‘ey up.
Quick Edinburgh report then….
My five days were a lot of fun, basically. The new piece that Chris read “Inventory” is brilliant. If you’re in London you can see/hear him doing it again this week at Shunt Weds 9 – Sat 12th September. Go see….
Other things, I particularly enjoyed were:
Orphans by Dennis Kelly – one of the most outstanding pieces of new writing I’ve seen in years. Great performances too. If you can see it anywhere on tour then do.
I always try to make time/space for a trip to the Botanical Gardens while in Edinburgh, so I loved walking through them accompanied by David Leddy’s Susurrus.
Also and always a pleasure was spending time with Alex Kelly of Third Angel who was performing at Forest Fringe – I first saw Class of 76 at Leeds Met Studio in 2000 so was intrigued to see how Al had gotten on with tracking down other members of his class since then (sorry again tho for getting times wrong and arriving late – bad Jon). Third Angel’s new project “Words & Pictures” also looks to be shaping up most nicely and includes some thoughts on benches that I wrote for Alex last year (?) and his and Rachael’s contribution to our mixtape project.
Also, long term Unlimited collaborator Lucy Ellinson was the outstanding performer for me in the alright play “Land Without Words” for which she was rightly nominated for a Stage Acting Award. Visceral, honest, brave, totally committed.
I was massively underwhelmed by both John Clancy’s The Event and the new Dancing Brick show, which has confused me because both shows were widely written and spoken about ecstatically, won awards etc. Of course there’s always matters of personal taste that come into individual’s’ (where does the apostrophe go here – CHRIS?!) responses to work and my default setting is to try to be as generous and open as possible – so the fact that I was so disappointed by both of these made me wonder what it was that I was missing. Anyone able to help me out….?
My favourite part of the week though was our Unlimited family lunch round at Clare and Valerie’s flat. Great food, wine, company away from the circus.
About to start work proper on making a couple of new things which I’ll be posting more on at some stage soon both here and in the Shows section of the site.
In the meantime, get down to Shunt if you can for Chris’s “Inventory”.
jx