The memory plays tricks (Day Two Part Two)

We wandered the mean streets of Edinburgh in a vague and general direction to the Pleasance. On the way we passed an old church that was the venue for various plays including a Sondheim Musical (Assassins) that skit reserved some tickets for. The play was late (possibly 10 or 11?) so we doubted that we would attend and indeed, we did not.

So, after that scintillating paragraph we hopped, skipped and jumped to a large, purple and inverted inflatable cow. As you do. This venue had plenty of free stand-up comedy gigs. We turned our noses at it though and continued on our trek, getting rather hungry as we went. To appease the borborygmi (thanks, bbc Magazine), skit and biped popped into Greggs and emerged with mysterious meat-stuffed pastries and also the world’s most inedible doughnuts.

Somehow, we made it to the Pleasance. In all subsequent trips there, it never took quite as long which was a relief. The Pleasance courtyard was packed with people and billboards with posters and flyers. All around the edges of the courtyard were the entrances to the venues and outside each entrance, the list of shows and a billboard of posters advertising them. We lingered around such a billboard and identified the posters we liked, a highly scientific way of choosing shows that resulted in us still being incredibly unsure of what we wanted to see. We lurked for a while. Biped suggested that she at least join the massive queue to the ticket desk while we mull this over some more. I wandered off a few metres to ask at the information desk whether there was a list of shows that hadn’t sold out. I could see a blackboard of shows that had sold out but that wasn’t highly useful without spending a good while cross-checking. I asked the information desk girl “is there a list of shows that haven’t sold out?” and she shook her head. A voice behind me said “This show hasn’t” and a flyer was thrust in my direction. I took it and looked at the nice and strangely yearnful face of the man that said this and then looked at the flyer. “Oh, we were looking at this poster and thought it looked good,” I said for we were. I asserted that we would see this show and then was joined by skit, slightly out of breath (don’t deny it), who explained that they had already spoken to the flyer-man as they were standing in the queue and biped was getting the tickets. Flyer-man seemed content but still a bit yearnful and he slouched off in his grey unassuming hoodie into the distance. “Who was that hoodied man?” whispered skit in hushed tones. Well, she didn’t but she did ask whether that was the man on the flyer. “I think so...” I said. I checked the flyer: Ben Moor, a man in a slightly dishevelled shirt and tie and an Indian headdress. Yep, that was him. The serious and strange man was the star of the show. I found it endearing after being hounded by so many leafleteers on the Royal Mile who were not the cast.

Biped came out from the ticket office with “the last three tickets” and I heard that this was one of the acts Mike advertised. Last three tickets... Mike’s recommendation, the star being in the right place to inspire skit and biped and then sell his show to me... It felt like fate. We had a bit of a laugh about the coincidences. It felt noteworthy in light of the act’s title: Not Everything Is Significant.

The show wasn’t until the middle of the afternoon so we wandered off to have lunch. We passed a pub and I thought that we could grab a bite in there which is when I learnt the oddity that is Scottish pubs don’t serve food. It kind of makes their very existence pointless to me but maybe Scotland has some sort of heavy drinking culture or something... maybe.

We found a wonderful little cafe in the end. Nice and modern furnishing and a great feel with plenty of newspapers littered around. We bought our lunch (soup for me with a latte) and settled at a breakfast bar style table. Each of us fell into silence and read papers (I attempted and failed at a cryptic crossword). Had we run out of conversation already? Yes, it appeared but personally I loved that we were all content to be quiet for a little while. No pressure to be anything.

Lunch ended and we had some time to kill before the show but nowhere to kill it so we had a little wander and then returned to queue. We all bought programmes that came with badges (and the money went to charity). Thanks to being there early, we were able to pick some fantastic seats inside the venue. It really was an odd place. I got the impression that it was just a storage room or something in its normal life, transformed with some cunning black cloth and rows of benches into a theatre. It was tiny and the benches were arranged in a U shape around the stage. The seating was tiered so the performer was standing below us as we took the highest tier (and the middle so facing the performing area, not to the side). But this just made our eye level match his and so it was the best, most intimate, view possible.

The room filled up quickly and it became dark and warm. Lights brought the centre alive where Ben Moor stood, now in his scruffy suit sans jacket and wonderfully enlivened. The odd sense of wanting, needing, yearning for acknowledgement was lost, replaced with confidence and love for his play.

He said his carefully crafted lines with pride and perfect timing, perfect performance with every part of his gangly and expressive body. The character he created for his play was a biographer, blocked and scrimmaging for material for his book. His tale was commented upon by the footnoter, a slightly more arch and unemotional character essentially biographing the biographer. The play began with the biographer concerned that he was repeating himself because “the memory plays tricks” and goes on with twists and turns in an Escher styling, never taking the direct course, creating characters and bizarre scenarios, playing with words and memory, time and fate. Not everything was significant but what was significant to one person was not what was significant to another. The play defied logic and relished in it at the same time.

It was amazing.

The biographer inhabits a world where the hyphen has been hijacked by Nike as a form of punctuation sponsorship, where there is a chain of J G Ballard pubs, a rollercoaster called life that is so popular with Buddhists you can’t stop them from queueing up again for it, a musician related to Handal (he finds the name opens doors) and an ex-girlfriend who "moves like a fading continent worried about its future".

I cannot praise this show enough. You may have noticed from the way I am still praising it. The humour was pure radio 4 word play. Every sentence had at least one funny thing in it and I found it hard to keep up. The overall sense of the show was one of wonder but also one questioning fate, not just cosmic fate but the ones we carve for ourselves through our possibly flawed and certainly skewed interpretation of the world. On his website, Ben Moor says “[the story is] written in such a way that an audience member can decide one thing about the events as presented in the piece, and the next person might come to a totally different deduction” and indeed, reviews of the shows have mentioned how the experience of the play was personal and could not be dissected in print.

See it.

Incidentally, biped kept falling asleep. But not because of the play but because it was so warm and dark in there.

On leaving the theatre, I swore to stalk Ben Moor. As a joke, of course and more referring to his career than his physical being.

Outside the courtyard, we met with Gillian, skit’s friend from school. I don’t know what she thought of biped and me but we kept our distance in case she was a cannibal or the like. We walked back across the city, this time walking close by the castle. I recall griping about the number of steps we had to climb and not giving the castle enough awe. I was a little thrown by the way it was a grey stone house and not something with turrets and dragons and fairytale princesses hanging their hair out of windows. But I should at least mention now how cool it is to have a castle on a mound at the centre of a city.

After walking around the castle and through a little park with an incredibly gaudy gold fountain, we came upon a small French market. I have noticed that French markets in France contain much more in the way of skimpy underwear than French markets in Britain. Just an observation. But this market contained the very best of French food and crafts (possibly) including a stall proudly displaying quilted blankets, throws and pillow cases. This immediately caught biped’s cold eye but she dragged herself away.

We went to a cafe/canteen where we grabbed some food and drinks (I believe skit had her second cream tea in two days and declared that she was on a one-a-day diet from now on, something she never kept up to her heart’s relief). Another of skit’s school friends joined us (or rather joined skit and Gilian as biped mused on the benefits of a quilt and I replayed Ben Moor in my head). Biped and I decided to leave the giggling school girls to it without even attempting to find out if they were decent people which was very rude of us but neither of us can claim to be paragons of politeness (well, maybe the Paragon...).

The sun was low in the sky and casting the city in a wonderful golden light. I felt happy and oddly brave so I phoned Mike (phoning is a scary thing to do because I need to speak in better English than normal) to explain that we weren’t going to pop into his shop at closing time as we half-promised because we were quite far away. I came away from the brief conversation congratulating myself on not sounding too abnormal and nervous but perhaps Mike’s memory of the conversation is different.

I then joined biped at the quilt stall where she was annoying the man tending the stall by drooling on his wares. After she wiped the spittle away, we compared opinions on the quilts, remarkably coming to the same conclusion on which one was the best. It had one side with wild strawberries as the repeated motif against a white background. The reverse was quite agreeable too though it is the strawberry side that sticks with me. With reservation, biped asked the cost. The man, obviously eager to pack up but more eager to get some money, gave her a great deal for the quilt and two pillowcases so she could not refuse the expense. With careless abandon, biped skipped off to the cash machine to get the money for it while I stayed at the stall and growled at anyone that came near to her chosen quilt.

We moseyed to our meeting place outside the theatre for the evening’s entertainment. It was a recommendation from Mike called Pagagnini and described as a string quartet with a twist (or words to that effect). Skit and her friends were there and chatting but on seeing us arrive, they hastily made their departure. We joined the queue for entry, taking it in turns to hold the place and use the toilets. I mention the toilets not so you can monitor our bladder control or lack of but so I can moan about the evil soap that stung my eyes and throat and had an even worse effect on skit’s breathing. Fortunately, it wasn’t so bad it detracted from the enjoyment of the evening. As we sat down, a man near us said that he had seen many (maybe all?) of the shows on at the fringe and this was the best one.

It was certainly good but I found some bits a little tedious. The show was formed by a string quartet playing recognisable classical pieces but then rebelling and playing other styles and using their instruments in other ways (for example, as percussive instruments or guitars). The musicians were frenzied as they leapt about the stage, playing expertly. I really enjoyed the music particularly when one musician got an electric violin and recorded himself play. And then played the recording as he played with it, recording the result and then played that as he played again and so on until he was a one-man orchestra. It was phenomenal and had he messed up once, it would have ruined the whole thing as it would have been repeated again and again but he did not; he was perfect. Finally, their encore of the techno version of the Four Seasons really cheered me as it is one of my favourite pieces and seeing it performed with such enthusiasm (not to mention smoke and lights) was the real highlight of the show. Oh, there was also some stuff with a love story between one musician and a member of the audience and other things with one musician being too full of himself... all that was the tedium I mentioned. I observed to skit that physical comedy really wasn’t my sort of thing.

We left the show buoyed and thinking that the entire festival was like Pagagini and Ben Moor. It was cold so I hugged biped’s quilt as we traipsed across to rescue the skitmobile from the priciest car park in the world. The multi-storey was pretty empty when we got there and we discovered the wonderful echoes we could produce. To the castle, we went where the meal was pasta and the entertainment was discovering “Taking over the asylum” on the telly. Mike texted skit as we ate our meal to tell us it was on. He knows us so well but by that point we had decided that as great as David Tennant was, the show was not gripping us. We were just too exhausted and had to go to bed... thinking about fate, choice and significance.