The Inkling Volume 1

A week at the fringe
By Katie Kirkpatrick
In the second week of August, I was lucky enough to spend a week performing with Viva (a local theatre group) at
the famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Having finished a three-week-long intensive rehearsal period, our production
of ‘The Dreaming’ garnered a five star review. Performing the show for such a renowned theatre community was an
extremely rewarding experience, but the week would not have been complete without experiencing everything else
that the festival (and Edinburgh itself) had to offer. We spent most of the week watching other shows, so I’ve
decided to review some of the performances I enjoyed...as well as those I didn’t.
We kickstarted our week of theatre with ‘The Reduced Shakespeare Company’. Their ridiculous take on the
works of the Bard definitely appealed to my sense of humour: the show cleverly combined niche Shakespeare
references with some wacky slapstick. My only quibble in recommending the show would be that you have to have
a relatively thorough knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays to understand all of the humour- some of my friends
became rather frustrated rather quickly when they had no idea why people were laughing.
Our first evening culminated in a trek all the way to the Circus Hub. As someone who generally detests the very
concept of circus, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to ‘Acéléré’ by Circolombia. I was expecting cringeworthy
clowns, terrible tightrope walkers and acrobats performing tricks we’ve all seen a million times on TV talent shows...
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Put simply, Circolombia were incredible. The stunts and acrobatics they presented were truly impressive, and the
whole show had an unexpected coherence: from the performers’ outfits to the transitions between tricks, the show
was superbly put together. What really made me reconsider my hatred of circus, however, was the way Circolombia
incorporated singing, music and dance into their performance. The seamless integration of so many different
performance disciplines made the evening quite spectacular.
The following day led us down a slightly less...sophisticated path. At about 11am, we arrived at ‘The Showstoppers’
Kids Show’. As much as I’ve heard fabulous things about the adult version, the show we saw was definitely
aimed at a lot younger an audience than we, as a diverse ‘youth’ company, provided. The concept of Showstoppers
is that the performers improvise a musical based on suggestions from the audience. Unfortunately, I don’t think the
actors expected our group’s suggestions of the Team 10 YouTube channel or dabbing… It all became particularly
ridiculous when we discovered that the actors were unfamiliar with the ‘dab’, and so ended up desperately doing
imitations of Usain Bolt’s signature pose on stage. Nevertheless, the slickness with which the show was quickly
assembled was fantastic, and it was well worth the ticket price just to see our director dabbing.
‘Tape Face’ was probably the act most anticipated by our group as a whole. After his appearance on
America’s Got Talent, he was definitely the most high profile performer we saw. However, the peculiar premise
didn’t appeal to me, and unfortunately neither did the performance itself. While the show was often funny, and
certainly involved the audience, it remained just not really my ‘thing’.
Later in the week, we witnessed the wonderful ‘Doris, Dolly and the Dressing Room Divas’. This show took the form
of a cabaret-meets-musical performed by three women who effortlessly sang their way through the songs of stars
such as Judy Garland and Liza Minelli. While the show is best enjoyed with a little background knowledge of the
musical greats, the beautiful harmonies and raucous humour could appeal to anyone.