My Fringe

My second Edinburgh Fringe was far shorter than my first but it was no less enjoyable. In a rapid three days this week I managed to cram in some excellent shows. The benefit of going to Edinburgh in the last week of the festival is that you know which shows are successful already and which offer a high standard of quality. Word of mouth plays a key role in advertising plays and comedy so I hope to add to a bit of the good publicity for the productions I saw.

I was lucky to see some terrific acting - most notably in Death of a Theatre Critic, performed by The Swedish Theatre in Helsinki, and Keepers, by the Plasticine Men. Bane 2 should also be credited with its lead actor taking on several different roles in a whirlwind film noir parody. The quality of acting in these productions was outstanding and I will look in depth at a later date at how each of them

Other plays - Cracks and Jacob's Ladder - were presented by young actors and dealt with macabre themes of death and deception. Both plays deployed similar stylistic elements such as action driven by character monologues so will neatly compliment each other (I hope) in a future post.

As the Fringe is stuffed full of comedy, many shows drew me in. Sketch performances by Ginger & Black and Colin Hoult were two big highlights of my short stay in Edinburgh and were two further shows to draw on dark, brooding themes but take them to surrealist heights.

My next few blogs will focus on the qualities of the performances I saw - I was lucky to see such consistently high quality at all shows mentioned above as well as others that I went to. My Fringe 2010 was great, but I'm already looking forward to 2011.