The final weekend of the Edinburgh
Fringe season is normally one of the busiest. This year, however,
perhaps partly because of the festivals’ later than usual dates and an
unprecedentedly busy start, felt palpably exhausted. Nevertheless, the
past few days have seen a slew of awards announced.
The last batch of Fringe Firsts included Grid Iron’s site-specific
Barflies and Better Bourne’s
A Life In Three Acts, both of which
I reviewed last month, as well as an extraordinary award to venues
rather than productions, namely Forest Fringe and the Arches at St
Stephen’s. Another venue, Dance Base, won the Jack Tinker Spirit of the
Fringe award, and Amnesty International’s Freedom of Expression Award
was presented to Judith Thompson’s trio of Iraq war monologues
Palace Of The End.
Two of the most practical awards consist of offering transfer runs
abroad for the winning productions. The Carol Tambor Award for a New
York run was won by
Little Gem,
a fine accolade for Elaine Murphy’s first play, about three generations
of women from a Dublin family. The Holden Street Theatres Award, under
which a show travels to Adelaide, went to
Heroin(e) For Breakfast
(Underbelly), which I am afraid I found for the most part simply crass:
a kind of modern morality play in which Heroin is personified as a
manipulative Monroe-lookalike who shoots up three flatmates by
vampirically biting them. It felt like a 70-minute version of one of
the old, finger-wagging “Heroin screws you up” TV spots, albeit one
whose final phase was unintentionally hilarious.
The winners of awards from Total Theatre magazine included The Clod
Ensemble’s
Under Glass, a
group of live-action vitrines presented in the University’s Medical
School; Adrian Howells’ one-on-one piece
Foot Washing For The Sole; and
post-student company The River People’s
Lilly Through The Dark (Bedlam),
which brought a Tim Burtonesque aesthetic to a live-action/puppetry
tale of a girl searching for her father through the land of the dead.
Theatrical trade newspaper The Stage’s awards for acting excellence
included a Best Ensemble award to Green Shoots Productions for their
production of Martin Lynch’s
Chronicles
Of Long Kesh (Assembly Hall), a powerful recollection of the
Northern Irish prison camp which both reminded us what had gone before
and affirmed that we have moved past such things.
The most keenly observed awards, the Edinburgh Comedy Awards (formerly
the Perriers), were presented this year to a couple of Cambridge
Footlights alumni. Jonny Sweet’s first solo show
Mostly About Arthur won him the
Best Newcomer award, whilst the principal gong was secured by Tim Key
for his deliberately shambolic but delightful collection of bad poems,
apercus and daft games
The
Slutcracker. Performing in one of the Pleasance’s “Portakabin”
spaces, Key described the show as “a poet sweating in a hut”. The Eddie
award should see him graduate to venues with proper walls and ceilings.
Elsewhere in the field of comedy, the Malcolm Hardee Award for
left-field comic antics was won by Otto Kuhnle for a show which
included yodelling in drag whilst standing on his head and using a
leaf-blower to juggle chiffon scarves in the German national colours.
Written for the Financial
Times.