On the fringe

The 2016 Victoria Fringe Festival – the thirtieth such since the festival’s inauguration – has just reached its conclusion.

Looking back to last year’s event – which clearly took place in a period during which we had rather more time on our hands – I observe that we were able to get to a fair number of shows. This post – from September last – provides the details of those that the Girl and I deemed to be our pick of the 2015 fringe.

Having been occupied this year with our most welcome visitors from the UK we found – upon their departure – that we had missed the first week of the festival entirely. With the Girl now gainfully employed and thus not available for entertainment purposes during the working day our opportunities to attend fringe events were further restricted.

As a result we perhaps spent a little more time this year than we did last perusing the fringe programme, in an effort to ensure that those performances that we could attend were, after all, worth seeing. Our efforts seem to have paid off.  We saw three shows; we greatly enjoyed each of them.

‘Half the Battle‘ – written and created by Edmonton based Owen Bishop – is a one-man two-character piece with a twist… Bishop plays both parts simultaneously! Inspired by the burial beneath conjoined tombstones of a Canadian second world war pilot and co-pilot, ‘Half the Battle‘ imagines the men inextricably joined in the afterlife as two halves of the same character. It perhaps hardly need be said that the performance was funny and affecting in equal measure and was quite brilliantly played without the slightest waver by the talented Bishop. The use of the hackneyed phrase “tour de force” is normally rightly deprecated. In this instance it would be entirely justified.

British comedian, Gerald Harris, is that staple of fringe festivals the world over – a storyteller! Lest you infer that I regard the form as being in any way inferior to other performance arts let me at once set you right. The oral tradition is one the most fertile and immediate of all the forms – but only if the storyteller is a good one! Harris not only has the requisite performance skills – his manic energy clearly keeping some in the audience guessing as to his intent – but he is also quite obviously a writer. As a result ‘A Tension to Detail‘ – Harris’s meditation on his mostly solitary life as an onanistic British Jew – was splendidly constructed and paced, and delivered with panache.

Finally, ‘Bushel and Peck‘ – a surreal physical comedy of (relatively) few words by multiple award winning Canadian comic actor Alastair Knowles (‘James and Jamesy‘) and choreographer Stephanie Morin-Robert – is that most wonderful of things, a performance that delights whilst completely defying easy categorisation. It must be my ‘poor theatre‘ leanings I suppose, but I do derive great pleasure from watching accomplished performers create a rich and beautiful visual spectacle with no set, everyday costume and the bare minimum of props – in this case a table lamp, a plywood board, a pair of hair-dryers and a packet of white balloons! (My liking for the surreal can probably be traced back even further to my early affection for the Goon Show).

As ever, should you happen upon any of these performers at fringe events around the world, I would heartily recommend giving them a look.