Edinburgh: Where Theatre Comes to Die

Over the next week I will be writing criticism at perhaps the worst possible location for one to write criticism - the Edinburgh Fringe - the home of star ratings and grabby taglines, as well as performing my own theatrical monologue End of Species to be presented together with a nightly forum with climate change scientists at a secret location in Summerhall.


I LOVED IT *****!!!! is all that any artist coming here wants to read. So I fully expect to find nothing here, and no reward for anything that might pass as actual critical writing. Sitting in the courtyard at Summerhall - you can almost explode with the conveyer-belt of flyers, pedalled by desperate artists in cut-throat competition. For what? One may well ask. To tear at the few scraps of what was once theatre? Looking around, you can't help thinking that, if there is a place where theatre comes to begin a longer journey into the public consciousness and eventually into history,  this isn't it. This is a place where theatre comes to die - where it has finally exhausted all that it can give.

There will be nothing here. So why am I here?

Perhaps, as a friend suggested to me today - I am here to be proven wrong. I am certainly ready for that.