Edinburgh Festival still... RSC day!!! Amoungst other things...

Wednesday – a new day!
Today, having got organized we already knew roughly what we were going to do – no more faffing about up and down the Mound! Yay! So we got into Edinburgh in good time and meandered towards the Plesance, arriving just intime to join the ingoing queue for Completely Hollywood!, a long awaited new arrival from the Reduced Shakespeare Company. We shuffled to our seats and then spent quite a lot of time shuffling in our seats, because really there were too many people for the venue and no marked seats… It really is the coolest venue though – dunno what it is/was normally, but it has a ceiling like a tudor banquet hall – v v cool J
So once the entire audience was squished in (v sardine-like), lights went down and the show started. Right from the beginning it was clear that it had diverged from the traditional format, although I really don’t think I should say why – I’m sure y’all want to find out for yourselves. There were so many things in the perfromance that I sat there and thought – “must remember that and put in psp for everyone” just because I thought it was so cool or funny – but alas I actually can’t remember anyone of them now :o which is rubbish, but I’m like that, I can’t remember very much of any of the plays even the ones I’ve seen serveral times…
Anywayz, once aspect I particularly loved in the new play was the prominence of a geek as one of the main characters!!! How cool :o) I think geeks are under-represented in society on the whole, so that is very welcome. Hehehe… Although that is one of the things I found quite strange - that the three of them were less themselves being themselves and acting out characters when necessary and much more acting one character throughout, then being that character acting a character when necessary – if you see what I mean. Sorry that wasn’t very clear.
The silent movies bit was really good, especially after the bit about cancelling world debt – that was really really random… I think I missed the point somewhere… And I like the idea of the foreign language films dubbed into english/american (so they got the culture and could understand) that looked really funny – heheh… simple things. I also enjoyed the discussion of how many different story lines there are in films – I’m converted to the ‘Jesus Story’ philosophy completely – every film story line is essentially the Jesus story – absolutely! Who need any others?
Overall I thought it was really funny, and pretty good – having said that I thought it was a different type of ‘funny’ – if that make sense to anyone – more light laughter and less hysterics…
Having said that, I thought a lot more of it went straight over my head than any of the other plays – maybe because I read a lot more than I watch movies (particularly classic Hollywood ones…) – and at times I really didn’t get how it all connected - and in answer to your question, Rabid, about how I agreed with bits of the Times review – she clearly didn’t either… “For no clear reason we get a Latvian version of The Wizard of Oz, in which the yellow brick road leads to an anti-capitalist paradise, and a super-hero cowboy called Cattleman arriving with his sidekick, Saddlesore … Blofeld appears, with a cat that doubles as a gun, but why I never understood.” And while they were in themselves quite amusing moments at times, I didn’t get the connection quite a few times, it seemed to lack a completely coherent thread through the show, which would have made it much more funny because then there would have been some kind of context for the jokes (if you see what I mean) – infact there probably was, and I simply missed them or didn’t understand them, but at the same time, whether they’re there or not, if the audience doesn’t understand them then it’s lost on them. And the other bit I agreed with was her comment about Hollywood coming out remarkably unscathed (“But Tinseltown emerges from the RSC’s frisky mockery even more unscathed than the Bard, the Bible, human history and the world. And that is a pity.”), which is not something I had thought about at the time, but in retrospect I think there’s an element of truth in that. I mean, particularly in Shakespeare, Bible, America and the MM, the subject (or the in the case of the MM, the Church) was constantly picked at, teased and reverentially mocked to quite an extent throughout the show, and whilst Hollywood was lovingly mocked I really don’t think it, um… suffered quite as much as any of the previously mentioned.
On the other hand, as I pointed out at the beginning, it was a very different show, and I am perhaps unfairly comparing it to all the other shows – after all, other people would simply revert to saying it was formulaic if it followed the other shows in so many aspects. Overall, I really did enjoy it (despite some advocatus diabolus in agreeing with bits of the ‘evil’ Times review…) and there were sooo many bits that I wanted to mention and then couldn’t remember – so if this maybe seems a little unbalanced that’s only because I can’t remember the bits I laughed at… of which there were many :D
Great job guys!! (Though it definitely lacked a song or two…)
So with the show over we headed outside to see if we could find any RSCers – I saw Reed on the stairs, but he looked busy (he was talking to Suu I think) and I don’t like interrupting people so I left them to it. Besides which I don’t think he’d have any idea who I was... and he wasn’t in the show so it’d be a bit random… However, as we went outside I did spot Austin, so I went over and introduced myself – and he was indeed lovely. I like meeting people for real that you’ve only ever seen on TV or in pictures – they’re usually much more interesting in real life :D (although I ‘spose that rule does have some exceptions…).
After that I wander away up the hill smiling – don’t you just love it when you’re really happy for no reason at all (or for really trivial ones in any case). After that we had planned to go to another show and rushed off to get tix, but there were none left so we went to get lunch. At which point we came across the most genius shop ever!!! They had a vegetarian baked potato shop (and reasonably priced too – every town should have one) so we got the most humongous potatoes you’ve ever seen (which made us wonder what the ‘large’ sized potatoes were?!) and went and sat down on the pavement (before we burnt our hands) behind the craft fair thingy where there was a street performer doing stupidly dangerous things with knives and unicycles twice my height… He was very good, but I wouldn’t have wanted to have got any closer.
After food we spent the afternoon (before our next show at 6pm) shopping in the various quirky (non-touristy) shops Edinburgh has to offer – there was a very cool crystal shop there, and a Christmas shop, and a fudge shop that smelled sickeningly good. We also spent a significant proportion of our time watching more street performers (with umbrellas up…).
The street entertainment is one of the things I most love about the festival – you could actually wonder around for days and be entertained without spending any money at all – and a lot of it would be absolutely excellent (like the guy who chased a pigeon, encroaching on his area, with the chainsaw he subsequently set permanently going and then juggled… he was brilliant, if more than a little scary; or the Canadian escape artist who was somewhat less threatening, tied up in a straight jacket and chains :D ; but even the one we saw who’s act went terribly wrong when his CD player stopped working, had some excellent moments before and did keep his audience subsequently, even if it did involve locking a kid in a suitcase and carrying him around… we still kept watching…). We also took the opportunity to find some photo spots for Jenny having completely forgotten top take any photos the previous day – I didn’t bother since I think I went slightly mad with photos one year and have tonnes, but it was good to wander around looking at the beautiful city that is Edinburgh for a bit. We wanted to go up to the entrance to the castle, where there’s a really good view, but the police had already closed it off for the tattoo, so that was a slightly unnecessary uphill walk… but then that was slightly the story of our days in Edinburgh…
At 6pm we found the venue for our next show (C venues – central), Beautiful Child, by Nicky Silver. This was a bit of an unknown quantity. We were told that it had just come over from America, where it seems it has, for the most part, attracted brilliant reviews, and we knew that is was quite a bold morally interesting play, but we didn’t really know what it was about.
It is a hard play to describe to someone because they tend to put the emphasis in totally the wrong pace in their heads. It focuses, largely, on one family that is in crisis and is generally falling apart in many ways. The wife doesn’t love the husband, who is serially unfaithful (and is currently embroiled in an affair with his secretary, which he can’t get out of because she’s pretty screwed up as well, and is also pregnant), but loves her all the same. Then their son (now in his 30s) comes home and asks for help because he’s on the run after having a ‘relationship’ with one of his pupils (an 8 year old boy). However, this is not a play about child molestation – far from it – it is much more about the parents, and how they come to make a judgement on their son about what they should do – what’s the morally correct thing, and what can they do given that he’s their son and they love him. They also question, who is to blame for it?
It is an interesting character study (there is also a strong theme about love and different types and expressions of it) with the son’s childhood psychologist returning to challenge and talk with the various characters; she is also stuck in her own affairs, and says that she had other things on her mind (like her marriage…) when she was treating him.
As you can see, it was somewhat complex – in fact it gets more and more complicated every time I think about it, but it was really interesting. I did feel at the end that while the body of the play was pretty excellent the end was quite crude and should perhaps have been left a little more ambiguous. Having said that, it didn’t seem to detract from the effect it had on the audience by the end, which was one of stunned, pensive silence – but I would certainly recommend it, even if it does take a while to recover…
Also, one more mention to it – it had an inspired set, constructed largely of breeze blocks in scattered piles across the floor, and a plank to make a seat – a sofa was then constructed by adding two cushions… I have read American reviews of the off-Broadway production and it seems that they had a much more realistic set, which wasn’t highly rated. I hope that if this play continues in Britain they stick with the current set – it so well portrays the isolation of the characters that are still trying to build bridges with one another with varying success, and the complexity of the relationships – which sounds really pretentious, but for once I think it’s true. Good play.
So, after that we headed of for some food and discovered a really expensive chip shop (which, btw sold deep-fried mars bars… I was soooo tempted to try one – I think it’s one of those thinks that you have to try once. Hehehe), got some chips and sat on the Royal Mile being entertained by another performer and then spent some time meandering back down towards the buses musing about how much we could stay there for weeks, how I really need to get around to working there next year (I meant to this year, but A Levels took over and I didn’t), and how we soo much didn’t want to go home :o( I felt how I used to feel when we went on holiday and then it came to an end just far too early, but then I ‘spose I haven’t had a proper holiday for a few years, but yeah, it felt like that – more at home there than at home; having said that, I’d rather be quite a lot of places other than home at the minute.
When we finally got around to going back to the flat we had every intention of packing and going to bed, since we’d have to leave the flat at 6am the next day to get to our flight home – yay! [/sarcasm], but instead we stayed up talking ‘til gone midnight and I drew a thank you card to go with the chocolates we’d got them. Aww.. it was so sad – we didn’t want to go; but then as I said to Jen – Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all, or something…