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Edinburgh Tips

By Stewart Lee in The Financial Times Posted on Sunday, July 11th, 2010

Every year at around this time journalist are asked for their tips for the best shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe in August. Professional critics can’t just pick all the things they have chosen before and know are the best because, like the low rent entertainers they essentially are, they too need to vary their repertoire to stay on top. I have done the fringe 23 times and have no axe to grind, so the only top tips list you need is this one. But remember, seeing something a bit rubbish that hasn’t really worked is a vital part of the fringe experience, so at least two of these may well be deliberate duds.

1) It’s Always Right Now, Until It’s Later (Theatre, Assembly) The world’s best stand-up comedian, the hair-shirted Yorkshireman Daniel Kitson, presents another of his usually superb theatrical monologues at the typically truculent time of 10 a.m daily. Have a bowl of bittersweet romanticism for breakfast.

2) Hans Teeuwen (Comedy, Pleasance) The Dutch comedian’s no-prisoners approach to the art from takes in stand-up, music, vaudeville, confrontational embarrassment, and dada-ist performance art, and is sure to disappoint and confuse as many as it delights. My wife and I were on the floor laughing during his bongo-powered song about the life of Nostradamus but, to be fair, half the room was just irritated. In the future, when Teeuwen’s genius has been recognised by The British, you will boast that you saw him way back when.

3) Dick Gaughan (Music, Acoustic music centre) One night only, August 25th, from the impossibly intense Scottish folk veteran who makes English people feel thoroughly told off, and leaves Scottish collaborators ashamed. But seriously, the force and focus with which Gaughan, alone at the guitar, delivers his annual Edinburgh set of modern protest songs and ancient folk ballads is a wonder to behold, a force of nature that leaves you shaken up and exhilarated.

4) Harlekin (Dance and physical theatre, Pleasance) The St Petersburg troupe Derevo, whose impossibly imaginative and stunningly precise devised shows have barely visible roots in European clowning traditions, were responsible for the single greatest piece of theatre I ever saw, 2002’s La Divina Comedia, and I am so delighted they are back at The Fringe. In ’97 I shared a venue with them. My warm-up process was drinking a half of lager. Theirs appeared to be discovering entirely new purposes for their limbs. Nightly.

5) Nick Pynn (Music, Inalingua Edinburgh). For the best part of the last decade, Nick Pynn’s intimate one man shows, in the candle lit twenty seater room of a Hanover St language school, have been the festival highlight I save up as a treat. Pynn plays a succession of home-made contraptions and exotic stringed instruments, often simultaneously, using loops and pedals, with naggingly unforgettable tunes that seem to reference half-familiar folk tunes through a prism of borderline avant-garde practise. I liked him so much I toured with him last year and now I am no longer really allowed to recommend him without being nepotistic.

Written by Stewart Lee in The Financial Times on 11th July 2010. Filed Under: Written For Money
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