Edinburgh Fringe mini-reviews: A War of Two Halves and Guide to Surviving Masculinist Territory

Slightly caught in a time-warp from last year, I find myself saying again: for one night only, here is the return of a much-missed-by-pretty-much-nobody Scot Goes Pop feature from the past - yes, it's the Edinburgh Fringe mini-reviews!  And it really is for one night only, because I live with a vulnerable person and my former routine of going to the Fringe six or seven times over the course of August is very much on hold for the time being.  Last year I decided to go in just once and I managed to find a couple of shows that were completely outdoors (albeit one of them was cancelled at the very last moment).  So I thought I'd be able to do the same thing again this time - I assumed with the Fringe back to a full programme it wouldn't be beyond the wit of man to find at least a handful of shows that were outside.

How naive of me.  The pandemic "is over", don't-cha-know, everything is "back to normal".  I cast the net pretty wide, I searched for drama, dance, musicals, physical theatre, etc, etc, but after dredging through eighty-odd pages of results, I literally found just two shows that I was confident were fully outdoors.  One of those was Sweet FA, which was the only show I actually managed to see last year (it's a play about women's football during and after the First World War), and the other was an "audio walk" through the streets of Edinburgh as you listen to a pre-recording of a feminist talking about the incel movement, which didn't sound exactly like my cup of tea.  And as good as Sweet FA is, I couldn't quite convince myself that a repeat performance was what I was looking for if I was only going to Edinburgh once.

I almost started to wonder if I should abandon the idea of booking anything and just wander around watching the street theatre instead - but I realised the day would end up a bit too heavily-weighted towards escapology and fire-juggling.  So I decided to just plump for the best fit I could find.

A WAR OF TWO HALVES (Tynecastle Park)

Rating: 5 stars (*****)

This is Sweet FA's sister show, but is staged differently because there isn't a fixed outdoor stage - instead you're led around various spots within Tynecastle.  I formed the impression from what I read that the bulk of it would be outdoors, and although I was right about that, it was the 25% that's indoors that was the absolute killer.  About one-third of the way through, there's a prolonged sequence in the Hearts dressing room in which the cast of ten are shouting and screaming very close to the audience in an extremely confined space - it's just about the highest risk environment you can possibly imagine from a Covid point of view, and if I'd known it was going to be like that, I wouldn't have gone.  I don't blame the production, because there was nothing inaccurate in the description I read, but I do blame the Fringe centrally for not arming people with enough information.  When you search for shows on the website, you can find out how accessible they are, whether you're likely to find them offensive, exactly how many miles away from you they are, and what the babes-in-arms policy is.  But the one thing you're left totally in the dark about, right in the middle of an ongoing pandemic, is the degree of risk that you'll catch a serious virus while you're at the venue.  The implied message seems to be: the Fringe is only for people who don't care about avoiding Covid, or to put it another way, stop caring about avoiding Covid if you want to come to the Fringe.  In the end I just had to trust in my N95 mask (needless to say I was the only person in the audience wearing a mask indoors), and over a week later, touch wood, it looks like I might have got away with it.

The play itself is about the Hearts team that was on course to win the league at the outbreak of the First World War, but ended up losing out to Celtic after the team joined the army and started to pay the price of military training.  In a far crueller twist, several of the players went on to die together at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.  There isn't an explicit anti-war message in the script, but you're shown the massive external pressure the team were under to join up, from the military, from the press, and from young women delivering white feathers.  And then you're left in little doubt that the players' sacrifice was essentially futile, because it was obvious before the scheduled advance that there was no realistic prospect of success.  Since the purpose of pressuring the team into fighting in the war was to coax Hearts supporters into following their idols' example, you're left wondering how many of those supporters ended up having their lives needlessly thrown away too.

It's an excellent production, although apart from the safety aspect the one thing that bugged me was the anachronism of using what appeared to be radio commentaries to tell the story of the football season in shorthand.  As is being well and truly shoved down our throats, this is the centenary year of the BBC, and although there were amateur radio stations prior to 1922, it seems pretty unlikely that there was such professional-sounding football commentary on the radio as early as 1914.  But I suppose you just have to suspend disbelief.

GUIDE TO SURVIVING MASCULINIST TERRIRORY (starts at Summerhall Courtyard)

Rating: 4 stars (****)

After a bit of reflection, I decided there was actually something to be said for making a virtue out of necessity by going to one of the extremely unorthodox Fringe productions that I read about every year but wouldn't normally take a punt on.  My main misgiving about this was not actually the subject-matter, but instead that the pre-recorded nature of the monologue about incels meant that I wouldn't even be spending my money on seeing a live production.  However, you're led through the streets by a lone woman, and she stresses before the start that "it only works" if you keep a bit of distance from her, so presumably the visual effect of that is intentional - meaning there's a small element of live performance, albeit of a very basic type.  But what really counterbalances the non-live audio is the very high level of individual interaction with the audience, more so than I've ever experienced at any other Fringe show.  Our guide spoke to most of us individually before the start, and I'm pretty sure she sought every single one of us out after the end.  I was a bit startled when she approached me and asked what I had thought about the way she paced the walk, and also how I had found out about the show.  I said to her: "I know this will sound ridiculous, but I wanted to see something that was mostly outside, I live with a vulnerable person and I didn't want to be stuck inside for two hours".  She said "yes of course!" but then apologised for the fact that she couldn't give me a light, funny show.  I told her that wasn't what I was looking for (and it wasn't), but as a group of Swiss feminists seemed to be behind the production, I think I was just relieved to be able to offer a plausible reason for turning up that had nothing to do with a keen interest in the subject of incels.

The other thing that considerably enhanced the experience was that, just by chance, the world's most enthusiastic audience member was there and talked excitably to our guide in both English and fluent French about how much he was looking forward to the production and how he thought more Fringe shows should try something daring and different.  She warned him that the audio was very dark, but he said "that's great, I like to be challenged!"  When the walk started, he turned to me with a huge grin and said "here we go!" as if we were setting off on a reindeer ride in Lapland.  I did wonder if his attitude might have changed by the end - but not a bit of it.  He said it had been amazing, that the walk had taken him close to where he lived and that he would never see those streets in the same way again.  (Possibly that was overstating the case just slightly.)

I was curious about the back-story of the production, because in spite of the Swiss origin of it, the audio is performed by a Scottish actress, and the script was very obviously written by a native English speaker.  It was presumably an adaptation of the French language original, but even so, it must have taken quite a bit of organising.  Before going, I read a short review in the Guardian, and the main misgiving mentioned was that the incel movement is small in number and thus is not really the chief explanation for women feeling unsafe when they walk the streets alone.  Although it's haunting to observe a lone woman while listening to an account of an extreme misogynist ideology, the fixation of the character delivering the monologue can only be explained as symbolic rather than a concern about something that is particularly likely to affect her directly.

The final flourish at the end of the walk is that you're led back into Summerhall (the room was large and well-ventilated so I can't complain too much) and given a little gift to take home.  I suppose this falls into the category of "spoilers" but suffice to say that part of the gift I received was edible and in a rather startling shape.  I'll be charitable and assume that it's an example of offbeat Swiss humour, because the alternative explanation would be a touch of 'revenge misandry'.

Probably part of the reason I've given the show a high rating is its novelty - if there were lots of audio walks in the Fringe, I've no idea if this would stand out as one of the best.  But it was certainly a memorable experience.  Because it was an exceptionally hot day, I was a bit worried beforehand that I was getting very tired, so in order to be ready for an hour's walk I went to the Meadows with a sandwich and forced myself to just lie there for a good forty minutes.  The irony was that the walk eventually took me back to almost exactly the same spot in the Meadows, where every single person in the audience proceeded to have a lie down!

And just a word about Summerhall: I'd only been there twice before, and one of those times was to attend a presentation by John McTernan.  So, let's face it, the only way was up.

Glitter, Murder, Echoes...

So I sat down to write a long blogpost in response to a bizarre Twitter dispute I had with Stephen Bush of the New Statesman a few hours ago. (It was on the relatively obscure topic of a wildly inaccurate Populus poll that was conducted towards the end of the EU referendum campaign.) However, just before I started, I noticed that Stephen had sent me a very gracious email after the exchange. It didn't touch upon his absolutely ridiculous (and now deleted) suggestion that challenging his claims about polling somehow made me a racist, but in the circumstances I'm happy enough to draw a line under the whole thing. In future I'm just going to try to avoid replying to his tweets altogether, because we do seem to rub each other up the wrong way - which is unfortunate, because as regular readers know, I've sung his praises more than once for his uncanny powers of political prediction.

Instead of the blogpost I was planning to write, here's something else I've been meaning to do for a while - the annual ritual of my Edinburgh Fringe mini-reviews. The Fringe only has a week left to run, so it's probably now or never anyway.

DIRTY GLITTER : A comedy-drama about two unlikely Private Eyes in 1970s America, and their investigation into the disappearance of a girl at a nightclub.  Some of it is very, very funny, although the logical part of my brain was struggling with one of the recurring jokes, about a character who constantly denies being Spanish even though he is clearly a native Spanish speaker.   If you were in America, why would you even assume he was Spanish in the first place, rather than, say, Mexican?  Ah well.  Leaving that quibble aside, the show is well worth seeing - fast-paced, breathless, with a relentless soundtrack of 70s hits.  RATING : 8/10

THE MURDERER : This is apparently a loose adaptation of a poem about an alternative universe in which murderers have 'carers' who help them reintegrate into society. Even though the focus is firmly on the 'caring' dynamic, I don't think there's any real excuse for the fact that the murderer just comes across as a random, bland person, rather than someone you can actually believe committed a serious crime or has been affected by many years in jail. There's just not enough meat on the bones, although the play does deserve credit for its sterling efforts to cultivate greater usage of the tragically-neglected expression "catch you later". RATING : 5/10

ECHOES : An absolute tour-de-force. In all honesty, it was a struggle to work out what the hell was going on for at least the first fifteen minutes, but the dialogue was so lyrical and beautiful that the meaning didn't seem to matter - you could just bathe in the words. Basically (and I hope I've got this right) it's about a bloke who returns to the woman he got pregnant and abandoned several years earlier...but then dark secrets emerge about the fate of the child. An act of extreme violence is depicted about ten minutes from the end, and I found myself wanting it to be over at that point, because I'm not a big fan of gore. But if you happen to have a very, very strong constitution, I can't deny you'd be hard-pressed to see anything better this year. RATING : 10/10

A TALE OF TWO CITIES - BLOOD FOR BLOOD : I studied Tale of Two Cities at secondary school, but it's so long ago I can barely remember anything about it, and unfortunately this is a production that does seem to assume knowledge of the text (probably because liberties are taken with it, and half the fun is supposed to be in the divergence - that was the impression I got, anyway). But what I can say is that the acting is excellent, and the staging is much more elaborate and impressive than you see at many Fringe productions. The review I read before going said that there was an inexplicable scene at the start that seems to be set in Edinburgh for no apparent reason, so I set myself the mission of trying to make sense of it - but I had to admit defeat. It really is totally baffling. RATING : 8/10

EN FOLKEFIENDE : I had very little pre-knowledge of An Enemy of the People either, but thankfully this is a much more accessible production - although ironically the acting isn't quite up to the same standard as in Tale of Two Cities, probably because it's a young cast cutting their teeth. Again, the staging is very imaginative and works wonders with limited space - everything takes place within or just outside of a rotating 'cube', and there are repeated instances of the exterior of the cube 'censoring' politically sensitive words that are spoken inside. RATING : 7/10

LE BOSSU : I had to keep reminding myself it wasn't Christmas, because this has the feel of the sort of family show you'd see at that time of year. (Although ironically I don't know how suitable it is for children, because there are one or two mildly adult references.) A kind of halfway house between a play and a musical, based on The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, with some limited audience participation thrown in. I'm not sure how much of the music is original and how much is borrowed, but it really works - I had one of the tunes going round in my head for hours afterwards. RATING : 8/10

LADIES IN WAITING - THE JUDGEMENT OF HENRY VIII : A great show, although I was more than a little harassed when I sat down at the start.  The venue is a hotel, and no matter how hard you try to mind your own business while waiting, you can't seem to do anything right - you're queue-jumping even though there is no discernible queue, you're in a corridor you shouldn't be in even though you were just following the signs, you're in the way of a scooter even though you've got your back pressed hard against a wall...and then you take your seat and find you've got a horribly restricted view, even though you're only in the second row.  You'd think it wouldn't be beyond the wit of man to raise the stage slightly (or organise a comprehensible queuing system, for that matter).  Anyway, the idea is that Henry VIII has found himself in purgatory and must submit himself to the judgement of his six wives, who are now free to speak their minds in his presence without fear of being executed or anything unfortunate like that.  The funniest bit is when Henry seems disconcerted that Catherine Howard is so pleased to see him.  "But Catherine, I had your head chopped off."  "Oh, that was ages ago!"  RATING : 9/10

I can also highly recommend a version of Northanger Abbey with puppets, which I saw two or three years ago and is on again, albeit at a slightly awkward time of day.  It's one of those things that sounds horrific, but is actually fantastic.

A few Edinburgh Fringe mini-reviews

I'm a bit late with these, but the Fringe still has a few days to run, so maybe they'll be of some use to somebody out there...

I AM BEAST : I made a point of going to see this because I had such fond memories of the same company's The Girl With No Heart, which was a mesmerising fable about the effect of nuclear warfare on children.  This one perhaps doesn't quite scale the same heights, but it touches the heart in much the same way.  It's about a girl who loses herself in a comic book fantasy after the death of her mum.  Looking at it objectively, there are a few flaws - for example, the first twenty minutes or so are awfully repetitive, and the story only gets going properly after that.  But by the end, I found myself getting so involved that I completely lost interest in picking fault.  And I must just mention the background music - it's very simple but really gets under your skin.  RATING : 8/10

I LOVED YOU AND I LOVED YOU : I took a bit of a punt on this one, because it's only running at the tail-end of the festival, and so there were no reviews to be found at all.  But judging from the promotional material it had the look of quality about it, and just for once my instincts proved right.  It's about the life of Morfydd Owen, a brilliant female Welsh composer who died in bizarre circumstances in 1918 at the age of just 26.  It's billed as a cross between a dance show and a play, but it's more the former than the latter - there's some speech, but not a huge amount.  The music is mostly Owen's own compositions, and there's live piano-playing and vocals.  I don't really have the vocabulary to properly describe a show like this, but the music is beautiful, the dancing is spellbinding, and I totally recommend it.  The only disconcerting thing was that I was sitting next to someone who was studiously taking notes throughout the performance.  She was obviously involved in the production, and every time she jotted something down I imagined she had spotted some minor flaw, or scope for improvement.  I can't imagine what that would have been, though.  RATING : 10/10

THE GOOD DOCTOR : The annual outdoor play in Duddingston Kirk Manse Garden is a very special experience.  It's surely the most atmospheric venue in the entire Fringe, with Arthur's Seat right behind you and Duddingston Loch right in front of you.  A long play always seems to be selected (at least two hours), which means you drift pleasurably from daylight into darkness.  You'd think word of mouth would lead to huge crowds every night, but not a bit of it - there's quite often only three men and a dog there (figuratively speaking).  It would be interesting to know why that is - maybe it's because the production style is old school (although that suits the surroundings perfectly), maybe it's because of the midgies (although they generally only get about halfway up your nostrils), or maybe it's simply because Duddingston is well off the beaten track for festival-goers.  Suffice to say that people are missing out.  This year's play is Neil Simon's comic tribute to Chekhov, and the standard is as high as ever.  RATING : 8/10

AN AUDIENCE WITH JIMMY SAVILE : This is every bit as uncomfortable to watch as you might think, but not always in the way you expect.  It's a very funny play in parts, and it's really quite disturbing when you realise that you're laughing with Savile, rather than laughing at him or (as would be more appropriate) not laughing at all.  It's a reminder of the charm that was such a big part of his success in getting away with crimes on an unimaginable scale for decades.  Obviously the play becomes darker as it progresses, although the funniest part is actually just a few minutes from the end, when Savile makes a delusional comment about being responsible for the Israeli-Egyptian peace deal in 1979.  By that point you're laughing at him, though.  As many people have noted, Alistair McGowan absolutely owns the title role, and from memory he hasn't really toned down the impersonation he used to do for light entertainment shows - perhaps that wasn't such a caricature after all.  RATING : 8/10

FOXFINDER : It's bound to happen sooner or later, but in my few years of going there I've yet to see a bad Fringe show at the Bedlam Theatre - they've all been either outstanding or very good.  This one falls into the latter category.  The basic idea is really clever - the humble fox is blamed for England's economic collapse, but even after the species has been hunted to extinction, government-sanctioned paranoia still reigns.  At the end of the play, you suddenly realise that there are indeed still "foxes" out there to be found - it's just that the meaning of the word has changed.  RATING : 8/10

THE CLOCK STRIKES NOON : This is part of the Frontier trilogy set in a chapel in (I think) California.  Two desperate armed men are confused to find themselves negotiating for their lives with a very calm and collected young woman.  As someone once said of the Blake's 7 episode Project Avalon, this has more twists and turns than a twisty-turny thing, and both the script and acting is exquisite.  Just a word of warning, though - the venue is unbearably hot.  RATING : 9/10

I realise I haven't given any of them a bad rating - perhaps that means I'm getting better at guessing what I'll like in advance!

A few quick Edinburgh Fringe reviews

I've come to the conclusion that a visit to the Edinburgh Fringe is a metaphor for life - you start by thinking about what you really want to do, but then you work out what is actually available and practically possible, settle for that instead, and ultimately come to the conclusion that it was probably just as well it worked out that way after all.

Here are my very quick impressions of the four shows I've ended up seeing so far, in a couple of cases more or less by accident -

EUGENIE GRANDET : Just getting into the room for this one was a bit of an ordeal, because I had to make a wild stab at guessing how 'Eugenie Grandet' is actually pronounced in order to buy the tickets. I was absolutely gutted to discover that I had pronounced it perfectly, only for the woman at the box office to still look utterly baffled. "Are you sure it's on at this venue?" she asked, before eventually sheepishly telling me "I thought you said Jenny!" Still, French pronunciation is one thing - it's beyond me how anyone ever plucks up the courage to buy tickets for shows with sexually-explicit titles (and it's not as if those are in short supply).

I've never read the novel by Balzac, so I've no idea how faithful this adaptation is, but I would imagine it's reasonably close. Jo Hartland is superb as the title character, although the real star of the show is a remarkably versatile table which does all manner of things that a table really shouldn't be doing. It had me severely worried at one point when it was precariously balanced against a chair, and carefree acting was carrying on underneath it. I reassured myself with the thought that it was probably a lightweight 'stunt' table, but Hartland later walked on top of it and it supported her weight. In a nutshell, this is not a show that health and safety inspectors will appreciate. RATING : 8/10

FOREST : Well, this is an oddity. A girl who is scared of tomorrow wakes up in a forest, and is comforted by an assortment of men (and one woman) unconvincingly dressed up as animals. The basic idea is vaguely reminiscent of last year's utterly brilliant The Girl With No Heart, but unfortunately this production just isn't in the same class. I'm not even entirely clear what the allegory is supposed to be - my best guess is that it's something to do with the cyclical process of children who are afraid of growing up and of being abandoned eventually becoming parents and protectors themselves. But it might just as easily be an allegory about ketchup.

The young actors are all delightful, though, and it's hard to imagine that they could make much more of the material they are working with. This is also a show in the truest tradition of the Fringe - seven actors and an audience of about a dozen crammed into a room not much bigger than a broom cupboard. RATING : 6/10

LOOK BACK IN ANGER : There are two productions of John Osborne's classic play running at this year's Fringe - I went to the one by a group of Oxford University students, simply because the time of day was more convenient. In almost every respect it's a wonderful version, although it's just ever so slightly spoilt by the fact that the actor playing Jimmy Porter is miscast. The precision of his speech and movement almost makes it seem like a carefully choreographed dance performance, rather than a performance that attempts to capture the spontaneous anger of the quintessential angry young man. The problem is much more noticeable in the earlier part of the play which is so dominated by Jimmy's ranting - the production comes into its own later on when the other characters start to be fleshed out.

As I'm always being told by apologists for the Oxbridge system that you simply can't move in Oxford University for all the state school pupils, I was going to make a snide comment about an Oxford company only being able to find one actor with a working-class accent for a play that requires two. Full disclosure, though - I was taken by surprise at the end when the actress who plays plummy-accented Helena spoke with her own voice, and turned out to be Irish (I think). RATING : 8/10

CHERRY ON TOP : It was a choice of cherries for me - I was veering towards seeing a version of The Cherry Orchard set in 1980s Durham, but when I realised that I might miss my train home I went for the contemporary comedy Cherry on Top instead. One of the fascinations of it is that it stars two leading actresses from the Indian community in South Africa. It dawned on me that, although I've always been aware of that community's existence, I know next to nothing about it.

It's a choice of cherries for the male character in the play as well - although he's not so much a character as a bulge under a blanket. Before ending up in a coma, his term of endearment for both his wife and his mistress had been "cherry", and the story revolves around what happens when the two women encounter each other at his hospital bedside.

The jokes don't really do it for me on the whole, which is probably a culture clash thing - they seem a bit too obvious. Actually, the best ones are those that aren't played solely for laughs, eg. "I poisoned him with this. It's untraceable. I'm joking. It's traceable." But can a comedy work even if you don't find the jokes particularly funny? In this case I think so, because the story works, and is acted out vivaciously and with total conviction. RATING : 8/10

So which of the four would I recommend? I think Cherry on Top has it by a nose over Eugenie Grandet and Look Back in Anger, although you'll have to get your skates on if you want to see it - it's only on until Saturday.

More evidence that Labour is heading for defeat

Although YouGov have yet to match ICM by producing a poll showing the Tories level-pegging with Labour, the latest one does show Labour's lead down to a wafer-thin three points. More significantly, we're provided with a breakdown of where voters for the three main London parties in 2010 have gone to since. This offers a particularly useful insight into what type of people are currently in the UKIP column. Really the only surprise here is that there are no surprises at all -

15% of people who voted Conservative in 2010 now support UKIP.

6% of people who voted Liberal Democrat in 2010 now support UKIP.

4% of people who voted Labour in 2010 now support UKIP.

So the conventional wisdom is borne out by this poll - if we can assume that perhaps half of current UKIP supporters will drift back "home" to their previous party by the time of the general election (a reasonable assumption unless Farage is given a place in any TV leaders' debates that may take place), then Labour no longer have a lead in any meaningful sense.

Incidentally, there's no reason to imagine that switchers from Conservative to UKIP are so scunnered with their former party that they're more likely to go the whole hog and vote Labour rather than return to the Tory fold. This poll actually shows that the Conservatives have more 2010 Labour voters in their column at present than Labour have 2010 Tory voters. In spite of his relentless march to the right, Miliband seems to be utterly failing to appeal to former Tory supporters - his slim lead is an artificial product of the UKIP advance and the Lib Dem collapse.

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Simply because I'm so impressed that someone actually sent me a personal tweet to promote their Edinburgh Fringe show, I may as well give it a quick plug. It looks quite intriguing - it's called The Confessions of Gordon Brown.

"Gordon Brown hilariously exposes the darkest secrets of being Prime Minister, the stab-in-the-back plotting, the betrayals and most importantly - the hair gel. Love him or loathe him, Gordon candidly reveals what it takes to knife your way to the top and rule a nation. And how his dream of power all went wrong. New play by acclaimed Scots Emmy-nominated writer and director Kevin Toolis in a manyrivers production."

Lib Dems on supporting their own votes-at-16 policy : "oh, if we MUST..."

The Liberal Democrats' support for votes at 16 is remarkably similar to their legendary "100 years of support for Home Rule" - they're terribly passionate about it in principle, but are rather disturbed, and frankly not a little offended, by the suggestions that this should extend to doing anything at all about it in practice. In particular, the notion that Liberal Democrat government ministers should actually be implementing the party's supposedly long-cherished policy is considered fatuous beyond words. You might remember the exchange I had with Lib Dem activist MrsB back in January, when she patiently explained to me that she of course supported votes at 16, but that it was utterly impossible to extend the franchise for the independence referendum. Unfortunately, she became considerably less patient with me when I pointed out that her support for Michael Moore's plan to specifically ban Holyrood from introducing votes at 16 for the referendum meant that she wasn't so much in favour of votes at 16 as...well, opposed to it. That was simply an example of me being "difficult", apparently, and I needed to grow up and accept that there were insurmountable logistical issues standing in the way of 'what we both wanted to happen'. Logistical issues such as Michael Moore's proposed ban, presumably.

It's a great pity that MrsB is no longer anywhere to be found, because I suspect the cognitive dissonance brought about by the events of the last few days may well have been a sight to behold. A UK government spin doctor has evidently been busily briefing the press that the Tory-Lib Dem coalition have dropped their objection to votes at 16 for the referendum, and that this new enlightened attitude will even apply in the fantasy scenario of a Westminster-conducted referendum next year. Hmmm. Amazing the speed with which utter impossibilities and insurmountable logistical issues can melt away when there's yet another wizard 'stop the Nats' tactic to be cooked up. But we shouldn't be churlish - it's a rare delight to see the Lib Dems actually supporting one of their own constitutional reform policies, and we can't realistically expect them to be doing it as a matter of principle.

In truth, the excuses for not extending the franchise for the referendum were always pretty thin. The practical objections were comprehensively addressed by the Scottish Government in their consultation document, while the principled objection that there is an international consensus to exclude "children" from the franchise simply didn't stack up. It's not just that established democracies such as Brazil and Austria have already reduced the voting age to 16, or that the British Crown Dependencies (Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man) have done the same. What really drives a coach and horses through this argument is that 17-year-old "children" routinely help to elect the most powerful person on the planet, by voting in US presidential primary elections. Ah, the objectors say, this only happens because those voters will be 18 by the time of the general election. Er, so what? If you think "children" are too immature to vote, self-evidently what matters is what age a person is when their vote is cast, not when that vote "takes effect".

From my own perspective, if I cast my mind back to when I was a teenager, I can see plenty of differences between the 14-year-old me and the 18-year-old me, but not very many between the 16-year-old me and the 18-year-old me. Society has presumably reached the same intuitive conclusion - how else can we explain that 16-year-olds are legally permitted to consent to sex, marry and have children? It really is hard to understand why people think that the sun will fall out of the sky if young adults who are already deemed responsible enough to be entrusted with all of those decisions are simply allowed to vote.

Unless of course the fear is that they will vote "the wrong way". Yes, that's probably it.

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I went back to the Edinburgh Festival on Saturday (although there's not much point in launching into another batch of reviews, because the Fringe ends today) and among the many eager leafletters was a Geordie woman whose pitch was "keep the UK together, sir?"

Sounds a rum kind of show to me.

A few quick Edinburgh Fringe reviews

It's high time for my annual post about the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Unlike last year, I've so far been going with other people, which is a good thing because it means I've been to shows I might not otherwise have bothered with, one of which was an absolute revelation.

Anyway, here is my quick run-through of the six shows I've seen, with a rough score out of ten. Bear in mind that I saw some of these at the start of the month, so they probably won't all still be running.

TRANSLUNAR PARADISE : I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to adequately describe physical theatre, and I must admit I winced at the start when it dawned on me that there wasn't going to be any dialogue at all. The first few minutes are taken up with a young male actor, holding a mask to his face to make him look elderly, going through a series of intricate but mundane movements, such as opening and shutting cupboards. I thought to myself "I'm not sure I can take an hour and a quarter of this", but fortunately it gets much livelier. In fact, it's extraordinary how much can be evocatively conveyed through physical movement - longing for a lost spouse, courtship, marriage, pregnancy, the death of a child, war, marital rows, etc, etc. The movements are so precise that I can't even begin to imagine how much rehearsing must be required. The action is accompanied throughout by a woman with an accordion who hums to herself rather a lot, which is an odd effect at first, but of course lyrics would have broken the spell of wordlessness.

So having been dubious at first, I was well and truly won over. Quote from the lead actor/performer/whatever the correct term is : "if you liked the show, please tell your friends, and if you didn't like it, please tell your enemies it was fantastic". On the basis of which I can only say - I liked it, but how do you know I'm not just saying that because I hate you? RATING : 8/10

TIM FITZHIGHAM - STOP THE PIGEON : This was the first time I'd ever seen comedy at the Fringe, and after an ill-fated trip a few years ago to a comedy club in Glasgow with a group of people I'd never met before, I was a tad nervous about it. But to my relief, it turned out to be very much mainstream comedy (even if the subject-matter was distinctly offbeat), and although there was audience participation, it wasn't of the 'enforced' variety.

In many ways, it was more like a painless history and physics lesson wrapped up as a comedy show. FitzHigham is obviously fascinated by the imaginative possibilities of gambling, and recounts in a surprisingly pleasurable degree of detail how he recreated a bet entered into by the 4th Duke of Queensberry in the 18th Century to send a letter over a distance of 50 miles in less than an hour, using only the technology available in the period. As the name of the show implies, FitzHigham eventually achieved the feat by using carrier pigeons, although intriguingly it appears that the Duke of Queensberry originally did it by inserting the letter in a cricket ball, and using a relay team of cricketers.

The performance was a bit rough and ready when I saw it, but to be fair that was the first preview show, so the gremlins were probably ironed out later. Having said that, I'm not sure the seating arrangements in the stifling 'igloo' venue are likely to have improved much since then. RATING : 7/10

THE LETTERS OF JANE AUSTEN : A bit like Translunar Paradise, my first thought was "am I really going to be able to stand 45 minutes of two women in period costume sitting and reading out letters?" But the answer to that question was a firm 'yes', because Austen's prose and wicked humour is such a treat for the ear. I'm not sure The Emails of Ian Davidson would be quite such a winner, though, before anyone gets any bright ideas.

Every single letter is from Austen to her sister Cassandra - except for the last, which appears to be Austen writing to someone else about her devastation at the death of Cassandra. It's only when the letter is signed off with the name "Cassandra" that you realise it was in fact Cassandra writing about Austen's death. A very moving end to an otherwise lightly comic show.

There are a few songs as well, which I didn't think were much to write home about (if you'll forgive the pun), but I suppose it's necessary to have something to break up the wall-to-wall reading out of letters. RATING : 7/10

POE'S LAST NIGHT : I think you'd have to be a true Poe aficionado to really 'get' this free one-man show. I was so baffled by it that my concentration kept slipping, a problem which wasn't helped when pop music started blaring out from somewhere! However, the performer David Crawford is a class act, and didn't bat an eyelid. I have the distinct feeling I'd have thought it was fantastic if I had fully understood what was going on. As it is, the most helpful thing I can say is that Crawford is clearly a superb actor, with a melodious voice. If only all American accents were like that, it would be the most disarming accent in the whole world. He also very modestly asked for suggestions about how the show could be improved, and invited donations in a civilised manner that put to shame the American street-performer I saw a couple of years ago who essentially bullied people into giving him money. RATING : 6/10

THE GIRL WITH NO HEART : One of those shows which you know within about five seconds is going to be amazing. It just radiates quality from the off. A girl from a world where wishes are always granted asks to be transported to the world where wishes do not always come true but where "every day is an adventure". She is warned that she can never return, but stands firm in her resolve. The world she arrives in is a world of ash, intended to represent Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombings, and the story that unfolds is a metaphor for how children experience war. A nuclear explosion is explained as something that happens when a child's heart, worn on his or her sleeve, is ripped in two by the 'Adult Army'. The decision to use nuclear weapons is justified as "one big terrible thing to stop smaller terrible things from happening", a line of reasoning which is challenged with the question "wouldn't it be better if nobody did any terrible things at all?"

Although the girl referred to in the title is played in conventional fashion by the actress Nicole Anderson, most of the other characters are represented by puppets. That takes a bit of getting used to, because you can see the puppet operators at all times, and at first you think you're supposed to be looking at a two-headed or three-headed being. But you quickly adjust to that and learn to suspend disbelief. I also initially thought it was a bit strange that the 'girl' in a fable about children is played by someone who is very obviously a woman, but Anderson's performance is so heartfelt that it doesn't really matter (in fact it may even work better that way).

Given the un-self-conscious way in which the show is presented, I assumed I was watching an interpretation of a well-known fable that had been written decades ago, perhaps by a Japanese author. So I was very surprised to learn afterwards that it was an entirely original play. As with the Poe show, the audience were asked for suggestions at the end, but in all honesty apart from the type of improvements that greater resources would be required for, it's hard to see how it could be made much better. I think the venue (the Bedlam Theatre) helped enormously - it's difficult to imagine it coming across quite as well in one of the more cramped venues. Simply spellbinding, and I can't recommend highly enough. RATING : 10/10

THE MOST DANGEROUS TOY : Jamie Laird is a very Scottish Nietzsche in this play which explores how the philosopher's relationship (or non-relationship) with Lou Salomé led him to despair. The ambiguity at the heart of the play is whether Salomé once allowed Nietzsche to kiss her under the moonlight, an incident which fuelled his false hopes. In a monologue, she insists that "she honestly can't remember" whether it happened, but then a flashback sequence suggests that she did allow the kiss, before slapping Nietzsche on the face twice.

Maria Alexe steals the show as Salomé. I was amazed to discover afterwards that she's Romanian - her accent sounds 100% middle-class English. RATING : 8/10

My pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Fringe

If anyone is labouring under the misapprehension that this is a man's world we're living in, they should try standing for an hour in the queue for the Edinburgh Fringe box office. Watching the behavioural patterns of those trying to drum up trade, it's very, very hard to escape the conclusion that you're much more likely to be singled out for attention (and occasionally even handed free tickets) if you're a) female, b) attractive, and c) inclined to giggle incessantly at very poor jokes. There was one South African guy in particular who was making me feel paranoid - he must have gone up and down the queue about twenty times to speak to people, but with an uncanny homing instinct always seemed to just miss me. Ah well, at least it made for a (relatively) quieter wait.

My plan was to do the same as last year, and see one contemporary play and one 'classic'. But there were no tickets available for the contemporary play I had in mind, so I ended up going for two very 'earnest' options - an adaptation of the Russian novel A Hero of Our Time, and an American production of Hedda Gabler. (Yes, that's right, more Americans with guns!) What they have in common is that they're both works I was supposed to read when I was studying literature at university, but never quite got round to doing so. In fact, I even wrote an essay on A Hero of Our Time without having read it. So, several years on, it was fascinating to finally discover what I was writing about! They were excellent productions and I'd recommend them both, although Hedda Gabler was marginally my favourite.

The highlight of the day, though, was eavesdropping on an exuberant director (or I assume he was a director) when he was introduced to a young designer who appeared to be the son of someone important in the theatre world. I drifted in and out of the conversation, but there was something about performing in Nice and Florence, 'fourteen illegitimate children', the Nazis letting someone go because he was so famous, and this -

"He said 'I'm not having a woman design my stage'. But she wasn't just A woman, she was THE woman. The greatest actress in all the world!"

No idea who he was talking about, but presumably 'the greatest actress in all the world' narrows it down to a few thousand.

Fringe benefits

I've just completed a survey on my experience of the Edinburgh Fringe this year.  It was the first time in my life I'd actually got round to attending any shows at the festival, and I had a very nice day - the two plays I saw were excellent, and the organisation much smoother than I anticipated, so I was more than happy to give positive feedback.  However, when I was asked to agree or disagree with the following statement, I did begin to wonder if the organisers might just have a slightly inflated notion of the potential impact of their endeavours...

it made no difference to my well-being (e.g. emotional, social)

When days out in Edinburgh affect my emotional well-being, it's usually got more to do with surly bus drivers.

Incidentally, in case you're wondering, Lockerbie : Unfinished Business wasn't one of the plays I saw - I thought that might be taking one of my fixations of the summer a step too far!  Instead I saw a vivacious performance of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle by a young theatre group (who I presume hailed from the West Country, unless the choice of accent was totally random) and then a very good contemporary Irish play called Dead.  The latter gave me a taste of the famed rough-and-ready character of the Fringe, with an actor drafted in at the last minute who read his lines direct from the script, and an audience of about ten, half of whom seemed to be either professional reviewers or to have their own shows.  Before the performance started, the reviewers mentioned that they were particularly interested in covering plays about death, at which point two other members of the audience leapt into action and started thrusting leaflets into their hands.  "A character definitely dies in our play," one said, "I promise you".  The other one (a rather sprightly-looking elderly gentleman) thought for a moment, and then triumphantly announced - "You must come to my show.  You see, I'm almost dead..."