Eagerly-awaited Fringe frenzy solo show left me in a right old cankle
It’s been highs and lows for me this Edinburgh Festival. I achieved a bucket list ambition which was to perform a proper one-woman stand-up show. It had been a secret desire for a long time and I never thought I would have to guts to do it. I remember doing a radio show with Sue Perkins many, many years ago when I was starting out as a stand-up and she scribbled something on a tiny scrap of paper and pushed it towards me. It read “You have got to do an Edinburgh show. Just do it!”
Well, more than ten years later, I’ve done it. People came. People laughed. A man even ripped his jeans. There were sold-out shows. And I got the affirmation I clearly craved so much (because that’s why we do it right?) . . . I got a four-star review from this very paper. (I know I know. But it absolutely wasn’t guaranteed . . . I promise you – no much how I tried to bribe the Deputy Editor). I cannot tell you how proud and happy I felt when that review landed. I could have been all graceful and dignified– could have enjoyed the feeling “in the moment” as Gwyneth Paltrow might say – but oh no. I was that keen to show off like a massive idiot that I started tweeting furiously. In fact, I was so glued to my phone, I didn’t look where I was going, fell down an entire flight of stairs and ended up in the Edinburgh Infirmary. Pretty classy.
I did stop off en-route to do my gig (the show must go on darling) but it was more sit-down comedy with an ice pack and a swollen cankle of elephant proportions which must have been really pleasant for the poor audience. I also had to sit there on stage as they filed in as I couldn’t walk. It was all a massively awkward – like my ankle – a bit Abigail’s Party. I didn’t even have a cheese and pineapple hedgehog to offer them.
All the staff at the Museum of Scotland, a Gilded Balloon venue, were kind and professional and I was whisked off stage to a waiting taxi in a wheelchair for added glamour. The staff at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary were also terrific although they clearly thought me and my producer, Lynne Parker from Funnywomen were ludicrous characters from Ab Fab as we inquired whether there was a Waitrose Food Hall on the premises as we were a bit peckish. The receptionist sniggered as he pointed us in the direction of a broken vending machine.
I did manage to flyer the entire waiting room and the X-ray team so it wasn’t all bad. The good news was that there was no serious damage other than to my pride. But I learnt an important lesson. Stop living every minute of your ridiculous life on Twitter and get off your phone. This phone IS a potential death trap. And never turn up at A&E on an empty stomach.
This year’s Edinburgh Festival is going from strength to strength. Every room, street, alleyway, nook and cranny explodes with creative energy and it is a sight to behold and cherish. The sheer number of people who come from all around the world to perform and to consume this smorgasbord of culture is amazing. The Festival provides entertainment galore, but it also educates, provokes and informs. You can have your belly laughs but you can also learn about things and I think audiences genuinely want to be challenged and their art to reflect the bigger issues going on in society which is why politics has been big business this year. You can’t move for hot takes on Brexit and Trump lookalikes giving you flyers. I feel like we’ve reached peak Trump. In so many ways. But politics is often communicated most effectively when it is done through a personal lens and given a human story. Ranting polemic is often less effective than a story. The personal is the political and it can be powerful.
Immigration, race and identity politics have never been more germane and just as it’s important that we have more female performers, which is happening, we should also hear the voices of people from different communities and from BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) backgrounds. Class and inequality is a huge source of tension and division in our society and arguably was a key driver behind Brexit – do we have enough working-class voices at the Fringe? All these stories need to be told and heard. I feel the will is there from the organisers.
As a performer who talks about my Muslim background, I feel there is an appetite to stage and promote my show and indeed to come and listen to it. But as a good friend pointed out to me, I may be a rare brown (alright beige) woman on stage, but where were the brown and black faces in my audience? Apart from my family?
This got me thinking and she was right. My audiences, who were absolutely the best obviously, were very white, middle-class, slightly older and Radio 4. I thought that this may be because I am a bit middle class and pop up on Radio 4, but it was also true of lots of other shows I went to watch. At the beginning of Twayna Mayne’s excellent show Black Girl she congratulates her audience for coming to see a black woman do an hour of comedy at Edinburgh and has a great line about how she thought she saw another black woman on the street but then realised it was her reflection. Her show is funny, interesting and tells her story about being adopted by a white family and her relationship with black culture.
Sajeela Kershi returned to the Fringe with her brilliant show Immigrant Diaries, which features performers from different cultures telling true stories about their heritage. Some were uplifting, some were painful about how hard it was to grow up feeling and looking different, but all of them were brilliantly honest and again the audiences would leave feeling like they have been entertained but very moved as well. I would love to see more people from different backgrounds come to Edinburgh see shows like Sajeela’s, Twayna’s and of course my own. The organisers of the Fringe sprinkle a special kind of magic on the city (and curse it with the worst traffic known to mankind but let’s gloss past that) but I would love to see them do more to try and draw in more diverse acts and crucially audiences across race and class.
I was struck that there wasn’t more on the 70th anniversary of the Indian Pakistan partition, which coincides with the 70th anniversary of the Festival. I’m also kicking myself for not coming up with that idea much earlier. Right, better hobble off and start thinking about next year’s show.