It may be his seventh year at the festival but it's the first time playwright Adriano Shaplin has had a dressing room. He gives us the inside view in the first of his blogs from the Fringe.
There is a small faded sticker stuck to a lamppost on Lothian Road advertising the Riot Group's first Fringe appearance in 1998. It isn't legible, but it remains. Now all the newspapers call the Riot Group "fringe veterans", the Guardian calls me an Edinburgh "old hand". The city makes me feel old even at 26, though I figure I'll be classed as a "young playwright" for another 14 years or so.
I didn't worry when EasyJet lost my bags, stuffed mostly with props and few pairs of socks to protect the breakables. This is the third time we've lost bags flying into Edinburgh and they always seem to turn up. We are met at the airport by our producer Louise Chantal with our first week's wages and taxis on standby. That's a change. When the teenage Riot Group first arrived in Edinburgh seven years ago we didn't have ATM cards, and the hunt for our venue took nearly as long as the flight over the Atlantic. Now the taxi is paid for.
This year we're at the big bad Assembly Rooms having paid our dues in the famously tiny Garage studio until 2002. That 30-seat studio, with its tropical heat and pesky press night power failures, is gone, though the Garage Theatre operation continues around the corner. We won two Fringe Firsts in that desperate room, and had to mop up our sweat after every performance. Our sets were made of PVC piping and string. Now, at the Assembly Rooms, our set is a grim technician's nightmare; hundreds of pounds of welded stainless steel and the same old five-minute changeover. Dirty looks all around.
When I picked up my second Fringe First in 2002 I swore I'd never play at a place like Assembly; I swore I'd never play next to a Nokia banner. Now, when the Assembly's artistic director William Burdett-Coutts complains publicly that the Fringe is an "Olympic-sized event run like a Mickey Mouse operation" I find myself cheering.
2005 marks our seventh Fringe appearance, but this is the first time we've had a dressing room. So far, we're smiling.
* Switch Triptych is playing at the Assembly Rooms until August 29.
