Pericles Redux, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, 18th August 2008

I swear I could come to Edinburgh and just enjoy the buskers on the High Street: a beautiful Japanese girl, in beautiful Japanese clothes, playing beautiful Japanese fiddle; a contralto in full kit belting out operatic arias from the top of a small stepladder; puppetry of fiendish imagination; whole casts of musicals, giving preview; and my star for this year, Juzzy Smith, who sang catching R&B (I think I have to call it), accompanying himself as an electronic one-man band.

I had decided to stay in Glasgow this year, catch up on family, and pop through for an afternoon show.  Which was interesting and enjoyable in itself, and allowed me to make a 'Theatrical Journey' every day.  But, as the buskers reminded me, immersion in Edinburgh has a pleasure all its own.

The theatre shows in Edinburgh probably number in the hundreds, so it is difficult to make a choice.  There are lots of barkers, sometimes the cast themselves, thrusting flyers at you from every direction, each with several photocopied reviews stapled to it, which made it easier for subsequent days, but the first day was a problem.  I solved it by relying on the Metro, which had published a few reviews in the London Edition the previous week.  (The Scottish Papers devote acres to festival reviews, but the accents around the venues are not predominantly Scottish).

The Metro said 'Pericles Redux' was very good: so I took it for my starter day; a chance to see some 'physical theatre'.  This was really quite an adventure for me, because I have to work very hard to enjoy Shakespeare modified: I like my Shakespeare, well, Shakespearean.

So 3pm saw me ensconced in Pleasance One, in a full house, ready for the show.  The audience turned out to be so enthusiastic, with a lot of them indulging in that American 'whooping' thing to show their approval, that I began to suspect this might be AmDram, or American College, or both. 

But it wasn't.  They used Shakespeare's story  (I think: the program notes provided a synopsis, and, like you, I'm not well up on my Pericles) to carry some rather fine dance routines (I guess that's the 'physical' theatre) and a rather more puzzling sequence of comedy routines, edging, in places, into farce: a kind of modern, Californian mummery, I suppose. 

The Comedy took a bit of catching-up-with.  They could have used the 'chorus' character (there is one, Gower, in Pericles, I found out later) to get us on-side a bit quicker.

So this turned out to be a splendid start to the Festival, a wide and varied piece of theatre, in the midst of an enthusiastic audience.

Followed by a sodden trudge back to the car park.  Edinburgh in August is iffy, weatherwise, but this time was the wettest I remember.

You may have heard that there is a degree of rivalry between Edinburgh and Glasgow: this expressed itself in no mention of how to get to Glasgow on any road sign I saw before I stumbled onto the Glasgow motorway.