The Theatre Times: With more than 4,200 shows making up this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, twenty-four performances can hardly stand in for the whole thing. What follows is a subjective itinerary through a week shaped by my own tastes and curiosities, even if several stops were among the Festival’s conspicuous talking points. Across theater, comedy, clowning, and magic, certain motifs kept surfacing in parallel: the stories we tell about ourselves, the selves we perform for others, the seductions of visibility (both online and off), and the strange uses of laughter as camouflage, release, resistance, or simply a way of survival.
1 comment:
Edinburgh Fringe is a weird, wonderful, utterly bizzarro odyssey through everything that makes theatre good (and bad), and I would love to attend someday. In the meantime, though, this outline of notable works will suffice. My own (limited experience) working on and directing for one-act play festivals has led me to the same conclusion that most of the artists featured in this article have reached: if you're short on time, try to aim for funny. Not that funny is easier than moving or depressing, just that most people (in my experience) would rather watch a show where the jokes don't quite land than watch a show that's trying to move you and fails, spectacularly. To move into specifics, I was quite intrigued by Huge Ass Mindset by Frankie McNair, Where Are All the Tall Grandmas? by Lou Wall, and As Far As We Know by Sam Ward. All in all, Fringe is a shimmering telos of theatrical weirdness and beauty, and I'm so glad we've kept it up.
Post a Comment