Aidan Smith remembers the Fringe as a family affair
Father’s play at the Fringe was a one-man show but behind the scenes it was a full-on family affair recalls Aidan Smith
‘Right,” said Father to my sisters, “one of you is to get off the bus at Bruntsfield and the other will stay on to Morningside.” My wee brother was to infiltrate the badlands of Davidson’s Mains aboard a No41 and the three of them were given 25 posters and expected to return with none.
The joint mission was to persuade Edinburgh’s shopkeepers to advertise a play being performed on the Festival Fringe. Dad had written it and Russell Hunter was the star, taking the role of a Scottish soldier grumpily posted to the regimental museum who decides to have some fun with the swords and pistols and relate his version of the history of his nation. Thus, each of my siblings was despatched to the burbs wearing a cardboard Glengarry.
“‘Lonely’ from Callan,” read the caps, emphasising this was no cockamamie production but one sprinkled with TV stardust. “He’s a one-man Tattoo!”
And my task? To source a real Glengarry for Hunter. First I tried our local second-hand clothes shop in the New Town, but at Madame Doubtfire’s the scary, clay pipesooking proprietress could not help. Neither could similar outlets – though in Edinburgh there was really only one Doubtfire, the inspiration for a Robin Williams movie – and eventually I had to purchase a brand new titfer from a military outfitters, denting significantly my props budget. This wasn’t my only duty. As assistant to the assistant stage manager, I was something of a one-man Tattoo myself.
I had to black out all the windows of the makeshift theatre, above the Playhouse at the top of Leith Walk when it was still a functioning cinema. I had to operate the lights, creating gloom when Scotland’s story needed it, which was often – although never the hugely exciting strobe, a regret to this day. I had to bang a big bass drum, creating doom. Best of all, I had to sprint to the chip shop for the newspaperwrapped supper with which Hunter would resume his portrayal of a land which dreamt of big fish but often had to be satisfied with the crumbs at the bottom of the poke.
This was 1972, the four of us were aged between 15 and nine, and when I think back, we were handed a sizable amount of responsibility, requiring no little courage. Which parent would allow children so young to travel unaccompanied in funny hats today? That was the first time I’d been brave enough to enter the Doubtfire emporium. But all this had to be done. There was a show to put on.
The play was Jock anddad– W Gordon Smith – and Hunter would go on to collaborate on many others, requiring us to tear more tickets and sell more intermission Mivvis, in what seemed like the best, most fun summer jobs on earth. We were a backstage version of the Von Trapps who’ve never got the smell of greasepaint out of our nostrils, or the sense of adventure it promised. In memory of our father, we remain thirled to the Festival and especially its tricky, mouthy and occasionally outrageous sibling, the Fringe.
This is the 70th anniversary of the cultural clanjamfrie and it’s certainly not the same Fringe anymore. In ’72 there was more of a level playing-field or stage. Dad may have been able to recruit a weel-kent thesp but his children were still required to work as hustlers and gophers. We, the little helpers of Cacciatore Fabbro – Italian for Hunter Smith – held our breath hoping for a good review
from The Scotsman just like every other troupe. These included the church am-drammers with their trusty door-slamming farce and the Czechoslovakian crackpots coming over all avant-garde nonstop for 36 hours with mattresses on the auditorium floor for the weary. In ’72 the Fringe was more egalitarian; there were no megavenues or super-promoters. Also, in ’72 theatre ruled, OK, and now it’s comedy.
Shona Mccarthy, the Fringe’s chief executive, is concerned about the dominance of stand-up, calling it “ginormous”, but such gripes are not new. I’m pretty sure I first heard them at the dawn of the alternative comedy boom of the early 1980s, shortly after I began reporting on the Fringe and was summoned by a furious Ben Elton, raging about my review of his show. It was a triplebiller with Rik Mayall and another comic, long forgotten, and barely mentioned in my crit, which was Elton’s complaint. Emboldened by that encounter with Madame Doubtfire, I refused to back down, explaining that the other fellow’s schtick had been dismal, while Elton’s was inferior to Mayall, earning the latter the most words. Elton insisted there could be no such ranking in alt-com because it was non-hierarchical, non-sexist, non-racist and, I was beginning to suspect, non-funny. I wanted to throttle him with a brassiere snagged on a tree-branch in a sketch involving bad, old Benny Hill but there wasn’t one to hand. To be fair, Elton cringed when I reminded him of his rant later and apologised for being an “arrogant tosser”.
Off-stage dramas and epic hissyfits are part of the Edinburgh extravaganza, just not listed in the programme, and help it survive and thrive. The lack of an opera house will kill the Festival, the city’s first Labour rulers will kill it, the Fringe will get too big and explode, or die from too many bad jokes, or the threat of Glasgow’s Mayfest, or whatever is happening in Manchester. Well, guess what? The world’s greatest celebration of artistic expression and showing off is still around and the city has not yet sunk back into the medieval mire through the weight of so many tourist trolley-bags.
I’m biased, of course, and reckon it peaked in 1972. Being a Jock-of-alltrades was the making of me.