Edinburgh Fringe Diary Vol 3: How To Win A Fringe

MONDAY

The iPhone's snooze button is perhaps its' most addictive feature. My alarm goes off about five hundred times before I can bring myself to face the day. When I eventually make it to the lounge room, it is with a grumpy demeanour and an unshakable headache. There's something about performing for an audience who don't want to be there that completely saps my spirits the next day. I really wish they'd just left, I can deal with that. Although I did enjoy the fleeting moments where I felt like I was slipping back into my old scaring-people-for-the-shits-and-giggles-of-it schtick.
Point is that I am as grumpy as shit and can't bear the sight of anything festival related today. I need a break. I attempt to go clothes shopping but all I can find are what they are calling “skinny chinos” over here. I am not impressed and go home empty handed, aside from some new gloves that I'll never have reason to wear in Australia.
I find the only way to recover from a show as awful as last nights' is to find some really solid goals to focus on during the next one. After I figure out a few subtle changes of approach, I post I Don't Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats on my Facebook and have a wee online grump before walking to the show. It feels like the longest walk ever.
I've gone into all this detail about my emo day because it is in such contrast to the show. My show is life-alteringly amazing. The audience is a lot of fun and my material lends itself to very effective catharsis. The song No Reaction, written on a bus at Adelaide Fringe in 2006 after a similarly awful show, is perfect for venting my grumpiness.
After the show and some photos with the audience, I'm taken aside by a lovely gentleman who turns out to be a reviewer. We chat for a long time about the genesis of my show, the ways my act works and cabaret in general. As someone who has yet to be written about much this Fringe, it's an absolute delight to find somebody so interested in my work. I'm interrupted by audience members who want me to sign things. This is new for me in Scotland. I can't help but beam with delight.
Still beaming, I skip home to find my awesome housemates hanging out in our lounge room. We drink too much whiskey and eventually crash out. I am still smiling when I make it to bed and have a series of dreams in which the running theme is how awesome I am.

TUESDAY
I spend a big chunk of today with my American pal Abigoliah Shaumann who has become a tight pal this Fringe. She is having a hard run; her room in our house was broken into last week and her laptop was stolen along with a stack of cash. She's moved out but can't get her rent back from the real estate agent, so we sit and work on a press release together. It doesn't end up getting picked up, but her follow up approach of an online fund-raising campaign later in the week is much more successful and gets her on a prominent fringe blog.
Somewhere in the midst of this release-writing, my first Edinburgh review comes out in The Scotsman. It's a big deal to even get covered by them and I didn't know they'd been to see me. I score three stars, which is better than I'd expected – metropolitan dailies generally hate me or think their readership won't “get” me. That being said, the opening paragraph manages the feat of being the weirdest bunch of words I have ever read in one of my own reviews:

Here's the thing about the Fringe: you can sometimes find yourself enjoying a show that you, the rest of the audience and occasionally even the performer knows is a bit crappy.

Uh, sorry, what? This is what happens when mainstream newspapers try to say nice things about an underground thing. It goes on to be a really rather positive review (they go on to include me in their “best free shows of the Fringe” the following week, so this assessment seems fair) and I'm delighted for the coverage. It makes me chuckle.
With the press release out of the way, I head to another housemates' show (I know, there are so many of them, this house is huge). Kiera Daley's Ladynerd is part of the Best Of Sydney Fringe program here and I'm intrigued as to how she adapts cabaret for her nerdy audience. There's something very l33t about what she does; the tone is perfectly pitched for nerdy crowds. Her stories of female inventors lead into some very clever character songs, but her audience are dead. At the end of the show the crowd go as nuts as they know how to, and I overhear a bunch of awed conversations on the way out of her space at Assembly. I realise they were totally captivated; they just reacted in the quiet way nerds do. I don't envy her that.
Appropriately enough, once I'm out of the venue, I google myself.
Holy shit.
My name. Five stars. In Time Out. Oh shit. Oh my god. Oh shit. Really? Yes. Oh good god. Oh wow. If I could quote this whole review here, I would. But I probably shouldn't. Scroll down to the picture of my head covered in streamers on this link to read it.
This review is amazing. I don't know what to do. I should be writing my week two tour blog. I can't. I get a coffee. I go to the shops. Why am I at the shops? Should I be doing something about this? I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO.  Everyone at home in Australia is asleep, so I can't even tell them. I go home and have a shower. I open my laptop and stare at it for an hour, with a Cheshire Cat grin on my face. I go out and flyer – which is a lot more fun when I can brag about being five stars in Time Out but I still feel like I'm not sure what to do. I sit down and write half of Monday's entry and then head to my venue early as I feel like I need to tell as many people as I can. There's professional validation and then there's this... it's a total vindication of the last eight or so years of being a performer.  I would never normally let a review get to me like this, but this is huge. Plus it's from Time Out, one of the few critical authorities on cabaret.
After a show to a quarter-full but enthusiastic room, I Skype my wife and parents, who all freak out with me to an adorable extent. This trip has officially been worth all the bullshit that's gone into it.
Eventually, I calm down enough to sleep.

WEDNESDAY
I mean I really, really sleep. When I eventually surface at four in the afternoon, I feel like I have been beaten up, despite still buzzing off the amazing review. I was originally going to hire a car and head into the Scottish highlands today with Abigoliah but I broke some of the wiring on my roadcase last night and need to go in and fix it, along with sending out some emails in the wake of my five star, full body orgasm of a review.
I spend the day sourcing my cables, getting a massage and flyering. I'm recognised by punters a couple of times on the Royal Mile, which is pleasant and unexpected for a debut trip. The show that night is fantastic (though again, I don't know that my flyering has much of an impact), with word starting to spread about my strange show on the edge of town. Many of the audience are returning customers; the Othello: The Remix guys come back with some mates, there's another big group that have been in before and a lovely American group are back in as part of the celebrations for a birthday. I do a one-off encore of Hedwig And The Angry Inch's The Origin Of Love for them once I've kicked everyone else out. They put a one hundred pound note in my donation bucket!

THURSDAY
I'm in the lounge room, eating corn chips and nacho sauce with the cast of Crab House: A Bloody Cabaret (yet more of my housemates) when the phone rings. It's Amy from London cabaret institution the Soho Theatre. This is a nice call to get. I still have corn chips in my hand. She is ringing to tell me I have been nominated for the TO&ST (Time Out & Soho Theatre) Award, along with five other contenders. There is a showcase at the Assembly Spiegeltent on Saturday and if I win the award, there's a two week season at Soho in it. It's basically equivalent to the Perrier (now Fosters') Award but for cabaret. I drop my chips on the floor.
I tell everybody in the lounge room (somewhat awkward as they are also in a kickarse cabaret show) and then call my wife and folks again. This is insane. We all freak out. Regardless of whether I win or not, I have officially won the Fringe festival as far as I am concerned.
That night, I head to Polish theatre company Teatr Biuro Podrozy's outdoor spectacle Planet Lem. I'd had my interest roused when they flyered the Royal Mile for their other show in terrifying hajib-nun-ghost costumes on stilts with hand-held noise-makers that sounded like AK-47's. They absolutely terrified 90% of the street, with the other 10% enthusiastically chasing them down for flyers.
This show is based on the writings of Stanislaw Lem, who is a big deal in Polish sci-fi. The narrative concerns a man travelling forward through time to a time where all jobs are done by machines and humans are relegated to menial tasks. He was a genius-level writer and luckily the company are more than up to the task of creating his world. It is an immersive, brain-frying, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck kind of show, which starts out with a firefight between three enormous robots and a human. The set is an enormous contraption of scaffolding and screens and the actors perform more like dancers than anything else, conveying their story through physical theatre. The whole thing takes place in the midst of the Edinburgh University quad, which would be a beautiful place to sit for an hour regardless of the presence of a show.
I'm trying to tell you this show is fucking amazing but I'm being as inarticulate as hell. If any Australian festival programmers are reading this, please look this up as both of their shows need to come to Australia so I can bring all my friends along to freak out at them.
When it comes time for the show, between the nomination and the high of watching Planet Lem, I'm so amped up that it can't help but be a lot of fun. I come home and drink until much later than I really should.

FRIDAY
My flatmates are getting gently annoyed at me; I'm an experienced touring partyman. I know sleep is an important part of the equation. I keep staying up late with everyone, but while I go to bed at four AM and sleep for ten hours, they attempt to get out of bed at their usual time. This is not the way to function as a human being. I promise to behave myself more in future and not get them into trouble with me. I am lying. Deep inside, my lie does not bother them.
Friday continues the trend of having fun. I'm on my best behaviour, as I need to keep my voice in good shape for tomorrow's showcase at Assembly at noon (NOON!!!!!!!). I stay home, click around on Facebook, listen to some records (an old Even thing, the new Com Truise thing and the recent Christa Hughes thing) and Google myself.

SATURDAY
I roll into a taxi in my silver tux and head across town to Assembly for the TO&ST Awards Showcase. After a season of performing in a tiny room, it's a delight to have a whole Spiegeltent to mince around in. All of the other performers are lovely to chat to, despite our excessive hangovers. Piff The Magic Dragon's dog Piffles sits on my lap and I experience the odd sensation of being starstruck by a dog.
I'm up against some real class acts and it's great to have a chance to see them perform; Lady Rizo is an early highlight, performing sultry crowdpleasers La Vie En Rose and Amanda Palmer's epic I Google You. Dusty Limits hosted notorious cabaret hangout Boom Boom Club last night and should be in bed, but turns out two of his epic originals. Piff The Magic Dragon does a very tight five minute spot of disgruntled magic that ably demonstrates why he has one of the buzz shows at Pleasance this year. East End Cabaret are slick purveyors of Germanic good times and pull of some masterful audience work. Finally, Glasgow's Creative Martyrs combine mime and musical comedy for a smashing closing number that sees them arranging a whole crowd sing-along into about ten different harmonies. Somewhere in the midst of all that, I pull out two absolutely cracking performances, jumping on tables and generally losing as much of my dignity as possible. I totally kill my spot and am buzzing for the rest of the afternoon.
Not really sure what to do with myself after my show, I head out to flyer for a while before catching a couple of shows. The first is Bob Slayer: He's A Very Naughty Boy. Bob managed to get himself banned from Perth Fringe, being forcibly ejected from the Spiegeltent just before I was due to go on at one of Marcel Lucont's cabarets. Just before I arrived in Adelaide in April, he'd managed to do the same thing there. I'd never really seen his full show and I was curious as to how it went down, as his schtick is intriguing. He drinks as much as possible while telling stories about his Australian trip. The show I see is a bit of a mess, with completely trashed ex-girlfriends piping up in the audience and Bob losing track of his stories constantly. It somehow manages to be engaging.
It's a marked contrast between the anarchy of Slayer and the tightly controlled cabaret of veteran Dusty Limits. His set earlier in the day has me curious about what his whole show will be like. It's loosely arranged around the theme of death as turning thirty has made Dusty a little self-conscious. The show sees him moving between his own salacious cabaret originals and some choice covers, including a pleasantly genderfucking version of Portishead's All Mine.
Though I've seen some other enjoyable cabaret, this is the first full show that I feel an affinity with as a performer. It's scary launching into the cabaret world – cabaret means so many different things. For some people, it's musical theatre without a stage, for others it's satire and for others it's burlesque. I find most of it terrible. I'm not into aesthetic art or pleasant background music; I want cabaret to grab me by the balls and make me feel and think about things.
My own show feels rather splendid. There's a lot of the cabaret award judges in and a big crowd who have had their curiosity piqued by my showcase set. I proceed to tear the room a new one. I end the night in a shower of post-show audience hugging. Afterwards, I'm so amped I dump my stuff at home and head to GHQ, Edinburgh's big gay club, which happens to be very close to my apartment, and meet a whole pile of bent Edinburghians before I crash out, completely sapped of energy and having felt as much happiness as is possible in one day.

SUNDAY
You know that rule when you go to Chinese restaurants and you look for where all the Chinese people are eating to figure out where the best one is? It applies triple to Scottish food. I find the local cuisine here to be a fairly risky proposition at the best of times – it's stodgy winter comfort food, which I'm not really into. The only place I can find a spare table on the Royal Mile is a completely deserted old man's pub with a menu full of the kind of food your Grandmother might make. Despite a resolutely Scottish menu, there's not a Scotsman in sight. I decide on the “chicken stack”. This is a bad decision, as it means I walk around for the rest of the day with fatty gravy, Deb mashed potatoes, weird chicken bits and haggis lodged in my stomach.
With my flyering for the day done, I decide to see a pair of shows. Sundays have proved to be the hardest day of the week for my show, and I find that if I make the day about having fun, I don't go to bed grumpy after a shit gig. I head to another one of the TO&ST nominees shows; Piff The Magic Dragon was on my to-see list anyway, but his spot yesterday still has me giggling at the thought of it and I need a fun show to keep my energy up.
The show itself takes place in a decent sized room at the Pleasance Dome. It's interesting to see how an act that comes across so DIY in a showcase spot scales up to fill this room. With the addition of some slightly larger magic equipment, a very droll assistant and quite a lot of tech cues, the show feels very polished. His disinterested stage presence works a treat at manipulating audience expectations of his act and he's very adept and moving the crowd's attention to where he wants it to go. This makes him a natural for card magic, which he notes onstage is his favourite kind of magic. His ability to reinvent old tricks with unexpected props makes this show a thrill, even if you're au fait with how his tricks work. If magic was written about by music reviewers, critics would call Piff's act Post-Magic.
I chase the family friendly magic show with ArtW!nk at the splendid Voodoo Rooms. The bar staff make me a rusty nail and I settle in for what I expect to be a fairly standard burlesque show. I'm surprised to find I am actually watching a screening of vintage porno with commentary instead. This is a fantastic surprise; the films are an absolute riot and are enhanced by the dry, bawdy wit of the MC, who also busts out the odd cabaret number here and there. Everything has been tuned in this show to make the porn screenings as hilarious as possible. It feels a little rough around the edges as the MC's songs aren't quite integrated into the whole yet and I feel like it should be a longer screening, but overall this show is a winner with the rowdy queer-friendly crowd. I wouldn't be surprised to see it out touring the Fringe circuit and doing very well.
I then womble down to my own show. It happens. It's not as bad as last sunday, but the audience is pretty sparse. Such is the way of the Fringe. It's mostly Australian expats from Adelaide in tonight, who are all a lot of fun to play for and we have a nice chat after the gig. It's no problem having an off night in the middle of a run like this though. I've absolutely no desire to complain; I feel like I'm floating over the ups and downs of this festival now. This week I've gone from freaking out about having no press to being one of the most acclaimed cabaret acts of the whole festival. It's hard to think of how things might be going better. I high five myself.

An Audience With Tomás Ford plays at the Edinburgh Fringe at The Jekyll & Hyde (Hanover St) at 11:50pm, from August 2-26. His new album of the same title is in stores now and online at http://music.tomasford.com, iTunes and Spotify.