Starting things with a bang: Korean drummers Dolsori are performing at the Fringe this year. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
I've never quite seen the point of the venue press launches for the Edinburgh Fringe. Why go and see itsy-bitsy pieces of lots of shows when you could go elsewhere and see a play in its entirety?
In any case, I'm not convinced that you can judge a show by a five-minute segment. Inevitably, performances with a built-in wow factor - music, comedy, acrobatics, dance and penis origami - are always going to score more highly than most theatre. I can think of a number of instances where shows that made little or no impression at the launch turned out to be superb. Presumably it can work the other way too, making shows seem better than they are - rather like the trailer for Shrek the Third, which included the only two minutes of the movie actually worth seeing.
Anyway, in the interests of my current campaign to try to do at least one impossible thing before bedtime, I broke the habit of a lifetime of Fringe-going and - pausing only to admire the way the pillars of the National Gallery of Scotland have been transformed into stacks of soup cans in honour of the Andy Warhol exhibition - I dashed off to not one launch but two.
This was against the advice of well-wishers who warned me that some launches go on for so long that the festival is in its third week before you emerge, often broken and suffering from alcohol poisoning. Underbelly, whose (commendably brief) launch came first, played cheekily on Assembly's reputation by giving all of us who were heading that way a goodie bag including earplugs and some ProPlus. Actually, Assembly's do was done and dusted in two hours and I felt quite warmly towards both launches. Even the upside-down plastic purple cow known as Udderbelly may worm its way into my affections.
But my reservations still hold. As in any kind of showcase, there are winners and losers and while the Underbelly launch pushed the porno musical spoof Debbie Does Dallas and cheerful hip-hop circus specialists Tom Tom Club much higher up my must-do list, Jammy Voo's Something Blue fell straight out of my top 50. A similar thing happened at Assembly, where a Quebec-based acrobatic company called Traces persuaded me that I had a hitherto entirely unsuspected yearning to spend the next three weeks watching people jump through hoops, while the extract from Score (the latest show from award-winning French company Au Cul de Loup) just didn't do it for me at all.
The launches are designed to get the press to take risks, but to be honest I think that the real risks are taken when critics get beyond the main venues. Rather than going to launches, we'd do as well to stick a pin in the programme or try the Edinburgh drinking game.
