Edinburgh: Day 3 (in which I accidentally see some comedy)
Guys! Guys guys guys GUYS GUYS!!!
I saw some comedy!!!
I thought it was going to be poetry but it was comedy! AMAZING!
I don’t know the first fucking thing about comedy. Edinburgh is completely wallpapered with posters all featuring a bloke in a suit doing a face. Never a normal face, always some other kind of face, like ‘zany’ or ‘deadpan’ or ‘disgruntled’. They can fuck off with their faces. I want a SAMPLE JOKE. This is a prime opportunity to impress me as I queue for a piss and all I get is a gallery of fucking stupid faces.
(You can tell I’ve done three days of this now. My internal monologue has gone Scottish and I could murder a salad.)
So, anyway, I went to see Tim Clare at the Underbelly this evening. Tim Clare is member of Aisle 16, the loose poetry collective that compere the Poetry tent at Latitude every year. He’s one of the best ones. You can tell which are the best ones because they do the Oulipo poems, featuring only one vowel. Highbrow shit. Thinking woman’s crumpet. Tim Clare’s gone into ACTUAL REAL COMEDY now though. You can tell because he has made a PowerPoint presentation. All comedians have PowerPoint presentations these days. It’s pretty much the only thing I know about them. They pull faces at graphs.
I chucked my cynicism away pretty quickly tonight, because the show was actually really great. The premise was weak, instructions on how to be a leader, but (as you’ll hear in a wee while) a solid premise does not a good show make. Tim Clare had a few interesting facts about cult leaders and dictators from history, but my favourite parts were the parts where he talked about stabbing people, followed by the part where he asked an internet ‘spell-caster’ to empower a crown for him so he could take over the world. His emails to her got more and more ridiculous, and I could just imagine some other comedian on the other side of town reading them out while talking about the time she pretended to be a mystic to lure in some mentals.
Tim Clare is also really fit. If you’re reading this Tim, I well fancy you.
Going back to the beginning, I mainly saw shows about science today, kicking off with Monster In The Hall at the Traverse. That’s by David Greig who also wrote that thing I loved at Latitude last month, The Strange Undoing Of Prudencia Hart. If I’m truthful, Monster In The Hall wasn’t actually about science, although there was a man sitting next to me who I thought might die of some hideous respiratory disease halfway through. I don’t know about you, but if I CAN’T BREATHE PROPERLY, I go to the doctors instead of the theatre, David Greig or no David Greig.
After that came Your Last Breath by Curious Directive, which was about a woman who went into suspended animation when she got super-cold after a skiing accident, and a dude who drew a map of a remote region of Norway, and a girl scattering her father’s ashes, and a doctor guy FROM THE FUTURE. It’s the first show I’ve seen in ages where the staging was genuinely novel. Everything they did was simply executed but unexpected and so effective that you have to wonder why creating the contours of Norway using coloured string isn’t a more widely-used theatrical technique. I jest, of course, but it was a brilliant, moving, visually-stunning piece of theatre and I blew the snot bubbles to prove it.
Then came Chaos by ACE Productions, which involved some interesting talk about synapses and depression, but was essentially a comedy about women having mid-life crises, all performedwhiletalkingreallyquickly. Analogue’s 2401 Objects was much better. The crappy raked seating meant a lot of the cool rolling-around-on-the-floor bits were missed, but the story was excellent; an epileptic guy had a bit of his brain sucked out to stop the fits, but then his short-term memory was completely fucked. He was an old man but thought he was in his thirties, and had to be told over and over again that his mother had died. *sobs*
Last up before a pre-Tim Clare red wine was Doris Day Can Fuck Off by Greg McLaren. McLaren wandered around for months, singing every word he spoke and recording it all. It could’ve been wonderful, and there were glimpses of brilliance from the people he came into contact with; the shopping centre information woman who sang back to him about taking her medication, for instance. The problem was that Greg McLaren is a frustrated guitarist who got a loop station for his last birthday, and there are some men for whom this leads to an eternity of layered distortion and snorting. It’s a slippery slope.
