The weather really has mostly smiled on us for this visit to Edinburgh and in a way this day was no exception. Although it was drizzling hard in the morning, preventing us from playing tennis, the forecast said that the day would brighten up for our festival visit; which it did.
So we stayed home in the morning, making the most of the flat and having a cooked breakfast at home, using up some of the provisions we had bought in for hunkering-down purposes.
After brunch, off to town to collect tickets and then get to our first show of the day; Vessel at Bristo Square. Vessel is an excellent two-hander, performed by the writer, Laura Wyatt O’Keefe together with a fine young actor, Edward Degaetano, whom we bumped into and chatted with briefly after the performance.
We thought this piece, about the abortion debate in Ireland and the effect the strong views on the issue can have on real women’s choices/lives, was a really excellent short play. It deserves a wider airing and it was a real shame that the auditorium was not full.
Our next show was at the Teviot with just over an hour between shows; plenty of time to pop across the way to Checkpoint for some reasonably refined refreshment and for me to start getting interested in the Middlesex score as the chance of a highly unlikely win started to emerge.
On to the Teviot (what a grand looking Students’ Union that place is!) to see Sitting by Katherine Parkinson. This auditorium was full; probably because the play is by a known actress and had some exposure on the BBC. In truth, this was a rather contrived piece of writing about three life model sitters, apparently unconnected (although naturally connections emerge) and their relationship with an unseen and unheard artist.
The performers; James Alexandrou, Grace Hogg-Robinson and Hayley Jayne Standing all did their best to rescue the rather slow, tame and at times predictable script. The audience whopped and applauded wildly at the end; perhaps because the BBC had endorsed the production…or perhaps it was one of the better things that many in the audience had seen.
We emerged from that experience feeling a little irritated that, of the two things we had seen today, the production with bigger names behind it was getting the bigger audience and plaudits, despite being the lesser production in our view.
Irritation that Middlesex still needed a wicket to secure a win turned to joy at that win, before we moved on to have a stroll across town…
…in many ways retracing in reverse the stroll I took first thing in the morning when I visited Rohan Candappa’s show, a year ago to this very day:
A Day At The Edinburgh Fringe Festival With Old Muckers, 22 August 2017
Then we wandered around Charlotte Square for a while looking at the Book Festival and taking an ice cream in the sunshine.
Then on to the Royal Botanical Gardens for some more irritation as we were told that we couldn’t see the garden ahead of our 19:00 concert there; we would have to walk all the way round the outside from the East Gate (where the fringe app had sent us) to the West Gate. This seemed ludicrously jobsworth-like to me during the weeks of festival if the gardens choose to play host to a venue. Being told that we weren’t the first to voice this grievance did not make us feel better.
I snapped some genuinely dire cricket in Inverleith Park across the road while we waited for the Gardens to let the #Pianodrome Live audience in.
The Pianodrome itself is a fascinating piece of construction, made from 50 recycled pianos, five of which can still be played within the venue. It seats about 50 people reasonably comfortably and another 50 uncomfortably. We had made sure to get there early to get relatively comfortable seating.
A young woman in Edwardian drag with an infeasibly waxy false-tash acted as compère quite well.
Janie and I already knew that we were to see a folk musician named Sam Gillespie (one half of The Brothers Gillespie) as a substitute for a prog rock band named The Brackish and were quite happy with the swap. He was joined by Siannie Moodie who turned out to be an especially fine exponent of the Celtic harp (clàrsach). In fact they both turned out to be good instrumentalists but my goodness Sam Gillespie’s songs are dirgy and derivative. Imagine Donovan and Pete Seeger, both in a bad mood, writing songs together.
Meanwhile additional people entered late (we guessed mostly the entourage of the substitute musicians) and some of them sat just under our feet. One young man who was clearly in with the in crowd made an especially redolent impression on us. What is it about people who hang around musicians and negligence with regard to personal hygiene?
There was also another musician involved briefly who played a glockenspiel-type percussion instrument but whose name seemed to be unlisted. Janie had unwittingly snapped him during warm up, so if anyone reading this recognises this man and his instrument, please message in his details.
The act for the second half of the evening was also unlisted and the compère merely mumbled that name as we left for the interval; in our case not to return.
We fancied a nice dinner tonight and felt that we could get one of those if we were back in Leith at a reasonable hour, so I made a last minute booking of a table at The Chop House for another good red meat meal.
Again Ignascio looked after us very nicely as did the very sweet and attentive (if not the most efficient) waiting staff. One young waiter, on his third day, took a particular interest in helping us out with ice cream, so I invented a word for the equivalent of a sommelier for ice cream: Ísbíltúrier. Remember where you encountered the word first.
A very tasty end to another enjoyable day.
All of our photographs from our week away, mostly at the Edinburgh Fringe, can be seen on our Flickr album by clicking here on the picture below:
