What Goes Up…

I always find it comforting whilst slightly disconcerting arriving back in Edinburgh for Festival time. It feels something like a home from home, but I can never get away from the sense that I’ve entered some weird time warp, where nothing’s changed in a year, two, or in my case five, since I was up here last.

It’s also a wee bit eerie arriving before everything’s kicked off properly. There’s a definite sense of calm before the massive storm, and watching everything being set up ready to go certainly spoils any remnants of illusion. I’d also imagined we might arrive to a great fanfare to find the city magically covered from head to toe in our Pedestrian posters from the distribution company we’d forked out for, but alas, we’re still completely anonymous… for the time being.

My big worry was that we’d get up here to find out that the Pedestrian team didn’t actually have a place to stay and I’d have a homeless company on my hands that I was solely responsible for. It turns out however, that the digs that I’d arranged and booked actually exist and turn out not to be too good to be true – they are very good and they are very real. I wanted the team to be in the heart of it, five minutes from Underbelly, able to pop back as and when to dump/pick up stuff, without that feeling then when you headed out it meant you were out for the day.

But, as is always the way, as a pay-off for the Pedestrian digs turning out fine, the place I, myself, was actually going to be staying in with the Shared Experience company of Speechless, turned out to be a little less of a winner on immediate arrival – I should make absolutely clear at juncture that this was nobody’s fault other than the owner and tenants of the flat and it was of course booked in good faith. Although evidently a lovely flat just off the meadows, the students who are clearly sub-letting for the summer, had left the day before, hadn’t actually bothered to clean it for our arrival, and the very reputable Festival letting agency hadn’t bothered to check the place for themselves before arranging for us to get the keys.

Our student tenant friends hadn’t bothered to change the sheets (even though they had been thoughtful enough to make the beds with their used bedding on), there were old plasters, magazines and combs under the beds; a thick layer of dust embedded into the carpet and on every surface that one could feel at the back of their throat; clothes and envelopes stuffed into drawers; vomit and other more unmentionable stains on the cushion covers – one of the company even found some unused LSD tabs under her pillow (some may think that was a bonus and not something to whinge about). Now, it might be just me, but when you’re staying somewhere for a month, you don’t really want to sleep in a place knee-deep in someone else’s pubic hair? And to have this privilege for extortionate “Festival Prices”? Outrageous.

Having said all that, I was so relieved to get back today to find all had been cleaned and sorted out – it actually scrubs up very well. Will be a lovely base for what is a lovely company to come and go from the Traverse. Slightly dreading that our first Speechless show on Thursday is at 10:15 in the morning – tend not to be quite at my best at that time of day. And then first Pedestrian preview at 19:00 on Thursday night.

The Pedestrian team outdid themselves today, getting the poster up in the last remaining spaces in as many café windows as possible in all corners of the city – amazing how quickly they go. However early you think you’re doing something, someone else has always thought to do it earlier. It was a nice to walk back from rehearsals and actually feel the presence of the show image around, cos it’s a good’un and will hopefully do the trick.

We’ve got a ridiculous amount of merchandise to get out there over the next few weeks: we’ve got flyers, we’ve got fortune-teller-fish with bespoke labels, we’ve got Moo Cards, we’ve got matchboxes, we’ve got stickers, we’ve got badges and we’ve got a giant fish head for Tom to wander out and about in. And we’ve got 1500 odd seats to sell over the run. The one thing we don’t have is a miniature ‘Tom Wainwright’ doll, but there’s still time to have that arranged.

Although you always want to steal a march and kick off things with a bang, I’ve got to keep reminding myself that this August is a marathon and a sprint and not everything will happen immediately.