Day Three
I have clicked on to fringe time. I woke up at 10:30 and felt wonderful. Tuesday is the day off for Pistols at 3:55 so no flyering! ‘Woop woop’ This meant that today we hit the ground running and got straight on to shows today. We headed over to the mile and down to the Underbelly to book tickets for shows then up to the fringe box office to book tickets for something else which I’ll talk about later.
The first of todays shows was Domestic Science calling themselves the fringe’s only science lunchtime party. It takes the form of a couple talking all things science, with some humour and a few experiments thrown in for good measure. The show also features guest spots. Today there were offerings from the fantastic Sci Fi improv team of Project 2 and the memoirs of a ghost hunter. The show is family friendly upbeat and interesting, presenting audiences with experiments they can do at home as well as explaining how and why the results happen. The show occasionally dipped in energy, and suffered from some technical blips but it was a sound show and had a lovely silliness to it throughout.
Straight after this we headed over to the Under Belly to see Impromptu Shakespeare. Impromptu Shakespeare is (as the title Suggests) an improvised Shakespeare play. One hour of hilarious bard tribute. Todays show, inspired by themes of Japes and Servants, produced a piece about marriage, disguise and tomfoolery involving the dead. The cast had the audience in stitches right from the off with strong characters who brought laughs a plenty. The improvisers stuck fairly close to Shakespearean dialogue patterns with modern elements thrown in which blended well into quite an authentic show. Occasionally you could see the cast break each other with what they were saying and there was some slight corpsing, however it was too fun a show to notice what slight slips of stagemanship that there were. Impromptu Shakespeare is up at the Fringe for the first time this year and I hope it returns next time around.
A long hike around the castle led us to Shhh! The improvised silent movie. This troupe of Italian Improvisers had devised a very unique show to deal with a very unique problem. It is easy to forget amongst the razor sharp verbal wit of the fringe that some people don’t use English as a first language. The cast of Shhh found a way around the problem quite spectacularly. Taking the suggestion of a job a 45 minute piece of mime and physicality, with the occasional projected caption. A very physical improv show forms in front of you, with slapstick humour at its core and a jaunty piano accompaniment throughout, giving a very genuine experience of the early days of silent film. The troupe of players all deserve to be praised for their specificity and acting ability, conveying a complicated plot to the audience with almost no loss of comprehension. A gem of a show and well worth the long walk round to Gryphon Venues to see it.
The last show of today was something from my flatmates; Casual Violence, up here with two shows House of Nostril and Om-Nom-Nominous. It was the latter of these we saw at the Voodoo rooms this evening, Casual Violence are, as well as being thoroughly nice people, very talented sketch writers and performers. Om-Nom-Nominous is a bleak and humorous series of sketches with a wonderful darkness to them. Bold and captivating, the macabre montage of sketches is the best of collection from 4 years work. The performers were comfortable enough to address the audience when unavoidable accidents happened but were straight back into character after and the piece flowed well. Their cool handling of a technical malfunction with a pair of props showed the professionalism and quick wit of these excellent performers.