We here at Theatre Bubble aren’t up for giving out the ‘big’ awards of the year, there seem to be enough prizes these days already celebrating the best new writing, or the best one liners. And we thoroughly encourage you to apply for them.
But at this venerable website we like to reward the more arbitrary events at the Edinburgh Fringe – the strange, the fantastic, the weird. Be it, for example, ‘the most enthusiastic watermelon smashing’ or the ‘least enthusiastic flyering attempt’ then we want to hear about it, and we want to give it the small level of exposure that these awards provide.
Come back every day from August 5th to hear what our Totally Arbitrary Theatre Awards (TATAs) is – you never know it might be you!
Day 1: August 5th – ‘Most Creative use of Bellows in a Stage Show’
Le Bossu was a pretty startling and fantastic piece of theatre from withWings. There’ll be a pretty rave review out for it soon, but we wanted to award it our first TATA of the Fringe too.
We could have given the show a number of arbitrary awards, be they ‘subtlest use of the macarena in a production’ or even ‘most artistic use of the kazoo’. But tonight we’d like to award withWings the award for the ‘Most Creative use of Bellows in a stage show’ – there puppet pigeons were a marvellous sight and a treat to watch!
Day 2: August 6th – ‘Most Erotic Taking Off of a Shoe’
The stage for Chung Ying Theatre Company’s A Tale of Two Cities was an elegant grid of wooden chairs, each placed above a pair of shoes. The putting on and taking off of shoes was a neat motif throughout—one which, happily, the company resisted the temptation to overuse. But when Sydney removes Lucie’s high heels, the sense of release was visceral. Brought to heel! (Seriously? Ed.)
Day 3: August 7th – ‘Best Blackout Ever’
Our reviewer Alexander Hartley recently came back for watching ‘Cut’, the site specific show at Underbelly Med Quad. While raving about various aspects of the show, he put a particular emphasis on the blackouts – namely how truly ‘black’ they were. ‘You would close your eyes and open them, and it wouldn’t make any difference!’.
Congratulations on your best blackouts Cut, and enjoy the rest of your run!
Day 4: August 8th – ‘Ability for two shows to forget Horatio ON THE SAME DAY’
This is a strange one, so hear me out. After catching a rather superb Callisto at the Pleasance Dome from 11:50am, almost 12 hours later I was treated to the equally superb Yuri, currently playing at Underbelly Cowgate. Both shows, due to some stroke of artistic imagination, included an off the cuff reference to the Hamlet line: ‘There are more things in heaven and Earth, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.
My body went cold – the same line, referenced twice, in two different plays, on the same day. Why would they appear? Was it a coincidence? Is there such a thing as coincidence?
Stranger still, both shows managed to omit the word ‘Horatio’. Ominous signs, it must be said, for Day 4 of the Fringe.
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