Learning from Less
How small audiences lead to big lessons. Also, Love for The Bear, hearing from older women and diving into trauma porn.
When I first heard Georgie Grier had one person in the audience of her Edinburgh Fringe show I thought
‘And?’
It was the first day of the festival. What did she expect?!
Now come on, that’s a little harsh.
Of course she expected more. She definitely dreamt and hoped for more. But the reality of fringe theatre, at an international festival that has been over saturated for years now, is that one person in your audience is an audience.
I once woke a woman up during one of my shows. She was taking a kip on the front row.
I was also in a play that performed to three people one night. The three people were my family.
I never begrudged the small shows though. They were the ones I learnt the most from. Your concentration level has to be at an all time high. You have to be more nuanced. You need to listen to your audience more.
Besides more bums on seats I’m not sure what Georgie Grier will gain from having her tears go viral and well known comedians offering her sympathy {Interestingly her Instagram page has now gone private}
The people seeing her show from now on won’t be organic. Are they really interested in what she has to say? Surely they’re just going because she was a headline and people want to feel a part of something these days?
Does it matter how she got her audience though? Once they’re in, they’re in and then it’s her job to keep them there, right?
I went to the Edinburgh Festival a thousand years ago and to this day have no desire to ever go back to Edinburgh let alone the festival.
It’s a behemouth.
Back in 2012 I wrote a chapter about it for my, as yet unpublished, memoir {No, I don’t know why it’s not published either! Thanks for asking} called ‘Not so funny girl’ {Ah….Maybe the clues in the title…}
It was still fresh in my mind back then and I wanted to remember it as fairly recent history. Not look back at it with the wisdom {PAH!} of age or analysed hindsight.
On rereading it I feel all the pain and shame and heartache I experienced that summer. It’s an amusing story now and I’m proud I did it but I guess in 2012 the PTSD hadn’t kicked in yet. I end on a surprisingly positive note! You could not pay me to go back and be in Georgie’s shoes now.
I understand the tears she shed on that first day.
{Dancing with the devil}
Chapter. 10.
If you decide to take a show up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival you need to be aware of the following things:
Get used to the fact that what you are essentially doing with your money is using it as kindling. Taking a show up there costs so much money that I know people who are still paying off debts from the 90’s. The 1890’s that is.
Get used to being damp. Permanently. Not a good damp like your knickers or a cold flannel when you’ve got a temperature but damp that smells of dogs. Nothing dries in Edinburgh. Your towels, your washed clothes, your unwashed clothes, your rain/beer/puke sodden clothes. The heating turned to constant in August is a necessity to combat rheumatic fever.
If you are not good at networking you might as well stay on the train you arrived on as it returns back home. Being successful in Edinburgh is all about word of mouth. Who you know. Interviews. Networking. Talking the talk. Communicating and telling people what you really think of their show when you’re drunk....and then waking up next to them the next morning.
Learn to be a good editor. Finding and patching together a good line from a bad review is an art and one that I should win the Turner prize for.
Don’t take heels to the festival as Edinburgh is very hilly and full of cobbles. I lost an entire sole off a pair of brogues whilst up there.
Just like putting out a flame with your fingers or touching Ed Milliband’s hand {of which I have done both} the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is exciting and daring. If you can succeed there and come back alive then you can do anything.
ANYTHING I TELL YOU!!
I took on the great challenge of heading t’up north, past the t’upness and into the och eyeness, in 2009 with my tiny one woman show and performed it every day for the month of August. It was one of the best and worst things I have ever done.
And I’m saying that having had a shaved head at one point in my life.
My time slot at the Pleasance venues in Edinburgh was 4.45pm in a place called The Hut. Sounds cuter than it was. In reality it was a portakabin in a car park.
The aim of every day was to flyer my show for a good couple of hours beforehand, get people interested in my character comedy show, head on over to the hut and then perform my hour long show to an audience of 25-35 people.
Not on one day did this become a reality.
On the very first day, as I stepped into the Pleasance courtyard, I knew it was all going to be downhill from that point. It was like standing in the middle of the five lanes of traffic on Vauxhall roundabout and trying to survive. This is when the gift of the gab was supposed to come into play and I needed to make my show stand out from thousands of others
‘Hey guys! You free at 4.45 today? You are? Brill! Why don’t you come see this amazing one woman show? Here take a flyer. Time Out said I was excellent’
This never happened of course because I was far too timid to ever approach someone with that amount of enthusiasm about an A5 piece of card with my face plastered all over it. Also I neglected to tell them that although Time Out did say I was excellent, they said it back in 2002 when I was in somebody else’s show.
See! Cutting and pasting is an art form.
I sat paralysed to a bench, clutching my flyers, for an hour and a half. I rang Tessa who was at work
‘I hate it already’ I wailed ‘Everyone is really confident and I feel so small and I can’t flyer’
‘Of course you can! You haven’t lost the use of your arms have you?’ She chastised.
‘No. But I might as well have!’
‘Come on you’ll be fine’ she told me ‘Just get chatting with people about something like the weather or being in Edinburgh and then give them your flyer’
‘That is so not natural! They’ll see right through me!!’ I cried.
I can’t stand someone pretending to make small talk with me when really they’re trying to sell me something. Just cut straight to the chase and skip the bullshit ‘I like your skirt. Is it Margaret Howell?’ talk.
‘Not everyone is as cynical as you.’ She told me ‘Go and get yourself a little drink that’ll calm your nerves.’
‘It’s 11.45 in the morning.’ I told her looking around for the bar.
‘So. It’ll calm your nerves. Look, Lucy and I will be there in two days time and we can help with the flyering....as well as the daytime drinking. I’m sure you can survive two days can’t you?’
Whether I could or not was not a question. I was going to have to if I was to make it past the first round of heats in ‘The Dance with the Devil’ competition. I ended my conversation with Tessa, stood up and went straight over to a young couple sat at a nearby table.
‘Hey guys, if you’re free at 4.45pm today I’m doing a little show in the hut venue over the road’ I said passing them a flyer with a shaking hand.
To my amazement they took it. RESULT!
‘It’s a show about six women and I play all the characters’ I continued. They were reading the flyer and listening to what I had to say. I couldn’t believe my luck. Maybe this wasn’t going to be as hard as I’d thought. One flyer down, 9,999 to go.
‘This looks great’ The girl said to me ‘But I’m afraid we’re going to see Nick Mohammed at 4.45pm’ She replied as she handed me the flyer back. ‘Sorry but I hope it goes well for you’
DAMN! 10,000 flyers still to go.
I carried on like this for the next hour. Scared and flyering. I stopped every ten minutes to smoke a cigarette and pretended I had to do something on my phone. It made me look busy but it also willed away minutes which, in that courtyard, felt like weeks.
It wasn’t all bad though.
I did get a few people saying they’d come to my show. I had a very hard time not sinking to my knees in front of them and kissing their feet. After 3 hours of being permanently petrified I was exhausted and decided I needed to eat something to regain my strength ready for my show. I was in Edinburgh though so food was the equivalent of 4 cigarettes. I wandered over to the picnic tables at the top of the courtyard and then I saw him.
Bobbi.
He was like a light at the end of a dark tunnel. A £20 note found on the street. He was Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the armies of the North, general of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor.
Only taller. And less of a twat.
My saviour was here and should a tiger be let loose on me in this gladiatorial arena, known as the Pleasance courtyard, he would have my back.
I had totally forgotten that he was coming up to film Rick Edwards for T4. He’s a producer/director for TV but, much to his annoyance, I still think he’s a cameraman and tell everyone so.
FYI apparently there is a big difference between the two careers. Big. Huge.
He was stood talking to That Man That I Loved – oh yeah, he was also in Edinburgh doing a show, being successful and calm and having fun flyering - both of them tall and handsome, both of them huge, important parts of my life.
One from the past and one a constant.
I had an enormous smile plastered on my face as I headed over to them and wrapped my arms around the constant. I knew that everything would now be alright.
‘Ow! Re! Careful’ Bob winced as he unlatched my vicelike grip from around him. ‘Don’t squeeze too tight’
‘Ehhh….What?! Why? What was going on with this man mountain stood before me?!
‘I’ve only just come out of hospital’ He told me
‘What the FUCK?’ I cried
‘I went in because I had chest pains.’
‘WHAAT!’ I now whispered not really believing what he was saying. ‘Did you have a heart attack?’
‘I didn’t. But I thought I was having one. Re, it was awful.’ He said softly
‘Oh mate! How did this happen?’ I asked looking up at my saviour with worried eyes.
‘I thought it was because I ate 4 sticky toffee puddings that afternoon…’
‘….Oh…’
‘... but it wasn’t that.’
‘Right…’
‘They don’t know what happened as they’re waiting on test results but I have to take it easy and I’m off the booze’
‘NO! How can you be so selfish?’ I cried now looking at him with gutted eyes.
‘I know. Bad isn’t it? I’m sorry’ He told me. ‘Anyway, How’s it all going? I saw you from across the courtyard and you looked terrified’
‘Well, I’m better than I was a couple of hours ago. I just need to get more people in to see my show. Do you reckon all your lot will want to come and see my show as well?’ I asked knowing that he was always with at least 6 or 7 people when he did these jobs.
‘As well as who?’ he asked looking puzzled.
‘Er...as well as you’
‘Ah...shit...I’m sorry mate but I don’t think I’m going to be able to come and see your show because I’ll be working’ he said looking genuinely guilty.
‘FUCK OFF! No drinking AND no bums on seats? I don’t know if I can call you my friend anymore!’
‘Listen, I might be able to make it up to you. I’m doing some filming later in the courtyard with Rick and I’ll try and get you involved.’ His name was called from a group of people nearby. ‘I’ve gotta go.’ He said squeezing me as tightly as his poorly heart could manage.‘Don’t look so worried. You’re gonna be fine.’
‘Ok.’ I replied as I saw his massive parka disappear into the crowds of people. ‘Can you bring some food with you next time I see you?’
I phoned everyone I knew and told them I was going to be on T4 that Saturday. Big Agent was impressed with my first day success. Sister With Massive Laugh screamed down the phone in a Scottish accent. It was going to be amazing.
I’d get loads of publicity.
People would come and see my show.
I‘d get brilliant reviews and I’d no doubt win best newcomer at The comedy awards.
Easy Peasy.
After I finished my first show, which went ok - not amazing, 20 people, it was a good start - I headed back into the courtyard to look for Bobbi.
I found him and his crew in the top corner. They were already filming Rick Edward and……That Man That I Loved.
Bobbi was stood behind the camera and found my eyes which now looked back at him with four letter expletives spilling out of them.
‘Mate. I’m so sorry’ he mouthed at me.
After a wobbly start I realised that I simply needed to get my head down and get on with performing my show to the best of my ability. And this is where, every day at 4.45pm, I would start to feel ok.
Regardless of the weather, how many people I’d managed to not flyer or how sad and useless I felt when I found my friend Gemma crying in the courtyard one day, at 4.45pm I would surrender to the six women I had to perform for the next hour.
A calmness would wash over me.
I would head over to my hut with mini hut next door {the changing room} and get ready for my show that I loved. And I did love it. I knew it wasn’t the best out there or, by a long stretch of the imagination, the funniest. I also knew that at times it was bittersweet and far too wordy but, for the whole of August, I was not doing my day job and that made me very happy.
I was in charge of my future and I was doing what I had always dreamt of - Losing a shit load of money in another country Performing my own work.
Every single day I learnt something new about my show. I learnt – pretty early on – that I don’t write jokes. I learnt that I speed up to a rate of knots when nervous and most importantly I learnt that when it rained on the roof of The Hut I had to shout to be heard.
The real lessons came with the reviews which, after hearing about my first one, I learnt not to read. I knew a reviewer was in on my second show. I’d wanted to get them in early so I could get my quotes plastered all over my posters. I didn’t realise that my critique would go up online so quickly.
On day three the buzz around the courtyard was that That Man That I Loved had received a 5 star review already. I bumped into him flyering that morning
‘Hey you, I hear you got 5 stars! That’s amazing!’ I said ‘Well done’
‘Thanks, it went up early. Yours is there too’ He told me.
‘Is it?’ How exciting! This was going to be my first proper review of my own writing.
‘Yeah, there’s only two up so far. Yours and mine.
There was a pause
‘Have you not read it then?’ He asked with a funny look on his face.
‘No.’ I replied wondering why his face looked the way it did.
‘Don’t read it’ He said gently.
Then I looked harder and I worked out what the look was saying. It read:
‘I have known you since you were 20 years old and, like the smell of guts on a fishmonger’s hands, some things about you will never leave me. A) You can’t sing. B) When you laugh really hard you look like a horse and C) You cry. A lot. Trust me because I have never lied to you. Don’t read your review. You have to survive up here, on your own, for the rest of the month and you’re not strong enough yet’
He was right.
He had never lied to me and if he had then he’d done it really well because I’d never sussed him out.
I didn’t read my review until November of that year and even then I got somebody else to read it for me. I was at Tessa’s having dinner one night and made some poor man, who’d never met me before, read aloud my one star review.
ONE STAR!!! Oh the pain and the shame.
Gaining one star is as bad as you can get. It’s sitting next to a family with young children on a long haul flight, trapping a finger in the car door and wearing super low rise jeans all rolled into one.
I managed to survive though because what Fest mag didn’t realise is that I was ungraded in two of my A-levels.
I was used to rising from the ashes and had mastered the art of polishing a turd.
For the purposes of laughing in the face of adversity and embracing the knock backs of life, I have included the first ever review of my own work from August 2009:
One STAR
BY LYLE BRENNAN | PUBLISHED 07 AUGUST 2009
Fringe newcomer Andrea Donovan has a long way to go. This one-woman character comedy flounders in unchallenging territory, peddling out tentatively risqué quirkiness. The show’s lack of comic substance means precious few laughs smothered by incidental detail, and it's as though she's more concerned with sculpting setting within a sketch than with entertaining her audience.
The desperation of each of Donovan's six personas could seem to account for their feeble humour – but the apparent lack of knowing with which mother-in-law jokes and penis gags are delivered means that it’s near-impossible to appreciate them on any higher level. What’s more, her anti-heroines are distinctly stale – take Kathleen, a forgery of the patronising, callous life coach exhausted years ago by Little Britain and The League of Gentlemen.
Donovan, 30, is obviously an accomplished performer; her spark could easily flourish with better scripts. As she darts between shrill, giddy toff and motherly Geordie, her accent rarely slips, though elsewhere a wrong turn leaves her drawling away somewhere between New York and Johannesburg. Whether she’s yelping naughty words like ‘fanny’ until the audience surrenders a titter or smugly naming a character Yoni, Donovan fails to realise that even the crudest joke requires thought. For her, it seems, the summit of naughty humour is a tale of a fling with a hermaphrodite. Meanwhile, characters like dreary, Brummie Audrey are clear attempts at embarrassingly familiar caricature – but here the audience is left cringing for all the wrong reasons.
For this, Lyle Brennan of Fest Mag, I would like to say thank you.
At the time of publication I was actually 31.
The festival wasn’t all sloppy journalism {BURN!} and painful self promotion though; I had some really good times up there. I managed one, just the one, sell out show when my ‘day job bosses’ came to see me. I saw some great theatre and comedy, met new friends.
Tim and Sister With Massive Laugh came up to stay for 4 days. I made them see my show every day they were there and always put Sister With Massive Laugh in the front due to aforementioned massive laugh. It’s highly infectious. At one of my gigs earlier in the year, her friend Dan, said he didn’t know whether he was laughing more at me on stage or at her laughing at me on stage. I discovered Frisky and Mannish and Ginger and Black, ate the best sushi and spent my last day in Edinburgh hanging out with Lionel Blair.
On that final day I headed off to The Hut for the very last time and performed my best show of the month. It was only to 7 people, 4 of them staff, but that didn’t matter. I marvelled at what a strange and hard but ultimately amazing place the Edinburgh Festival was. I had loved every single minute of it, even the bad bits, and vowed that, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, one day I would be back.
Preferably with Danny Devito playing my twin.
Berlin | Feb 2016
The Contents of My Consumption
~ Watching ~
It’s an adrenaline inducing ride in Carmine Berzatto’s kitchen but it’s so worth it. A family drama set in a small Chicago restaurant that is possibly on it’s knees….but of course that’s the journey you’re going to have to go on. Yes it’s a drama but it’s also incredibly funny at times. The characters are some of the best I’ve seen in years and I think about them often {Neil Fak. Thank me later}
Season 2 arrived just over a month ago with a whole host of famous faces in it desperate to be a part of such excellent writing. Trust me when I say don’t binge it. You’ll be sad when they all leave you.
I’ve not seen anything else like it. SO original and strange and dark. Ali Wong and Steven Yuen are excellent, and incredibly believable, as raging enemies who struggle with just how hard everyday life can be and how it can manifest itself as anger.
~ Listening ~
Wiser than me with Julia Louis Dreyfus: Rhea Pearlman | Apple podcasts
Frustrated with why we don’t hear from, and about, older women Julia Louis Dreyfrus set up a podcast that celebrates those women and is interested in learning from their life experience. BOOM! I’m in. I was in from the trailer. She’s a great interviewer ~ which isn’t always the case for none broadcasters who branch out. I found something inspiring in all the women she talks to {Jane Fonda’s one is worth a listen ~ Exercise will help you so much later in life and bad posture makes you looks older} but with Rhea I was surprised by how articulate and generous and thoughtful she was. More Pearlman in our lives please!
~ Reading ~
A Little Life | Hanya Yanagihara
I had the book on my shelf for years. Too afraid to go there. Then I heard it was coming to the Westend and didn’t want to hear any spoilers. To say I loved it feels strange as this tome has been dubbed trauma porn…But I loved it. I read it in 10 days. I just couldn’t put it down. Enticing storylines, great characters, heartbreaking scenes. Read it and then come discuss. In the words of my friend Soph ~ Here to talk through at every stage. You might need it!
How Deborah Levy can change your life | The Guardian
I’ve only read one of Deborah Levy’s books but fell in love with her writing straight away. This Guardian Long read made me fall in love even deeper. It’s a great insight into her life as well as her writing. She is the sort of person who makes the mundane remarkable ~ is how one friend described her. I mean who doesn’t want to be around that person? Also how she has curated her life after her divorce ~ goes off to write in her Paris flat for weeks on end ~ is everything I aspire to be. Bring on the divorce I say…
Istanbul | May 2022
And that’s your lot. Thanks for reading, Gang.
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Unless it’s a one star review and then you can just comment to yourself.
See you in a couple of weeks when I will be diving into the Barbie debate and intertwining it with a teenage boys thoughts…..You won’t wanna miss it!
There will be Barbie spoilers though so if you haven’t seen it yet ~ Get thee to a cinema!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ thoroughly enjoyed and yet marvelled on how brutally honest you are with yourself and your journey!
More of this please, as creatives only seem to show the shiny side and it’s boring if not fake.
reflection is growth right?
Keep up the awesome work, I’ll share on my socials and rich people dem please pledge your support!
Loved your piece on the Edinburgh fringe, felt like i was there flyering in your place. We were all booked to take Bed 13 to the fringe. We did some fundraising (quiz nights, a musical soirée!). But everything, the venue, registration, flyers, accommodation (for cast and crew of 10) cost a small fortune. I spent hours working out sums on scraps of paper. It always involved the total outlay already committed (without props, costume, travel, food, drink etc) against different hypothetical audience sizes. We needed to be at least half full (25 people) every night just to break even. I had a single recrring dream of us performing in the venue with a single person.in the front row - who left half way through. When covid put paid to the fringe i was hugely disappointed. But also hugely relieved. Think we dodged a (financial) bullet.
Looking forward to your Barbie review. Went to see ir with my 34 year old daughter who, to my feminist shame, had loads of Barbies and a pink horse and carriage. One day i went into her bedroom to find her doing the thing in the film with the scissors and the felt tipped pens. She looked up at me a bit guiltily but i felt so proud of her! Re the film, we had some crticisms, but we laughed A LOT.