Our last full day in Edinburgh was the usual frenetic activities followed by and a couple of hours of wondering what to do. It would be hard to fill your day completely and knackering too so you are left with pockets of time sat in coffee shops waiting to move on.
It is also quite difficult to find things to do in the mornings as the Fringe doesn’t really get going until the afternoon and extends out late into the night. There are, however, one or two things on and this morning we went to The Big Bite-Size Breakfast Show. It was a late breakfast at 10:30 but it did provide drinks and a croissant.
We’d forgotten what we’d booked for and automatically assumed that it was comedians but it turned out to be six plays of ten minutes each with up to five actors. They were very good although once again everyone in our party agreed that the strongest play was the first which meant the subsequent ones struggled slightly.
Ten minutes is not a lot of time to fit a story into but most managed to do what they did incredibly well while others could have done with being fleshed out more. All in all though a strong start to the day.
Game on
After lunch we stepped away from the Fringe and headed to the National Museum of Scotland to visit a temporary exhibition called Game On. I love NMS it is such a beautiful place (inside). It’s very cleverly done too as you enter at ground level which dark and then you walk up the stairs to the atrium which is brilliantly lit. The permanent exhibits are worth a wander round and we did that before heading to the exhibition.
I’m not a gamer and Game On really reenforced this for me as there were about 100 playable games inside from consoles to arcade machines to mobile devices. When I say “playable” I mean playable to some but not me. I did try but I just don’t seem to be able to get the hang of the controls and, probably, give up too quickly. I spent a hour in there watching other people skilfully race and shoot and dance before I decided that I’d had enough and wandered out leaving the rest of the party to continue.
Not her best work
Later in the afternoon we’d booked to see Agatha Christie’s The Rats a short play put on in the conference room of a hotel (they really do turn every space into a perfomance space during the Fringe).
If you are wondering why you have never heard of The Rat I can answer that for you – it’s not one of Christie’s best works. I’d say it was mediocre at best. The women putting on the play were fine but the story just didn’t work for me and it had no conclusion or twist which seems unusual for her work.
End on a high
Turns out that we had saved the best to last (imho). This bit of serendipitous scheduling was simply a matter of luck as Adam Kay was only playing one night.
I’ve seen Kay at least once before and read a couple of his books so I knew what to expect: “this isn’t comedy but there isn’t a section in the Fringe for ‘Man reading out loud’”. He’s right, it’s not comedy but it is incredibly funny and the only show that had me doubled up in laughter with tears streaming down my face.
Since the last book/show there’d been a new addition to the Kay family in the form of a baby girl born to a surrogate in the US. In an odd twist of fate given Kay’s previous career the child was born prematurely and, as the show ended, you were left wondering what had happened to the child. Reenter Kay holding up a smiling and waving two year old which answered that question. He’s obviously a bad parent keeping her up so late though!
