Content aside, my lasting impression of Doug Stanhope's gig is that it was lazy and incomplete. This wasn't helped by me seeing so many polished performances in Edinburgh last week; including such modern greats as Brendan Burns, Paul Foot, and Richard Herring.
The audience can sense the difference between the comic checking his watch to see if he can squeeze in that one last bit of material and the one visibly calculating the minimum amount of stage-time he has to endure before reasonably exiting.
I'm on the flight home from three nights, two-and-a-half days at the Edinburgh Festival. Time enough to catch up with lots of friendly, albeit pallid faces and to see a selection of shows. I went up looking for inspiration. I'm not sure yet whether I found any.
I've just finished Joshua Ferris' wonderful novel about life in Chicago advertising, Then We Came to the End. He has a phrase that sums up the Edinburgh experience beautifully: -
Amnesty was a gift, but oblivion was terror.
I'm obviously still trying to understand the entire Festival palaver, hence this procession of strange multiple choice titles.
The only way that Edinburgh ever made sense to me as a participant was as a trade show. Regardless of the industry a successful trade show requires an epic list of necessary factors that still aren't sufficient without the luck you need to meet the buyer you need in amongst the 2400 other sellers.
Wherever you are on the comedy food chain the person who can get you to the next level is undoubtedly somewhere in the city right now. All you have to do is get them to see your show and nail the gig the night they do. This is far harder than you'd think: posters, fliers, reviewers, even audiences all need to align to achieve this. The late night bars echo with acts lamenting that they haven't been reviewed, or that the agent was one of only three punters who turned up that night, or that all of the externals were in place but due to fatigue or illness or whatever the performer just didn't find the funny on stage.
Not everyone agrees with my Trade Show definition. Plenty of acts see the Festival more as a Comedy University ('CU Jummy'?). A chance to perform in as many as a hundred shows and to watch and drink with other comics. These people wear fatigue like a badge of honour. For a month you can make your mistakes openly. Hide in plain sight. For the last few years I was happy taking this 'university' approach but if you never intend to graduate then after a while you're just the kinda creepy older guy still hanging around campus.
The final option is to treat it as a holiday. Band camp for adults. Drop a few thousand quid on a month in Scotland instead of the Seychelles and good luck to you.
Whatever the motivation Edinburgh is wet, cold, tiring, entirely indifferent to your suffering and thus perversely addictive. I'd like to think I've another show in me.
2011 anyone?
I'm in Edinburgh for a few days to check out the 2010 Festival and catch up with some people who are performing up here. Unless I run into someone on the street who makes me an offer I can't refuse this will be the first Fringe I've been to since 2001 as a non-performer. I'm in need of inspiration not experience.
One interpretation of the festival is that this is when you focus on comedy as your career rather than just as your job. This is the month you perform your amazing, personal, funny-yet-poignant show that'll take you away from the Mirth Control / Jongleurs grind forever. That nice woman from the BBC is going to fall in love with you and change your life forever. Otherwise on Friday week you're back at your job: trying to get the attention of a hundred-strong mass of stag parties in Bristol.
That's the theory anyway. In practice there are too many excruciatingly revelatory hours with too few jokes and a legion of clever-not-funny double-acts and sketch troupes. 2,400 different shows. The aggregate amount of time devoted to writing and rehearsing all of these carefully crafted masterpieces over the last eleven months is mind-blowing. And many of them will be starting the whole process again in a week.
Because that's the third option: performing at the Edinburgh Fringe is your hobby. It's the thing you do that defined you as different from your (non-performing) workmates.
The shortlist for the Fosters Comedy Award (aka 'the Perrier') is published tomorrow. Making that list is genuinely life-changing. Everyone else is going back to a job of some sort on the 31st.
I'm processing my commercial / marketing learnings from Edinburgh.
So much of a project's marketing success comes down to proper focusing of finite resources. This is something that I got at least partly wrong this year. A disciplined mix of resources including time, manpower, passion and money is required. Every year too many impecunious acts convince themselves that an abundance of the first three removes the need for the fourth.
I agree with a recent Seth Godin post about 'bootstrappers' (one of his favourite terms).
The cricket show finally got reviewed, albeit on the very last day of the Festival when it could do us no good (or harm I suppose). The reviewer wasn't really much of a fan, ending her piece thusly: -
"This show will only appeal to die hard cricket fans. Or Australians."
In a month of trying Andrew Watts and I could not have written a better Mission Statement for the show.
23C in London today. A month in Scotland has made such a thing seem unnatural.
25 improv shows. 23 cricket shows. 28 stand-up gigs.
Done.
If you get caught in a rainstorm (you will) simply walk into the nearest pub (an easy task in Edinburgh) and ask if someone has handed in a black umbrella.
Don't worry, everyone does it.
When you no longer need the brolly it's only right that you leave it in the next pub you visit.
Illness meant that the 'Scenes' cast was in danger of being undermanned yesterday so I pressganged Albert Howell, an old Canadian mate and a seriously good improviser into the show.
It's a cliche known to every sports fan: the special player who makes it look easy, who seems to somehow have more time and space than everyone else on the field. The really special ones have enough time and space to make the people around them look good.
If improvisors aren't being surprised by what is being said to them on stage they go a little dead inside. They start anticipating, which means they stop living in the moment. An audience can somehow sense that they're now not watching wonderfully spontaneous creativity but rather a sort of badly underwritten sketch show. Even if the laughs keep coming they're nowhere near as heartfelt.
Obviously introducing new blood in the cast reintroduces the element of surprise. If the new performer is as good as Albert then wonderful things will happen.
Last show of the Edinburgh run is at 325pm this afternoon. We start back at Camden next week.
This Edinburgh has led me to the following conclusions: -
- Improv comedy has a way to go to be seen as a credible alternative to stand-up, musical and sketch comedy
- Younger performers cannot be relied upon to manage their own scarce resources of energy and focus
- Double-acts need both personal chemistry and decent writing. No excess of either excuses an absence of the other
- The sooner you accept that there's always a cooler party / bar than where you are the happier you'll be
- Very few performers can deliver on stage drunk or even tipsy. I am not one of them
- The best way to destroy a pair of suede shoes is to wilfully ignore the fact that an Edinburgh Fringe is a month of fliering in the rain
I haven't been able to post for a few days because I've been too angry.
Wednesday's Scenes from Communal Living was so bad I was nearly speechless with rage. The poor audience sat through a procession of tasteless, pointless autopilot 'comedy' that was unfunny in every possible way. Career-damagingly bad.
Of course it was the first show of the run that industry friends of mine from Australia and Canada had come along to watch. This Edinburgh was supposed to be my showcase for improv's possibilities but this was nothing more than an eloquent demonstration of its limitations.
Post-show notes were nasty, brutish and short and I walked away disconsolate.
I found out later that for once the cast took my notes to heart. When I arrived at Thursday's pre-show meeting the cast was already in the room, focused and ready to warm up. That day's show was a good one. Yesterday was the same with equally pleasing results.
Maybe the penny dropped. Maybe my young cast has realised that when you perform on autopilot bad things happen. It's Day 24 of the Edinburgh Fringe but as tiring as that may be, the audience members are seeing the show for the first time.
Five performing days left in Edinburgh.
For most inmates of this strange and wonderful assylum that means only another five days before rest and normalcy and the struggle to right the bank balance and write next year's show.
I'm faced with a different dilemma. For months I've been psychologically throwing any task associated with my consultancy work (aka 'my grown-up job') over the wall that is August and this time next week I'm delivering a daylong workshop in Toronto.
Buy the ticket. Take the ride
By Saturday night it was obvious to all that England were going to regain the Ashes by winning the final match of the series at the Oval.
I suppose you'd call it poetry that we were on stage doing Watts and McCure Know the Score to a packed house when Michael Hussey's wicket fell and the synchronicity made for a genuine Edinburgh moment. Andrew Watts then made me sit on stage and read out the Australian scorecard to the absolute delight of the crowd.
As long as they're laughing, huh?
I spent much of today in Slough of The Office fame, a town boasting possibly the most onomatopoeic place name in Britain.
The occasion was my first consulting job in a few weeks; half a day in a room with seven high-ranking sales and marketing personnel to discuss an upcoming product launch. As I've observed previously getting all the right people in the room in a pre-launch setting is much like aligning planets so I took a day out from the Fringe madness to run the workshop.
Really all I did was swap the task of convincing one lot of perfect strangers that I'm funny for the task of convincing another lot that I'm smart. It still starts with suspension of disbelief.
If they hear you out you're most of the way there.
We are now halfway through the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe so Scenes from Communal Living has a day off today. I am still performing in two other shows later but as Scenes is the production in which I've invested the most even on hiatus it's the one that demands most of my attention.
A few days ago I described my frustration at the lack of focus from some of my cast. I'm starting to worry that my actors are splitting into two factions; one still focused on giving the audience a great show worth the ticket price but another that now can't see past personal agendas.
I need to be a little careful here as everyone is performing for free. It's unlikely that we'll put enough bums on seats for the profit-share arrangement to kick in. And as well as performing everyone is fliering for at least an hour a day. Whilst undoubtedly exhausting this the deal we agreed to beforehand.
As ever it's all a question of each individual's motivation for being in Edinburgh. No one makes money and almost no one gets famous so why are we all here? To me the 'correct' answers are to further one's craft, to experience what it's like to perform in a month-long run and to improve one's profile as much as possible. The 'incorrect' answers are all about fun and sociability and bragging rights; for one month a year you're as much a Festival performer as Reg Hunter or Adam Hills. Only of course you aren't.
Alas, I have a couple of cast members who seem to be stuck in this second mindset and if something isn't fun they sulk. Fliering is never fun and I do my best to thank everyone every day for their efforts on that front.
But doing a bad show is no fun either and I've been openly accused of being negative for pointing out bad work in my oh-so brief post-show notes. Our reviews so far have been mixed and I can't argue with the more damning assessments any more than I can wholeheartedly embrace the more encouraging ones.
I need a break from my cast as much as they need a break from me. Tomorrow I have a day trip to London for a consultancy thing. It's a long time since I've regarded the prospect of flying into Heathrow with this much enthusiasm.
Talent is so obviously 'cost of entry'. Less apparent is the need for 'emotional intelligence'.
Every review of an improv highlights the variability of the artform. In the better (kinder?) ones it's mentioned towards the end, in harsher ones it's called 'inconsistency' and raised in the opening sentence. This is the nature of improv and has to be embraced.
I'm doing my damndest to free my cast from the pattern of following every great show with a weak one. This means focusing on the consistency deficit within each show. So every moment with the cast is precious.
Today was a strange show in that we went on 20 minutes late (unheard of at a Festival) because of an issue with a punter in a wheelchair. The actors might have been thrown but weren't.
I'm still too pessimistic to declare the pattern broken but the signs are good.
Being a non-performing director at a festival is a very different thing to the same role in a London season and some days it's easy to understand why there are so many solo performers at the Fringe.
The downside of going it alone is of course that you prepare alone, flier alone and spend a miserable 23 hours locked in your own head after a show tanks.
The upside is that your cast (aka 'you') turn up when they're meant to, focused and ready to engage in the task that brought you to Edinburgh in the first place; the show.
Suffice to say, I am learning. Every day I am learning.
The Edinburgh Fringe has been likened to a prison that just one person escapes from a year. That person is the winner of the Edinburgh Comedy Award (previously known as the Perrier Award and still referred to as such by everyone).
The rest of us inmates bounce around telling each other a series of palatable half-truths. My favourites so far have been: -
- Houses are down across the Festival this year because of the recession
- Free shows are doing better than paid shows this year because of the recession
- Houses are up but end-of-show contribution are down because of the recession
And of course: -
- A review is just one opinion