates
biographical histories by hunting through scrap books. What can she
surmise from the scrap book of Artemus J Mood, with its collection of
train tickets and seaside detritus, its peculiar photographs and
solitary raisin? Is he delusional, a fantasist, a sad and lonely man?
Or does his collection of flotsam and jetsam hold the key to the
beating of his heart? The trail from clue to clue is mesmerising:
there are false starts, misconceptions, ungenerous assumptions. And
slowly, the truth emerges, of a fairy-tale, impossible love. It is
the perfect end to a whirlwind Edinburgh: tender but sharp, funny but
sad, and, above all, achingly romantic.
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