Weekend Festival 1

On Saturday I made another trip thru to the Edinburgh Festival. To begin with I went to see The Musical! I’ve gigged with one of the duo involved, so thought I’d go along. It proved to be a reasonably entertaining hour. They knew when to drop gags in and the audience I was in lapped it up.

From there I went to see a show called Durang Durang, by a London based theatre company Skullduggery. They performed 5 short plays by American playwright Christopher Durang. Since I had picked this totally at random, I was pleased to discover the acting was of a really high standard and the plays themselves were quirky, yet funny. It was all over too quickly though. I could have easily taken another half hour or so.

Later I saw Richard Herring and his 12 Tasks of Hercules Terrace. What he did was, to take the twelve tasks of Hercules and attempt to emulate them in a sufficiently comedic fashion. This was his 17th year or something at the festival and he knows how to put on a tight show. It was at the controversial Pod Deco venue and I must say I found it to be a pretty good place to watch comedy. I had been there hundreds of times in its former guise as the Odeon cinema and it makes a perfect multi theatre venue.

The big event though, was Doug Stanhope at The Tron. The venue was a basement bar, not a conventional Festival venue or even a proper comedy club. Stanhope constantly gets compared to Bill Hicks and it’s easy to see why, he covers a lot of the same topics, smoking, war, the American public being hoodwinked by their government and the media and he even has a bit about Reginald Denny.

But the difference I’m commenting on here is that Hicks was a career comedian. He wanted success and big audiences – on his own terms, but he wanted it. Stanhope couldn’t give a fuck. When Bill Hicks played Glasgow in the early 90s it was at the Pavilion. I really can’t see Doug Stanhope doing that sort of tour, though he could do if wanted to. But onto the show. The audience on our night was a drunken rabble, perhaps that’s what they were like on each night of the run but it was somewhat irritating. Ten to fifteen minutes were wasted on him taking a couple of hecklers with no point apart. Fuck knows why you want to go see a cutting edge comedian only to interrupt him by shouting out pointless words and phrases.

Nicola and I were in disagreement on the way home. I thought he was good but not as good as he could have been whereas she thought he was all right, but nowhere near as funny as she thought he would have been. Some of his material I’d heard before, like people complaining that he was drunk on stage “that’s like going to a titty-bar and complaining that your lap dancer is a communist…” but that didn’t make it any less funny. Of his other stuff, although he ‘shocks’ he generally has a fucking point his wife’s abortion illustrated that, in America anyway, you can have a botched service and no one does anything about it. “I’ll tell all of my friends not to come to your abortion clinic.”

His intended use of his Mother as a suicide bomber was another highlight for me. Though he was only going to use her in order to satisfy his own petty squabbles with society, like not being able to get a breakfast muffin after 11am. I’ll definitely go back and see him should he play again, but I think with his lifestyle and career outlook, he’ll always be funny, but it’ll only be on the very rare occasions that he’ll pull off the real 5 star performances he’s obviously capable of.

Celebrity spotting for today Brendon Burns got out of a taxi just where I was eating my lunch. “Drop me where there’s a fat guy sitting on a wall eating a sandwich” I also saw funny ladies Rhona Cameron and Jenny Eclair.