No money: the root of all evil?
Comedy producer and supremo Nica Burns has raised hackles with her comments about the Free fringe (or the Free festival; she didn't specify). "A lot of [its] performers come to the fringe when they are simply not ready," Burns told the Scotsman the other day. "They've not done the work, they're not good enough and the public go along and have an absolutely terrible experience." On Chortle, Free fringe head honcho Peter Buckley-Hill hit back: "Lack of quality control is the biggest threat to the free movement. So we, the Free fringe, have always exercised quality control."
It did strike me as an odd thing for Burns to have said. Most fringe watchers agree that the advent of the Free fringe (and its imitators) has been a welcome development, in tune with what we all want the fringe to be. Yes, you're prepared for shows on the Free fringe to be less polished, or made by less experienced acts (although there are many exceptions to that). But I've never noticed much distinction between free and paid fringes in terms of sloppiness or lack of preparedness.
By chance, I just watched two Free festival shows back to back. The Hill and Weedon Fan Club is the new show from the winners of the 2013 Musical Comedy Award. They give you plenty of bang for your lack of bucks. The Conchords-tinged songs raise a smile: Centaur Lady imagines a romance with a half-woman, half-horse (or is it?), and there's one about the duo's ruptured relationship with Morgan Freeman. It's unsophisticated ("If you are what you eat, I guess I'm a dick" – ho-hum), but spirited.
At the Counting House, meanwhile, Nat Luurtsema is taking time out from her sketch troupe Jigsaw to talk about her breakup from standup – and fellow member of Jigsaw – Tom Craine. (Craine is performing his own take on events at the Pleasance.) Luurtsema is cursed with a difficult room – loud fan, cavernous dimensions – and was struggling to raise laughs when I saw her. Her account of heartbreak, living with your mum and working with your ex felt correspondingly effortful, and is sometimes crude. But there are flashes of wit, and it's honest, and if you'd paid for a ticket, you'd be perfectly content.
Relationship breakdown #2
Another show – a superior one – about relationship breakdown is David Quirk's Shaking Hands with Danger. Winner of the comic's choice award at the Melbourne comedy festival, Quirk's show recounts an occasion when he cheated on his girlfriend and destroyed his relationship. It has the rhythms of storytelling more than comedy: Quirk is confident, softly spoken and doesn't play the clown. There's nothing profound about the tale he tells, but it is attractively open and unsentimental about the lethal truth that there's no going back after that one reckless act. An amusing subplot about Quirk's love of Guns N' Roses supplies him with a quietly devastating finale, too, that hints at what we miss when we drive the people we love away. It's an unshowy but potent gig.
Seeing red
You couldn't call Red Bastard unshowy. Sure to be one of the Fringe's most talked-about acts, for better or worse, this US import is part comedy, part abuse, part self-help seminar. And largely excruciating, for those of us who a) don't care for coercive audience participation, and b) don't want to be aggressively life-coached by a man swaddled in red lycra.
Apparently, audience members in the past have quit their jobs, proposed marriage and healed estrangements at the prompting of Red Bastard (aka Eric Davis). And sure enough, at the show I attended, plenty of people happily kissed strangers, removed clothing and so on. (Drunken party behaviour, you may observe, rather than life-changing self-reinvention.) We're meant to be shedding our inhibitions, you see, and acting out our innermost desires. Nothing Red Bastard does, however, gave me any confidence that my inhibitions or desires were safe in his hands. He enjoys abusing his audience for their timidity, and at one point ejected a child from the theatre because he disapproved of the child's stated ambition (perhaps justifiably: the kid wanted to be a porn star). He's a buffoon: an angry clown, in your face and trying to be in your head.
The best I can say is that the show has a strong flavour, and that Davis generates palpable nervous tension in the room. It's not boring. But neither is it funny. Plenty of comedy shows before it have asked us to shed our inhibitions in the name of laughter: Adam Riches's work, for example. By contrast, Red Bastard exhorts us to act recklessly on the pretence that it'll make our lives better. Which, in reality, it seldom does.
