It’s Tuesday of week one at the Edinburgh Fringe 2006. There are clouds in the sky and the temperature has dropped. Just as well. The freakishly warm weather had a thoroughly negative impact on shows previewing last week in swelteringly hot rooms without any form of air conditioning and boasting, at best, a dilapidated electric fan or two. Last Saturday, after a comedy show at the Pleasance, a woman lay on the pavement outside, after friends had helped her out of the Pleasance Below when she was overcome by the conditions.
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She soon recovered. But here’s a prediction. Some time soon some poor soul will die from heat-related causes inside an Edinburgh Fringe venue. Inquests and inquiries will be held, Health and safety people will steam in. A sizeable percentage of performance spaces, recently converted from what were once toilets (you think I’m joking?) and broom cupboards, will be closed down. Surely it’s better, and shrewder too, for Edinburgh promoters, who make such a packet out of performers and punters, to recycle some of the profits and take action now, before they’re forced into it by tragic circumstances.
The Fringe office has been pushing the idea that ‘Facing Up to Faith’ is the big theme of this year’s festival. That’s a wild exaggeration, of course, and merely an attempt to find some kind of coherence in the face of 1,867 shows, but it’s true there’s some theatre and some comedy touching on matters of religion, in one way or another. There’s even a ‘Bible Babel Live!’ event at Old Saint Paul’s Church, just up from Waverley Station, where the entire Bible gets read in 80 hours over 10 days in languages ranging from English to Chinese and from Greek to Yoruba.
On the comedy front, Abie Philbin Bowman (he’s Irish) plays Christ in ‘Jesus: the Guantanamo Years’ at the Underbelly. Neat concept: Jesus comes back and gets detained in Guantanamo Bay despite his protestations to US immigration officials that he’s Jewish. Could be the basis for harsh and heretical humour. Sadly, it’s mostly comfortable stuff: talking about God as if he’s a difficult dad, complaining that Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ stole a lot of his best jokes, that kind of thing. There’s a good gag about how grateful we should be that Jesus didn’t have AIDS, though. One to stop the Christian lobbyists (you know, the kind who tried to suppress ‘Jerry Springer – the Opera’) in their tracks.
Next up on the faith-and-religion hit list: American duo God’s Pottery and their ‘Concert for Lavert’ (he’s a very sick Harlem kiddie) at the Pleasance and fellow Yank Ryan Paulson’s ‘Pentecostal Wisconsin’ at the Gilded Balloon. More on those next time round.
Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lothian & Fife
