A dream half fulfilled, after performing improv with my red snake and kitten hand puppet at the last night of Writers' Summer School at Swanwick, Derbyshire, I drove on to the Edinburgh Festival. Although I was not performing, I was watching for a week at the Edinburgh Festival to find out how it is done. How do you find a venue, get the public in, make money and most importantly keep the watchers entertained so that they smile, make the performers persist, feel good and find fame?
The first dramatic show I saw was the most professional and conventional, a modernisation of Strindberg's classic drama Miss Julie, but re-set in South Africa the sixties after Apartheid officially ended. The plot of the play is that lord's daughter at the aristocratic mansion house seduces the butler, hopes to run away and marry him and set up a hotel. But he chooses to stay in his role as a servant.
So, fearing that she is pregnant and they will both be killed by her father, she commits suicide. The modern version with the black butler and his mother and African music works very well, far more relevant to a modern audience than the class-ridden original.
Saw Gullivers Travels by a Romanian company with a real horse on stage. I confess that not knowing all the tales by the author I found it confusing although visually amusing. Plays aimed to bring Shakespeare and the theatre to schools have huge casts, the reverse of the modern play which has five or fewer actors to cut costs.
More drama from an Australian circus of four acrobats balancing on a box of eggs and on each other. They later smashed the eggs to show the eggs are real and not hard boiled. Afterwards over breakfast I and the family discussed the dynamics of the egg's construction. It's most solid at the most curved pointy top. You can't balance all your weight on one egg but need enough eggs to spread the load.
A fringe act had actors playing Lady Macbeth, Hamlet and Henry VIII at the job centre trying to get jobs. (To work or not to work, that is the question.) But perhaps the best of all was the outdoor street theatre. Every year a long-haired solo comedian performs surrounded by an astonished laughing crowd. He tries to make babies in pushchairs and their mothers reach arms up and laugh and cry and copy him. A bystander is leaning on a fire hydrant. The actor takes a banana and a roll of duct tape out of his briefcase and gives the member of the audience (I don't think he was a stooge) the banana to eat. Whilst his hands are occupied in front, the actor fixes the duct tape to the side of the fire hydrant then runs around behind the banana eater, typing his waist to the fire hydrant.
Everybody is in hysterics, including me, watching in my large black brimmed sunhat. The actor races towards me arms outstretched as if he has just seen me, enthusing, 'Mama! Mama!' Seeing Trevor beside me, the actor screams, 'Papa! Papa!' You can repeat this year after year at a festival. New members of the audience have not seen it. Old-timers have probably forgotten the plot. Even if watchers remember the actor's patter, the bystanders and their reactions are new.
Before leaving Scotland I visited the Purves marionette theatre in Biggar (not bigger, not beggar but Biggar). From their shop I bought a hand puppet of a Spitfire pilot plus a cardboard puppet theatre to paint.
Now what shall I write? For tragedy affecting all the audience, religion and politics (although this may endanger the actors and writer).
For comedy you can pick of religion and politics, the insiders and the outsiders - risking upsetting everybody. Or pick on your own family - and risk alienating them. Of be self-deprecating, which is safe, so long as you don't portray yourself as a total loser. But if you exaggerate it enough like Tommy Trinder, or Mr Bean. ...
I could be a teacher, like Joyce Grenfell, with puppets as pupils, or a grandmother, or a child, out of the mouths of babes, my childhood remembered, confessions of a naughty child.
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share my posts.
