The Lunatic Fringe
Stage Struck by Simon Gray
Theatr Clwyd, 1996
People can do a lot of crazy things in their student days, but by far the craziest is to get involved in a show on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Horse and Carp
In the late seventies I was there performing in a dreary little revue called Bumf or Fluffers or something. Unfortunately we’d left it all to the last minute with the result that the only form of transport we could hire to take part in the Festival Procession was a small farm cart drawn by an exceedingly flatulent kind of dwarf horse.
With the first gust of wind (or was our pygmy pony really at the back of it?) one of our more expensive cardboard props fell overboard and our director, diving headlong to save it, split his lip open on the kerb.
Undaunted, he insisted we continue the route march. The horse stank to high heaven, there was nowhere you could sit without getting a splinter, and once during a brief halt a policeman tried to move us on, suspecting us of vagrancy. With the first drops of rain I for one went into a deep sulk, bit the director thrust his bloodied visage into my face and managed to lisp through his swollen lips, “Look, do sumf’n youfful or I’ll feed you to vat flaming horfe.” It was one of the most depressing afternoons of my life.
What Bloody Man Is This?
But memories are short in the theatre and the following year found the same troupe of strolling masochists back in Edinburgh, this time with a hilarious follow-up called More Bumf (or More Fluffers, whichever it might be, I really have blotted the truth from my memory), and this time the lighting man tried to assassinate our director. I am not joking. If we’d taken out life insurance on him we could have made ten times the box office take.
This time the poor chap was suffering (not surprisingly) from high blood pressure and he developed a nosebleed in the middle of the opening number. Full marks for bravery, he carried on with the show, though I can testify he cut a particularly macabre figure in the vicar sketch when he stood there trying to baptise a swaddled plastic doll with blood pouring from his ruptured sinuses and puddling in our fake font.
But the coup de grace, as it were, came in the Brew Bags sketch. The idea was that of a cod advert wherein a glass of ‘beer’ was magically produced n stage by means of a cunningly converted tea bag. This was an eminently unstable concoction rigged up by our manic lighting man who each night doctored a real tea bag by replacing the leaves with a noxious formula of powdered brown chalk, acid and soda crystals. His only instructions to the director, who was to perform the miracle on stage, were “Just don’t drink it.”
Boom
Amazingly, all went well until the last night of the run. What we didn’t know was that the lighting man had been experimenting in the toilet and had come up with a completely new recipe without telling anyone. I noticed he was training a camera on the stage at this point but assumed he was merely taking a few snaps for his portfolio.
Well, the bag went in, there was a satisfying hiss from the tankard, and the audience started clapping. Then suddenly there was an almighty explosion which brought down half the ceiling and turned the curtains at the back of the stage into a fishing net. When the smoke cleared, our beloved director was standing there with no eyebrows, staring at a mug handle in his hand. The audience were already halfway through the exits by the time he recovered and went storming up into the lighting man’s gantry, gibbering like a monkey.
We never did get the audience back. And we had to pay the proprietors of the hall what little profits we’d made to repair the damage. All the lighting man ever said in mitigation was, “Yeah, but it was a laugh though wasn’t it?”
No, Edinburgh is not the place for student revue. Nor, come to that, for unsupervised lighting men.
PS
Sometimes needs must. This article on the Edinburgh Fringe was adapted at the last minute from a ‘humorous memoir’ I’d written some years before, and it seemed to fit the brief – light-hearted, inconsequential, and with a theatre background.
Incidentally, I don’t know to this day what the Simon Gray play Stage Struck was all about. We didn’t always get to read a script before we were commissioned to contribute to the programme, and we certainly never got free tickets to go and see the show. Happily, however, not all the plays I mentioned in the article were taken on trust. I had seen, for instance, Ira Levin’s Deathtrap on the London stage. It was terrifically exciting and at one point, when someone we had previously thought dead suddenly made a dramatic and bloody reappearance accompanied by a brilliantly timed flash of lightning, my companion actually screamed and buried her head in my shoulder. It frightened the life out of me, and I certainly made sure never to take her to the live theatre again, showing me up like that. Still not sure what the lesson is there...
The opening number of Knockers, Edinburgh Festival 1977, Oxford Actors Company.
l to r: Jane C, Joanna H, Andy B, Rob O, RAS, Michael W, Bill S, Dave E
A fuller account of this ground-breaking production can be found here.