STEWART LEE – BIG ISSUE FRINGE DIARY #4

For twenty years now I have treated the fringe as a vast smorgasboard of talent, sometimes sampling as many as sixty or seventy different shows of wildly varying quality each Summer. This year, my wife and I have a baby, so when we get time off the shows we chose assume a greater significance. We need them to be great.

That’s why we walked out of Biuro Podrozy’s Macbeth: Who Is That Bloody Man?, an outdoor interpretation of the Scottish play in the Old College Quad. Macbeth’s men were motorcylcing Nazis, again. The music was too loud, and too prescriptive. The gunshots sounded like capguns in the echoing square. It seemed like the show had been designed to convince teenagers that theatre could be cool, yeah, and the whole experience felt like being trapped in a Nine Inch Nails video. Theatre critics love it. Increasingly I suspect they know nothing.

My wife’s objections to the piece were more specific. In a former life she was a teenage Hell’s Angel, and recently we fled a rural Wilthsire pub when old enemies from a rival gang entered in helmets and leathers. She lost confidence in Biuro Podrozy’s Macbeth when the Mac-Nazis arrived on trials bikes. “Nazis should ride something powerful,” she explained, “like a Triumph, or a Norton, or a Ducati, something that sounds like a machine gun going off. They sounded like they were riding on lawnmowers.”

We headed off to The Pleasance to try and salvage the night. I’d never really seen the comedian John Bishop perform, but he has always seemed like a nice chap, so we went to see him. John’s show about his marital breakdown and subsequent reconcilliation was warm, touching, and hilarious and resolved itself with a sudden and breath-taking precision. It exceeded the acclaimed outdoor Macbeth in every respect, yet still stand-up is viewed as a poor relation to theatre by critics who are, essentially, ignorant snobs. We found our little fringe gem for this year after all, in a Portakabin out the back of The Pleasance, driven East from the Old Quad by stormtroopers riding lawnmomers.