From Festival to Fringe

The big play at Edinburgh this year – the one with Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon in it – was The Guys, a heartfelt tribute to the ‘ordinary’ heroes of 11 September. Written by a journalist called Ann Nelson, it tells the story of her encounter with a New York fire captain who asked for her help when he was landed with the task of composing eulogies to the eight men who died under his watch. I didn’t manage to get a ticket to The Guys so I’ve no idea how Nelson handled this assignment, but it sounds like a walk in the park compared to covering the Edinburgh Festival. Perhaps next year Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon can perform a tribute to the ‘ordinary’ heroes of 11-31 August, the theatre critics who bravely entered the Assembly Rooms when everyone else was fleeing in the opposite direction. I saw 15 plays in just five days and there were times when death would have been preferable to having to sit through the second half.

Take Variety, the play that the Festival’s director, Brian McMaster, chose to open the official drama programme with. Set in 1929, Variety revolves around a group of Scottish vaudevillians who are threatened with redundancy when the local music hall is bought out by a cinema chain. Clearly, Variety is intended to be an allegory about the corrosive effects of globalisation on indigenous Scottish culture, but the writer, Douglas Maxwell, could have done a modicum of research about the period he was trying to evoke. I was expecting these old-timers to perform a few of their favourite routines before the curtain went down on their act forever – there must be a wealth of material for Maxwell to draw on. As it is, there isn’t a single scene that makes you regret the passing of this supposedly glorious era.