Second visit to Edinburgh Festival and the Fringe. Aug 2022.
Second visit to Edinburgh Festival and the Fringe. Aug 2022.
This time started off seeing Boris the Third. A bit of fun reflecting back to Boris Johnson schooldays at Eaton trying to perform King Richard in Shakespeare’s Richard III. However he doesn’t know his lines and has other things on his mind, so has to resort to making stuff up and acting the clown. Includes some reflections of the politics of the time (Thatcher & the Falklands war) as well as some of today’s political situation. Definitely worth a watch.
Then on to Cirque Berserk! They are a regular up at the Festival, a mix of acrobats, high-wire performers, dancers and jugglers and their motorcycle ‘Globe of Death’. This is the second time I’ve seen them and did enjoy it. However things seemed to have changed a bit and it didn’t seem to have the same sparkle compared to the first time I saw them (pre-covid).
Maybe I’m being a bit cynical, but I do wonder if they knew this and tried to compensate by having lots of overly-exciting music played at a *really loud* volume. I wasn’t the only one noticing the excessive volume level, a guy on the other side of the isle to me spent much of the time watching, but with his fingers in his ears!
From there on to ‘The Importance of Being Earnest as Performed by Three F*cking Queens and a Duck’. Our three (rather camp) performers decide to put on a play and settle on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, however one of the performers has a bit of an obsession with a model duck! We don’t actually see the play, but their backstage activities as they go through rehearsals, and also as they learn that ‘management’ keeps on cutting down their stage performance time, so a suitable amount of arguments ensue as they sort out who’s going to play whom and what.
Great fun, however a working knowledge of Wilde’s play is essential otherwise much of the humour will be lost. Also considering the amount of (mainly gay) sexual innuendo and activities that go on this may not be ideal for those of a younger age.
