Attention spans at Edinburgh are brief. With thousands of shows on offer, the punters have to make a split-second decision based on the title and the poster. A blunt descriptive name works best, hence the popularity of Dan Kelly: How I Went to Every Supermarket in the World. Kelly spent 11 years as a data analyst collecting the prices of 164 basic items from supermarkets on every continent. The information was sold to international firms that needed to calculate the salaries of their overseas staff.
Kelly, a solitary and obsessive character, liked to tour the shops with a dictaphone taped to his chest and to record the prices by muttering into the hidden microphone, like a spy. His adventures are limited to shopping centres in large cities so his observations lack surprises. He finds that strangers react well if he wears a smile and he notices that shop staff get suspicious when he asks for the prices of a bra in six different sizes. His travels take him to Iran where America is hated by the government but not by the locals who support two faux-American fast-food franchises, Mash Donalds and Keng Burger. Kelly’s job no longer exists and his final task was to check prices online and terminate his own career.
Gail Porter’s one-woman show focuses on her meetings with ghost-hunters while making a TV documentary, Spooked Scotland. The best material covers her rough-and-tumble upbringing in Edinburgh. She was told by her mother that little girls who misbehave are likely to be murdered by Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. She recalls visiting a Christmas grotto where the child-minding duties were performed by a block of ice. Unsuspecting children were invited to lick the ice which froze their tongues to the surface and held them captive while their parents roamed the grotto in peace.
Rob Preston: Amazing Global Solutions sounds like a show about political and social reforms but it has the atmosphere of a lengthy TV audition. Preston is a likeable comic in his mid-thirties whose range of talents might appeal to executives hoping to cast a performer who can entertain family audiences on a Saturday night. He displays various skills as a mime, a stand-up, a character comedian and a quick-witted improviser. Here’s a sample gag. ‘We lost my aunt recently. Then we found her – but she was dead. What a woman! Her smile could light up a room and her breath could descale a kettle.’ His two best characters are a bothersome motivational guru from South Africa and a chatty Albanian barber who hates non-Albanians. Preston is charming but perhaps too predictable. Not enough rough edges.
One of the fringe’s most eye-catching titles, The Second Best School Shooting, is a dark satire about a pair of female teens, Ava and Parker, who escape a firearm crisis at school. A male pupil armed with a gun was overpowered after shooting a few bullets into a ceiling. Ava feels that this qualifies her as a ‘school shooting survivor’ and she promotes herself with a TikTok video about her experiences. Her message is misinterpreted as a pro-gun statement and she decides to clarify her position by going to school with a fake weapon. Her plan doesn’t end well.
The virtue of Alice Stanley Jr’s clever, fast-paced script is to highlight the common ground between Ava and a typical male shooter. Both are arrogant, depressed, and angry, and desperate to force the world to pay attention to what they do. The story deserves an ampler script that includes Ava’s parents and teachers. It has the seeds of a great coming-of-age drama.
Sutcliffe’s wit, charisma and sense of mischief are palpable. She looks like a star in the making
I Think I Hate Actors, written and performed by Roo Sutcliffe, is a tribute to showbiz in disguise. Though she affects to dislike thespians, Sutcliffe comes from a solid theatrical background. Both her parents were gay and they lived in open relationships so she had two lesbian mums and two homosexual dads.
They sent her to the Sylvia Young Theatre School where she perfected the art of mocking pretentious actors and drama gurus. A male acting coach recalled his first days in the profession: ‘I was an uncaffeinated and scarf-less newbie with a single-barrel name.’ A dance tutor ordered his pupils to diet and told them that soup and a tangerine counted as ‘a heavy lunch’. Sutcliffe found a boyfriend who congratulated her on a sexual trick that improved his vocal technique: ‘You’re making me moan from my diaphragm.’ Sutcliffe’s wit, charisma and sense of mischief are palpable. She looks like a star in the making. She always thought of the fringe as a home-from-home and when she arrived at Waverley to perform at her first festival, she was filled with anticipation: ‘Then a homeless drunkard came over, pissed in my tote bag and handed me a flier for his show.’
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