The third week of the fringe has nearly passed and my goal of seeing 100 shows/exhibitions/happenings this month seems distant, as I have so far managed a mere 40.
My goal of not being a drunk argumentative twat at 1 am in the morning is going well though.
I’m sending this week’s rec’s list out a day or so early to try and get another one in in week 4 before it’s pointless.

Here are my top 9 shows so far

Paul Currie – The Chorus of Ghosts Living in My Skull Keep Telling Me to Take a Shit in the Fruit Salad – Just The Tonic @ Caves – 9PM
A surrealist revivalist church meeting in which anything can happen. Brilliant clowning and unexpected hints of the personal. The sort of perfect fringe experience that grows and grows into something super-special over the month and then, all too regularly, evaporates on contact with the cruel reality beyond an Edinburgh August. I’ve been twice. Lots of the crowd are now clearly regulars, participating in a kind of ritual comic cleansing. Superbly tech’d too. My special place 2022.

Police Cops – Assembly Studios – 7pm
I am late to this party but I suspect this show is a step up. People with the skills to do proper comedy don’t usually have the skills or attitude to do music theatre too, but genuinely funny improvisations weave in and out of a tight cop-show parody script. The cast are fit and handsome, acrobatic and accomplished, and yet also ridiculous and grotesque and clownish in a classic comedy way. The jokes are smart and the musical milieu of ‘80s power rock is dead on. It takes brains to be this dumb! Who the hell are these people, and why haven’t they been ruined for ever by actual West End fame?

Thom Tuck & Tim FitzHigham – Macbeth – Udderbelly – 8.35pm
The drunken fen-lords of comedy recreate Macbeth from memory in a haze of hallucinogenic impro-fuzz, ravaging the text as is their Lordly prima nocte right. What really went on there? We only have this extract? What the fringe is made for.

Alasdair Beckett-King – Nevermore – Pleasance Dome 7PM
Great writerly material which has enough room to breathe to make it feel like it’s alive, and a well-judged and non-interventionist use of tech. Precise and very funny.

An Evening Without Kate Bush – Assembly George Sq Gardens 5.55PM
A Bush-consumed lady channels Bush fandom with persuasive charm, genuine warmth, and accurate choreography

Medea – Liz Locheed – Edinburgh International Festival – various times
A kind of fashion show promenade catwalk performance of the miserable tale in a spectacular space, with darkly comic lines performed in crispy Scottish vernacular by a brilliantly diverse cast offering finely nuanced interpretations of their roles.

Alfie Brown – Sensitive Man – Monkey Barrel – 9pm
A dozen years ago you could tell Alfie could be brilliant, raging against hypocrisy, but he was enslaved by his demons, and couldn’t control the timbre of his work. Now he’s riding them, like a Norse God astride two magic flying goats, and has discovered charm. Persistence paid off. Alfie espouses a furious liberal philosophy, whilst all the while ruthlessly and uninhibitedly interrogating his own reasons – vanity, ego, lust, etc – for subscribing to it. His explosively woke act comes replete with 21st century self-awareness and yet is clearly solidly in the tradition that the American stand-up innovators of the 50s and 60s would recognise. The best British stand-up I have seen for some years. You go girl!

Fata Morgana – Margerita Remotti – Pleasance at IECC – 5.30
In the lonely sad wastelands of the Pleasance’s International Edinburgh Conference Centre a lone Italian actress enters a dispiriting function room to conjure the spirit of the Velvet Underground vocalist and Warhol superstar Nico from the ether. This is a great fringe show. Music, psychedelic lights, a kaleidoscopic overlaying of memories, and the feeling that at any moment Remotti could come at you, so even if you weren’t a Nico fan you’d be caught up in the moment.
If you are a Nico fan Remotti contextualises, in her own dream like way, some of the more troubling aspects of the artist’s persona without ever striking a note of supplicant apology. There were two of us in when I went on Train Strike Thursday and Remotti still sold the show 100%. I saw Nico herself, past her best but majestic and awe-inspiring, a year before her death at 48, six years younger then I am now, during my first fringe in 1987, threatening a talkative audience with violence, her heavy wooden pump organ raised high above her head like a weapon, at the Venue, below Carlton hill. Don’t look for it. It’s not there anymore. And neither is the 19 year old me.

The Tragedy of Macbeth – Flabbergast Theatre – Roxy – 12 midday.
Everything you want from a fringe show, – stuff being banged, terrifying puppets, polyphonic singing, mess, mud, noise, wine, party hats, and an amazingly talented international cast taking on a variety of roles each. In this brilliantly designed show the turns seem to have risen up out if the clay itself to enact a Macbeth that, after the emergence of a Porter Clown who is uncharacteristically actually really funny, takes a turn into a black comedy that Shakespeare himself would surely have enjoyed. I am so glad my kids saw this. It will have made them lifelong converts of real theatre, not West End shit. And I am glad I saw it, because it reminded me of being 19 in 1987 and coming here and having my mind blown, leaving me no choice but to waste my life.

AND I ALSO LOVED this next 6

Fascinating Aida – Assembly George Square – 6PM
Sophisticated satirical songs, performed by jazz-age cabaret muso-dames, with unexpected angry edges and fantastic internal rhyme schemes

Jonny & The Baptists – Dance Like It Never Happened – Assembly George Square 4PM
High energy satirical folk-pop sure to make you dance in your seat, hate the Tories, and question God.

Marvelus – All The Marvel Movies… Kind Of! – Just The Tonic Caves 6.10 PM
Two deeply humane nerds impro-comedy their way through the MCU, making massive and imaginative use of limited props. Great if you know your Marvel movies, and probably weirdly enjoyable if you don’t. Leave your stinky Marvel fan husband there and go for a prosecco.

Omid Djalili – New Town Theatre – 5.20pm
Omid sneaks social commentary and liberal satire into a show so unapologetically entertaining the audience don’t even realise they are being indoctrinated!

Jo Neary – Stand II – 12 mid-day
Superb surreal character comedy with a pin-sharp absurd vocabulary and a fluid sense of the physical from the deathless art weirdo. Unique and special.

Famous Puppet Deaths – Roxy – 6.30pm
Three talented Canadian women explore the beautiful futility of life in a succession of Edward Gorey-esque comic scenes of suffering using puppets and bits of themselves

Kiri Pritchard-Maclean – Home Truths – Monkey Barrel – 7.05
KP Nuts’ hour starts with 30 minutes of fun-feminist body image stuff that this road-hardened pro sells totally with club-timed beats – it’s nourishing comedy comfort food to a generation of discombobulated dames and she owns the space. Then things darken as she descends into a disturbing hall of mirrors regarding her own reflection, a routine that’s got an unexpected brutality about it. The she tries to take her audience with her as she moves into an exploration of race politics, via an edutaining section on Welsh history, and pulls it off, although the slightly concertina’d second half will presumably expand and breathe on tour.

ALSO

If you like jazz art the Dovecote Gallery has an unprecedently thorough mini-retrospective on the overlooked free-jazz/abstractionist Alan Davie, whose work rots unacknowledged in British provincial gallery collection cellars. Ace!

MY SPIES TELL ME TO SEE…

Circus Abyssinia Tulu – Underbelly meadows 1.30 PM The kids said this was utterly brilliant and unaffectedly honest. They want to join the circus now.

WHAT’S ON

Dr John Cooper Clarke – Edinburgh Playhouse – 7.30 24th A big Dr John show w guests, including me
Oxide Ghosts – dir Michael Cumming his showing his Brass Eye documentary/art event at The Cameo, 4pm, on 25th and 27th.
King Rocker – dir Michael Cumming and I are showing our rockumentary King Rocker at The Cameo, 4pm, on 24th and 26th