What is the best poster design of Fringe 2018?
Let’s face it, if you are in Edinburgh at the moment, you are likely to have seen more than 1 poster advert for a show around town.
But have any posters particularly stood out for you this year? Have you been to a show purely on the basis of seeing a poster?
We are looking for nominations for the best poster of Edinburgh Fringe 2018. To nominate, add the show in the comments field and why it stands out for you as a winning design.
Good luck!
Until August 26th – £10
My 12-year-old nephew Tom loves gaming. Gaming in the sense of multi-million pound Xbox and PS4 releases.
So I was a little surprised when he choose ‘Dark Room (for Kids)’ from his ‘approved list’ of 12+ rated shows.
‘Tom, you do realise this is not like the games you play? Do you remember Chuckie Egg and Donkey Kong that we showed you last Christmas? Well, this would be a show with a game from that era…possibly slightly before!’
He was determined. So off we went to the Gilded Balloon.
I must admit, I had no clue as to what to expect. In my mind something like Dungeon Master but run by a teenage nerd.
To my surprise, the venue was packed. And it was not a room behind some out-of-the-way pub bar. No, this was the Gilded Balloon and the packed excited room had the anticipation of a junior ComiCon about to meet Batman.
The high octane show is interactive and full throttle from the start. After a brief intro, the show starts with audience members getting to choose one of four options on screen. The retro feel of the show comes across as a mix of a 1980s children’s show and a late night version of the Crystal Maze.
And you know what? It works. Whilst the afternoon show is aimed at early teenagers, and the late show aimed at drunk adults, it could be argued that both groups have a lot in common. Both groups love shouting, heckling, booing, chanting a couple of memorable catch phrases and both have a seeming inability to make logical choices. Despite this, John is supreme master of ceremonies to all of this and goads the crowd along, and there is genuinely never a dull moment; even if you are not a twelve year old boy or drunk!
Well I am pleased to say my nephew ‘Darren’, not only got chosen to take part, but actually won a prize (a lovely cd collection of panpipe music!). Thank goodness he impressed John with his taste in music as a Joy Division fan and the prize wasn’t the baked beans or the abandoned rug!
The biggest surprise for me was when the lights came on at the end of the show. I was expecting a bald real-ale Kiss fan doing a Richard O’Brien impression. Instead, a rather buff blond Australian stepped forward. He seemed like a really genuine guy and was happy to take photos in character with the kids.
I’ve heard he also does a late-night show, but probably not one of those far-out, crazy Fringe shows where the performer ends up in Hunter Square at midnight covered in butter and baked beans…oh wait.
Back to the Dark Room. All in all, a great show, and I am not surprised it has gathered a cult following among Fringe goers. There could arguably have been greater variety in the starter questions but simplicity works best for a live show with children. So ‘go North’, ‘don’t switch on the light switch’ of The Dark Room and sit back and enjoy this unique retro Fringe experience!
Until August 26th – £16
I always think Foil Arms and Hog is my little secret. I love their YouTube videos. At their Oink show last year at the Underbelly, I gushed to them outside how much I loved their Ryanair song. I still expect to see them at some cosy little Edinburgh pub in the New Town and share a pint with them afterwards laughing about Irish names for films and celebs as they do in their ‘Ceol agus Ól’ sketches. Dia Dhuit Floyd “Airgid” Bealtaine-Aimserach!
However, the clues are there that they may be slightly more popular than when they were starting out some ten years ago. The huge poster outside Waverley Station for one. The fact that everyone I know is talking about seeing them the other. Despite the clues, the crowds outside the venue come as a shock. ‘But they were my secret favourites!’
Ah well, you can’t keep good taste in comedy to yourself.
The comedic sketch group was founded in 2008 while they were still in University College Dublin studying architecture, engineering and genetics. The group’s name evolved from nicknames each of the members had for each other, Foil (Sean Finegan) being the comedy foil, Arms (Conor McKenna) was ‘All arms and Legs’ and Hog (Sean Flanagan) because he ostensibly hogged the limelight.
Since then they have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube and Facebook and become the biggest stars at the Fringe not on television.
McEwan hall is their temple to comedy this year and they play the venue well. It is a huge space and a solo show might struggle, but the trio somehow manage to transform the ginormous venue into a smaller more intimate space, by engaging with all sections of the audience. The ‘tour’ sketch was also an inspired way of bringing the audience in.
The natural rapport these three mates have comes across well, and whilst much of the show is scripted, some of it is definitely not, and the lads have a natural banter that gives them an immediate sense of connection with their audience.
The laughs keep coming and I did not see a single member of the audience look at their watch.
After their ‘Tennis’ sketch, they seem to have started to build up a gay following, and it was hilarious listening to the gay couple in front of me discussing ‘snog, marry or avoid’ ahead of the show. (Apparently Arms would look best in a morning suit so ‘marry’, Hog would be hilarious in the sack so ‘snog’ and Foil as ‘avoid’ because he reminded them too much of Simon from the Inbetweeners!)
That being said, Foil Arms and Hog appeals to no particular demographic more than any other. It is a show you could take your Gran, girlfriend or your long distance cousin from Australia. Everyone would get the humour and come out afterwards into the Edinburgh sunshine with a smile on their face.
As the trio keeps on gaining in popularity, it will be interesting to see where they go next. In terms of venue, the Castle is already booked out for the Tattoo for next year! Television seems a likely next step and it is surprising they have not already been on panel shows. Perhaps they are happy and content just doing live venues. As are we lads, all hail to the new Prince Regents of the Fringe, keep on coming back to the Edinburgh!
Until August 26th – £5
I really wanted to like this show. I really did.
The ‘poster premise’ looked good. Two besuited handsome young chaps; one smiling holding a couple of dildos, the other looking quizzically over a book, possibly a bible. A Tale of Two Gays – possibly with very different views on life, and the comical tale of how they became friends?
Despite only arriving a couple of minutes before the show started, the venue was only half full. Hardly a crime for a midweek show but not the best for atmosphere.
Out bounced the lads. Not in suits but in the millennial uniform of skinny jeans.
‘How are you all doing with the quiz?’, they roared. A few questions later, after going through the laminated quiz sheet I discovered I was not Tim Farron. I had to cast my mind back as to why this was relevant.
Next came a variation on the above theme – getting a straight member of the audience, and a gay member of the audience to answer similar questions to the opener. We discovered the young straight lad might be gay.
Ten minutes into the show, the pair announced the show was starting.
Pretty much every punchline and gag that followed involved cock or ass. It was like being with your two gay best mates when you are fifteen, drinking buckie down the park, and them telling you about their school trip to Amsterdam.
There were good moments. The sketch involving gay men through history was a stand out for me and if they had continued in that vein, this could have been a four or even five star review.
Sadly though, the confidence in the material and comedy timing just wasn’t there. The pair frequently had to resort to reading out from their ‘red book’ of stories, even at one point asking a confused member of the audience to do so.
Sketches that dealt with gay topics of debate such as nature or nurture ended abruptly and moved without warning into satirical comedy, then into some one liners then back to a sketch. Ultimately the show ended up having too many themes.
If the show’s content left the audience feeling confused, the ending took that confusion to another level. Mark ends with a set piece which sees him getting aggressively angry and storming off stage. This did not seem convincing and only ended up confusing the audience further.
Will bounces on at the very end to tell us he has a new erotic gay novel out called ‘Man to Man’ with a box of unsold copies. I honestly could not tell you if these were actual books or not.
Despite the show’s flaws, it did get laughs. In fact some of the audience were positively guffawing at points.
And the above review is in no way a criticism of the lads personally. It takes a massive amount of confidence to get on stage and perform. For Mark in particular to talk about his parents’ deaths and his sexuality on stage was really to be admired. They both come across as affable and I would be the first to buy them a pint if they come back to Edinburgh next year.
If they do though I would suggest they choose one of the following options:
A) Ditch the skinny jeans, put on leather jeans and go full on filth B) Split and Mark do a stand up based on being gay and an orphan C) Do a gay Dick and Dom style sketch show D) Leave comedy, enter politics and become Tim Farron.
I sincerely hope the answer will not be D) and to see the lads next year back at the Fringe with a new show.
Trump’d! – C Venues – Aug 16th-21st, 23rd-27th – £13.50
Two Thirds Comedy bring their musical comedy ‘Trump’d’ by Joshua Peters, Aron Carr and Adam Woolf back to the Fringe.
Set in 2030, the liberal world of Clinton and Obama is now a distant memory. Gun sales are up, the Democrats are down. After fourteen years in office, Trump has many enemies – but a new best mate in the form of Arnold Schwarzenegger, his Vice President.
The plot is loosely based around the Wizard of Oz. Except the Tin Man is now the Mexican Liberation Front, the Cowardly Lion is represented by the last two members of ISIS and the Scarecrow by ex supporters turned Nimbies not wanting a huge wall in their backyard. And Dorothy…Mike Pence?
The show is not a hard sell satirical comedy with a political agenda, a trap many Fringe shows fall into, rather one which drew you in with its high energy and fantastic cast chemistry.
Trump is so ridiculous and extreme in real life he is hard to parody. The show achieves this through song, giving new lyrics to well-known Disney and Musical numbers . Yes it was off-key and yes the dancing was a little off-rhythm. But the audience wasn’t here to watch X-factor or Strictly come Dancing. They wanted a light musical comedy, and that is what Trump’d delivered in spades.
Trump and Brexit themed shows abound this year, and it would be easy for a Trump based show to get crowded out. Trump’d, however, was full to the rafters. In part, I think this is due to the hard work of the street team, including star of the show Jack Bolton entertaining crowds on the Royal Mile in character. The pout, hair, accent and gestures capture Trump so well, I could well imagine seeing Jack doing this routine on TV sometime soon.
So no fake news – this is a comedy musical you have to see!
It is somewhat of a cliché to hear that ‘you will see all four seasons in Edinburgh in one day’ and that in Scotland there is ‘no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing’.
July was glorious weather in Scotland. We had to worry about sun cream, watering our lawns, and other sun related activities our cousins south of the border would normally engage in post June.
The weather this month has turned more ‘mixed’; dreich one moment, glorious sunshine the next.
Yesterday was no exception going from downpour one minute to blue skies twenty minutes later. But guess what? People kept handing out flyers, street musicians kept strumming their guitars and the Fringe Show kept on going!
Special mention to the Bristol Revunions team, who seem to be out every single hour of the day handing out flyers and engaging with the crowds. And even when the rain shower came yesterday they still had a smile on their faces handing out flyers!
https://www.facebook.com/hugobladel/
Hugo was one of those little treasures you encounter strolling between venues.
His recent performances prior to the Fringe include opening for Bliss N Esso, Vera Blue and ILLY at the Australian Open as well as main stage slots at Falls Festival and Party In The Paddock.
The singer/ songwriter from Hobart Australia has been trained on various instruments including guitar, bass and piano. He is also a trained circus performer and this high energy comes across in his performance.
What really stood out though is Hugo ability to engage with the audience, and I saw first-hand as he went around the gathered circle of enthusiastic spectators to incorporate them into his routine, which Hugo did with a gentle, kind humour.
His improvisation skills we saw though were nothing compared to the show he put on for the Prime Minister when she visited Edinburgh last week.
A five star ‘ad lobbying‘ performance Hugo. Enjoy your Fringe!
2nd-19th August (not 15th) – £10
Where to take a 12 year old boy at the Fringe? That was the dilemma we faced last Saturday. And it is a dilemma many parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts face – clowns and sing-a-longs no longer hold an appeal and many Fringe shows are <cough> targeted at a mature audience; even some it would seem with a 12+ suitability guidance in the listings.
With some creative filtering on the Fringe website, and an approval stamp at the ready, we let our 12 year old Tom loose on the Ticketing site. After two quick picks and even hastier ‘adult content’ rejections, he stumbled upon ‘The Time Machine’. In hindsight he could not have picked a better show for his first Fringe experience.
The venue itself was very child friendly with lots of interactive displays in the waiting area to entertain and educate ahead of the show.
The team behind the show, collectively the Scientific Romance Theatre Company, are veterans of Scottish children’s theatre, so my expectations of the show were high.
The team had no easy task – to simplify H G Well’s complex novel and bring it to the small stage was not an easy problem to solve. Neither was making the well-known tale accessible to a young audience.
For the most part, the team succeeded. The team use a mixture of acting and puppetry to bring the novel to life. Deborah Arnott, Matt Rudkin and Rick Conte all gave assured performances, with stand out performance on the night coming from Deborah Arnott who played both the housekeeper and the Morlock leader.
At times the play’s themes become quite dark, with visuals, Victorian earnestness and eerie sound effects to match. This could be a problem for a younger audience, but the puppets brought a necessary comical interlude, especially Weena, the young Eloi who the Time Traveller befriends 800,000 years in the future.
Others have remarked that the set detracted from the story, and that a little bit more budget could have been spent on transforming the Victorian Living Room into a landscape from the future. I did not find this a distraction personally, and I am sure the younger audience members had adequate imaginations to compensate for this.
Overall, as an adult reviewer I would give the show four stars. That being said, I am not the target audience, and Tom, my ‘younger reviewer’ absolutely loved the show. In fact, he talked about it for at least two hours afterwards, wanted to read H G Wells, and asked at least a dozen questions as we made our way up the Royal Mile on the possibility of time travel, whether we would end up as Eloi or Morlocks and when we could see another show.
If the aim of the show was to encourage literacy, an interest in science and develop an early love of theatre, then the Scientific Romance Theatre Company have clearly won with this show. And for encouraging such interests in young people, I award an extra star!
During Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival, the number of people swarming the streets expands. Drastically. A city, normally of approximately 400 thousand, doubles through most of August, and it is easy to see why.
In 2017 there were 2.69 million tickets sold at the event, with people lining up to see just some of the 53,232 performances occurring throughout Edinburgh.
Unfortunately though, unless visitors have a time machine and unlimited spending money, there’s no way they can see all these shows, and the artists themselves are acutely aware of this.
To get around this, performers hand out flyers to promote their work, which is somewhat of a tradition at Fringe. This grass roots method is reasonably cheap, simple and is a great way for entertainers to proactively engage with the public.
But as popular as this strategy is, it doesn’t come without flaws. The amount of rubbish created at Fringe is enormous. Bins quickly overflow and the streets pile up with thrown aside litter, flyers included.
All this mess may not have been a problem too long ago, but recently things have changed.
By 2020 Edinburgh aims to reduce energy consumption by 14% in all major sectors. These efforts are partly due to UN policies, which have urged quick action to mitigate and adapt against climate change, and the city intends to cut CO2 emissions by 40% before 2020.
With sustainability goals now of paramount importance, is all this waste really necessary?
The issue with paper production is that it is an energy intensive process.
A 2016 report led by Climate Strategies and DIW Berlin suggests that European Pulp and Paper Industries are using 13.3 Gigajoules (3.69 megawatts) of energy per tonne of paper produced. This is just below the average energy use of a UK household in a month. There are also toxins produced as a side effect of paper production, particularly during pulping and bleaching, which can add to air, water and land pollution.
Fortunately CO2 emissions from European Pulp and Paper Industries are relatively low. 55% of the production energy comes from biomass and 38% from natural gas. Many of the fibres used to create the pulp comes from recycled paper, which greatly minimises waste to landfill.
Even so, increased efforts of sustainability at Fringe are essential if Edinburgh is to achieve its 2020 goals. Reduced flyering would cut down on unnecessary paper production emissions, transportation emissions, toxic waste and would go a long way towards keeping Edinburgh streets clean.
This being the case there are now innovative strategies Fringe organisers can use to reduce flyer waste and other rubbish, while still maximising promotion for performers.
Mobile apps are just one simple way of achieving this. Many individuals use their mobiles to find information on everything. If there was an app that had information on all upcoming shows, there would be little need for people to pick up flyers around every corner.
Digitization can also reduce the need for flyering if utilized by the performers themselves. For instance, it is recommended to artists that they use a diverse range of marketing strategies to attract visitors. This includes poster advertising, social media, press releases, online advertising and other marketing methods. Indirectly this means the need for flyer advertising could decrease substantially.
There are also incentives offered by Fringe Festival, which go a long way towards promoting sustainability practices. The Green Arts Initiative encourages performers to engage in environmental activities.
Working with this scheme in mind, artists may use reusable props during their show, travel more sustainably through use of public transport or a bicycle, and may even use recycled paper for their flyers.
Performers who participate in the initiative also have the chance of competing for the Fringe Sustainability Practice Award. Since first introduced in 2010, winners of the award have been innovative in their attempts to spread environmental awareness.
Towers of Eden sketch by Outland Theatre. Winning show of Sustainability Practice Award 2017
So with great efforts being made to move towards digitization and to encourage green practice, what can be done to reduce the need for flyering on a more practical level?
Extra bins are one simple way of decreasing street litter, which is done every year at Fringe. But this could be taken a step further if incentives were offered to the public.
At some festivals, waste levels are kept low through reuse or clean-up initiatives. As an example the Stepping Stones Festival hands out reusable cups to all festival goers on arrival. On departure if they return their reusable cup they get the deposit back, and this method works well.
Other festivals hand out rubbish bags to all attendees, again offering an incentive of a deposit reimbursement if the rubbish bag is returned full when they leave the event. One rubbish bag is not much, but when everyone contributes this can make the clean up process extremely efficient.
If Fringe Festival were to offer similar incentives to the public, this could substantially reduce flyer waste. For example a payment schemes if a certain number of flyers were returned to the show.
But overall it seems like the festival organisers are well on their to making Fringe a green event, with sustainability practices being promoted heavily. The diverse marketing opportunities through digitization are also decreasing the need for flyering, and its not inconceivable that the festival may one day be paperless.
If there were incentives for the public to pick up rubbish and flyers, this could potentially cut out street litter altogether.
Matthew Turner is an Environmental writer based in Eastbourne.
Yesterday brought out the crowds and not surprisingly, the performers wanting to advertise their shows. One such show which caught our eye was Sisu by Suraa productions.
Their show description read as follows:
”Finnish Oulu traditional dance and folk music combines traditional Scottish dance and contemporary dance styles. An exploration in dance of what it means to be Finnish and to be Scottish, performed by Finnish and Scottish dancers of all ages”
The ladies did a marvellous wee routine on the Royal Mile but told us this was their last evening of performing. Our Article title was all-Finnished? as the flyer actually stated there would be performances the 2nd to the 9th of August. Oddly, the Fringe website shows no tickets available but that they would be performing 20th to the 24th of August at the C Aquila. Neither of which ties in with them performing yesterday!
Well Ladies, if you are performing next week, next year or never again, we wish you well. And here is your moment on the Royal Mile captured for all. Kiitos! Hyvin hoidettu!