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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 2010 Blog - 12Edinburgh - an introduction - Monday 2 August 2010Edinburgh. I know this will sound strange to many of you, but over the last couple of years, that word has literally sent shivers up my spine. To many people Edinburgh is a wonderful city filled with wonderful things to do. I'd say that that's probably true for most people so I realised that I was in the absolute minority when I said that I hated it. Please, before you lynch me, allow me to explain. A couple of years ago, I spent some weeks filming a big budget movie in a sunny part of the world. I returned to London healthy and tanned with a spring in my step. The very next day, I had an audition for a new production that was going to take the Edinburgh festival by storm. Produced by a young, dynamic team, it had a promising title, a decent venue, lodging to be provided by the company and a very good-looking website. The only problem was, it was profit share and as we all know, that generally amounts to squat in the financial compensation department. Still, I was offered a lead role and I had some money saved up from my previous job, so I took it. It would be my first visit to Edinburgh and my first time at the festival. At the time, I was sharing a London flat with two sisters who used to live in Edinburgh (before moving to London, not whilst living in London... duh!) In between acting jobs, I scraped by by busking on the London Underground. I asked my flat mates what they thought of the prospect of busking on the Royal Mile during the festival (I had to pay £50 for the privilege of getting a license). They both immediately agreed that I would make the money back in a day. So off to Edinburgh I went. Well, it didn't turn out as planned. The show, whilst being in no way bad, was not as good as it could have been. Disappointment there. Also, Edinburgh was (and still is) incredibly expensive. My savings ran out within the first two weeks. Busking on the Royal Mile didn't work out either. I was given a 20 minute slot at 2pm every day. Nobody took any notice of me whatsoever. I can't blame them. With so much stuff going on, who's going to pay attention to a lone viola player? There was so much noise from the crowds, that the instrument was completely drowned out. Even when pressing my ear to the viola, I struggled to hear anything. A couple of yards down the road from me was guy who was juggling chainsaws whilst on a monocycle. How could I compete with that? Anything short of full frontal nudity wasn't going to draw attention away from him. I made an average of 15p a day. One one of the days, someone gave me a marrow. I shot him. Worst of all was our lodgings. Words can't begin to describe the sheer awfulness of our lodgings. There are outposts in Siberia with more mod-cons than where we stayed. Bin Laden's caves in Afghanistan are more homely and welcoming than the place we called home whilst in Edinburgh. When exploring the Antarctic, Scott's lodgings were a five star luxury suite when compared to this place. Have I brought my point across? OK then, rats didn't live in this place because it was too rubbish for them. It was, or used to be, a youth centre. I expect that once, it might have been a moderately nice place (as far as pre-fab youth centres go). Unfortunately by the time the taxi dropped me off outside its front door, the centre's glory day were so far behind it, they weren't even a distant memory any more. Carpets were held together with brown tape. Pieces of cardboard torn from boxes of cereal replaced broken window panes. There were large holes in the ceiling. We all slept on mattresses on the floor of what used to be a basketball court. Everyone in the same room, like some sort of unaired series of Big Brother. The showers had no doors, and were in the men's toilets. Rain came through the ceiling every day. Imagine waking up to find yourself drenched because rain is coming through a hole in the roof! The centre was miles from the Royal Mile, and so a fortune was spent of buses and taxis. Everyone became ill because of the drafts that swept through the basketball court 24/7. Best of all, part of the building was a day care centre for toddlers. Every morning at around seven, a hundred screaming toddlers would be dropped off at the centre where they would spend the rest of the day screaming at the top of their lungs. The only thing that separated us from them was a wall of frosted glass. That's it. We could hear every single scream, whimper and ear piercing shriek those kids made. No matter what day of the week, or how late you went to bed, or how ill you were feeling, every day at 7am, your regular alarm clock would jolt you out of your 'bed' (read mattress on the floor) with the sound of a hundred screaming toddlers beating the living daylights out of each other (or maybe that was just my fantasy). It was hell. We eventually moved into a large house. However, before that, I spent a few days with my wife at a friend's flat. In reality it wasn't her flat at all, but her boyfriend's. He didn't want us there and made it very obvious. It was one of the most awkward few days of my life, sitting in the guest bedroom listening to our two hosts arguing about us being there. We'd been invited there, you understand. We hadn't just shown up or invited ourselves. It was actually a relief to get out of there. Then to the big house where, to my surprise, I found that I had a bedroom to myself. As you might imagine, compared to the horrors of the youth centre, this was positively heavenly. Except for the common areas, namely the kitchen, bathroom and living room. There were within the group one or two individuals that seemed to be living on a different time scale to everyone else, as in they would sleep all day, wake up to do the performance in the evening, and then spend the rest of the night partying. These parties for some reason always ended up at our house. The next morning (or every morning for that matter) I'd wake up to find a scene resembling something out of an American Pie movie in our living room. The room would be completely and utterly trashed. To get to the kitchen, I'd have to pick my way around comatose bodies of people I'd never met, trying not to step on beer cans and other rubbish on the floor. I'm not in any way averse to partying (in fact, that's exactly what I'll be doing tonight) but this was a daily occurrence. The 'mind the passed out stranger' obstacle game was part of my daily routine. Then there was the toilet. I've talked about the toilets at Latitude Festival. I believe I called them 'noxious cubicles of toxic contagious pestilence' and they were. They however, paled in comparison to the bathroom in this house. About a week into our stay, the bathroom was already full of rubbish - empty toilet rolls, cans of deodorant, old toothbrushes - but one morning I awoke to discover a new addition to the debris on the floor: a half eaten kebab take out. Now let's not get into the whole 'who on earth was eating a kebab on the toilet?' discussion. That's a question with no fathomable answer. My main beef with this is that the take out remained on the floor pretty much for the rest of the month. It was disgusting. As the days passed, the meat turned shades of colours I had no idea existed. I'm pretty sure that one evening, I saw a small piece of the meat grow legs and scuttle across the floor into a corner. Maybe it was my imagination. Or maybe it was the smell. There is nothing, but nothing, that stinks more than a toilet with three week old kebab take out remains on the floor. You always knew when someone was using the bathroom because of the sound of buzzing coming from inside the room. Every time you opened the door to the bathroom, a huge cloud of flies would erupt from the kebab bag, and come flying towards you as if they'd been waiting just for you to walk in so that they can fly over and vomit on your private bits. I could go on. For example, that Edinburgh stint was the first time a casting director agreed to come and see me in a show. For reasons I won't go into, there was a mix-up and she was turned away at the box office because we'd sold out that night. I could see her empty seat whilst I was on stage. Having said all that, the one thing that really made my first Edinburgh experience a miserable one, was the lack of money. I can honestly tell you that there is very little in the world that feels worse than walking around the streets of a city looking at food in shop windows and supermarkets, and not being able to afford any of it. It's a horrible feeling walking into a discount supermarket, and walking out empty handed because you don't have enough money to buy stuff. On the train home after that experience, I made a promise to myself that I would never return to the Edinburgh fringe festival unless:
No word of a lie, that's what I decided on the train home. Now it's two years later, and all three criteria have been satisfied, and I'm on my way back to Edinburgh. Still can smell that kebab though. |
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