The View from Edinburgh!
Yes, we’re here! In a city of comedy and purple cows and two confusingly overlapping levels and flyers and rainsunrainsunrainsun and exhaustion and happiness. And it’s only day three.
Well, it’s day six from my point of view as I was one of the first up to the flat, up peachy keen early to march around the city with our posters and crack on with rehearsal boot camp. For posters we were deployed with Tescos bags full of promotional goodness and blue tack by Ursa (producer) to zones of Edinburgh mapped out by Dougie (director and native son of Edinburgh) in pairs, spreading our pink-on-black Imps around Edinburgh double quick. Success! He now grins at innocent baguette eaters all around the city. Imps re-grouped, and a well-deserved cup of tea for all.
On to rehearsal boot camp. A brief word is probably required on the inevitable question, “how can you rehearse something improvised?” The easiest analogy is sport. There are skills you need and a team connection that can only be built by practising together. So of an evening Imps are squeezed in improbable numbers on our much abused furniture to make things up, laugh a lot, and then decide whether it was the Right Kind of Laugh. Edinburgh is a crash course in the different kinds of laugh available.
But no time to catalogue them here because it’s ononon with the news. We’ve done two shows! Hurrah! Despite our undying attachment to the delights of the Wheatsheaf in Oxford, the purple charm of the Gilded Balloon’s Nightclub is beginning to feel homely. Our first show was fun, our second was even funner, and I feel GOOD about the third today. If a little sleep deprived. But good. The loveliest of all lovely things about doing an improvised show at the fringe is being as surprised by the material as your audience; never a boring moment.
Meanwhile! The flat is filling up with more imps than seems probable, comprehensible or healthy. Stage imps, piano imps, tech imps, imps of yore, freshfaced imps, imps staying for the month and imps staying for the night. Sophie arrived back from her year in Paris, Jamie less impressively but no less excitingly made it in from Glasgow, Pete emerged from the horror of megabus and piano – Tom far more serenely from a nice road trip punctuated by sight seeing stopovers elsewhere in Scotland… andmoreandmoreandmore buzzing at the door. Andlessandlessandless viable bed space. TOP DRAWER.
Now, that is tout le news I think and I should run, because according to our Whiteboard of Wisdom I am meant to be flyering in, er, ten minutes. Right, good. I’d like to develop a new pitch today; yesterday, “can I interest you in a small piece of paper?” worked quite well, but I’m pretty sick of saying it, and I reckon the guys working the £1 tea/coffee stand on the mile (ace idea) must be fed up of hearing it. Ladies and gentleman, can I get a suggestion for a flyering line?
In haste and happiness,
Sylvia (the tall girl)
