Edinburgh Moment: Weirdest Venue
Singer songwriter Rosie Wilby will take to the stage at this year’s Fringe as a comedian. Combining music and comedy Wilby revists her past as a columnist in Rosie’s Pop Diary. In the run up to the show she shared some of her strangest venue memories.
Quite by accident, I’ve become accustomed to performing in odd locations over the past few years. It all started when my good friend Liz Bentley asked me to be a part of her synchronised swimming team in Edinburgh on Sea at the Fringe in 2008 – the only show that year to be performed in a pool. I was the member of the team who was a bit rubbish and had to do a forward roll when everyone else did a backwards one as I couldn’t do it. At least the swimming pool in Edinburgh was warmer than Camberwell baths where we did our previews.
I then got a bit of taste for the challenge of the unexpected things that can happen when you’re in space where the audience aren’t necessarily expecting a comedy gig. So my next two solo tours included shows in Peckham library and a living room in Tulse Hill.
Yet even that isn’t quite as bizarre as my recent experience of being a part of the ‘Twisted cabaret’ at London Zoo Lates every Friday night in June and July. I’ve been presenting some of my spoof Darwinian theory and scientific comedy alongside elephant burlesque and fire eating in the leafy surrounds of the animal amphitheatre . And then I’m doing an Edinburgh preview of my new show Rosie’s Pop Diary in London on July 29th. In a bookshop, of course – Woolfson And Tay in Bermondsey Square. A normal venue just wouldn’t do!
Even my Edinburgh venue, The Tron, has a personal resonance as it was where I performed in August 2000 for a one-off acoustic music show, not long after my London flat had burned down. As that’s the period of my life Rosie’s Pop Diary is all about, the venue is going to become a part of the story.
Rosie Wilby will perform her show Rosie’s Pop Diary at Just The Tonic at The Tron from 4 – 28 August (excl 15 and 16) at 18.20.
