Edinburgh is a flashers’ convention.
Edinburgh is a flashers’ convention. Everyone wants exposure. They come to build their brand, to raise recognition levels among the oblivious, to smuggle themselves into your brain while you’re not looking. So don’t feel obliged to buy a ticket. Your attendance is sufficient reward. Performers know the fringe is a gamble and they risk only what they can afford to lose: most of August and most of their savings. If you want comedy you’ll find numerous free venues listed at freefringe.org.uk. The best of these, by some distance, is The Canon’s Gait located at the lower end of a road known to the entire world — apart from the fringe map, which calls it ‘High Street’ — as the Royal Mile. Ale costs three quid. The crowded basement has the sweaty, uneasy, crackling energy of a beer hall in the middle of a revolution. Still, it’s good-natured.
Flabby-tongued strugglers like Fran Moulds are listened to in polite silence while the audience waits for someone good to take over. The midnight slot is run by the hilarious and strikingly beautiful Kate Smurthwaite, a powerhouse of observational wit. Christian Schulte-Loh has created one of the most subversive acts I’ve ever seen. Blond, slim, two-metres tall and defiantly Aryan he sets out to destroy the myth of the humourless Teuton. ‘I’m German,’ he announces with a twinkle in his eye, ‘so I’d like to apologise for everything that’s ever happened. And for everything that ever will happen.’ An English comic who made Hitler jokes would be scraping the barrel but in the mouth of a German, delivered in that skewed, stubby-edged, spittle-strewn accent, the same gags have an astonishing freshness and power.
Immaterial, an hour of sketches by Carrie Quinlan and Robert Cawsey, is a sublime slice of comedy.
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