By Tim Chester From Mashable

EDINBURGH — In a small, hot room on the second floor of a sprawling nightclub in central Edinburgh, a long-haired man in his underpants is gyrating in an unfortunate woman’s face. Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” is playing over the PA. The man is also halfway through a heartfelt monologue about how much he misses his estranged son, whose onesie hangs on the stage.

It’s the kind of scene you’ll find in countless back rooms across Edinburgh during August, as the city falls into full festival mode and every available space is filled with entertainment of every kind.

In the space of 48 hours I’ve seen a vision of Nigel Farage having sex with Margaret Thatcher, a woman singing Edith Piaf singing Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” and a euthanasia doctor performing a mock assisted suicide. I’ve seen mind-bending MC Escher lithographs and the city’s Usher Hall lit up by the team that visualised the opening of the London Olympics. The only thing I’ve barely seen is my bed.

Edinburgh is always a city of festivals, but August takes it to the next level. The Edinburgh Fringe alone, the largest arts festival in the world, has 50,459 performances this year across 313 venues and a 437 page programme.

That’s daunting enough for one visitor — but the Edinburgh International Festival moved its launch date forward a week this year, and now runs simultaneously with the Fringe. Plus the Art Festival has been spread across town since the end of July. The Book Festival, meanwhile, kicks off this coming weekend (Aug 15). And it’s not like the city is bereft of things to do all year round.

It’s a head-spinning array of options, enough to give you palpitations before you’ve stepped off the plane. Most shows last an hour, and you’d be here until next year trying to see it all. Where to start?

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of people offering pointers. The city is papered with posters, people handing out flyers jump at you from every angle and the Royal Mile is littered with performers in every costume imaginable, as thousands of acts vie for your attention.

The pitches started coming in before I’d even arrived. Barista Tim from Starbucks at Stratford in London wrote down “Harry Baker: Sunshine Kid” on a receipt as I paid for my coffee, making me promise I’d check put his friend’s show, while a woman on the tram from Edinburgh airport handed me a flyer promoting her daughter’s gig.

I decided to spend a weekend just saying yes to anything that came along, giving in to the first hustlers I encountered and seeing what happened — which is how I ended up witnessing Papa CJ’s naked confessional in that sweaty room.

It’s also how I found myself Friday at the Pleasance’s opening gala.

A great way to check out a bunch of stuff, the venues’ preview shows serve up a variety of acts in a short space of time. Within 90 minutes, I’d seen the always reliable Joe Lycett riffing on squirrels eating croissants, a troupe of singing birds, and impersonator Jess Robinson demonstrating her karaoke “wheels of sixty-four tunes” — an ingenious prop that generates random pairings of acts to brilliant effect. Think Julie Andrews singing “All About That Bass,” and other incongruous mash-ups.

Murder mysteries and modern ballet were also interspersed with jaded routines about the life of a comic from Hal Cruttenden (he of recent Bake Off Extra Slice fame), and a spectacular and mesmerising mime show titled Blind Man’s Song. The latter saw a male and female with bandaged heads engage in a dance around a bed while a third, equally anonymous figure looped violins and piano to haunting effect.

Allowing myself to be pulled into doorways and ushered towards box offices yielded several surprises. Jurassic Park was a raucous retelling of the Spielberg classic by a trio masquerading as west country bumpkins, while UKIP! the Musical dramatised Farage’s recent romp towards defeat in song. And Back to Blackbrick, the first staging of Sarah Moore Fitzgerald’s novel of the same name about Alzheimer’s, reduced a dark basement to tears on Sunday afternoon.

From the Art Festival, David Bailey’s photography filled the Scottish National Gallery gallery with icons for Bailey’s Stardust, and the Edinburgh International Festival’s opening extravaganza, the Harmonium Project, saw Usher Hall bathed in lights as a recording of John Adam’s “Harmonium,” performed by the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, played.

A tip-off to see audiovisual installation The Strip, meanwhile, saw me ringing the artist’s mobile to gain access to a deserted corner of technology incubator Codebase’s premises.

I was the only one there at the time to witness the artwork, which conjures CGI interpretations of Kurt Cobain’s suicide spot, scenes from Mars, and LA’s Sunset Strip, using a bank of PCs and a pair of speakers.

 

Early on Saturday night, I found myself with a window. How to fill it? The anxiety of too much choice started creeping in. Suddenly I remembered Starbucks Tim and wondered what Harry Baker the Sunshine Kid was up to. I’d missed his show, but it turned out he’d just tweeted.

Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting on the floor in a dark dilapidated building, about to watch a comedy versus poetry slam battle. No one told me he was a poet. I don’t even like performance poetry.

It turned out the Sunshine Kid was pretty good, using his slot to deliver a sharp and funny rumination on modern life via alliterative paper puns — before unveiling a freshly-written evisceration of his stand-up opponent in the battle.

The crowd were in stitches, their roars delivered a 1-0 victory for poetry over stand-up and my preconceptions were suitably challenged.

The scattershot approach was not all fun and games. At one point, I stood at the back of Savage & Ralph: Joyful Erotica, a show that sees jokes about miscarriage and competitive finger painting (with the female anatomy as the subject) compete for the hour’s nadir — while the portions of the crowd that could leave semi-politely deserted in droves.

I also found myself staring at a wall in a dingy venue while members of the Cambridge Footlights ran through hidden sketches only visible to the 20-odd people in their part of the basement and clubbers necked fishbowls of vodka drinks noisily behind me. And I turned up to a cramped spare room above a pub late one night to see something called The Barry Prophesy, only to find no sign of Barry or indeed any punters — something I had not prophesied. I’ll be here all week — or at least, next year I will.

IMAGES:

Performers on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile try to coax passersby into their show. Image: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire/Associated Press

Joe Lycett is one of the hundreds of comics appearing in Edinburgh Image: Rex Features via AP Images/Associated Press

Dilapidated buildings played host to countless gigs

A dizzying array of shows to choose from in the Pleasance Courtyard in Edinburgh. Image: Tim Chester/Mashable

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