Opinion: First Love at the Edinburgh Fringe
One of the pioneers of Alternative Cabaret, Charmian Hughes writes of doomed love at the Edinburgh Fringe
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First love has a power that never dies.
I met my first love at school, in the sixth form, and my second love and my third. All excellent boys: They broke my heart in their own wonderful ways, or maybe I broke my own. Wherever they are now (OK I’ve googled them), I hope they have happy lives. From time to time I’ll catch a whiff of their essence – on a park bench in St James Park, drifting under the moon-shaped lamps on Primrose Hill, in the wake of a lonely gull on the Essex marshes. But our shared moment is strictly in the past.
Like first love, the Edinburgh Fringe can seem like a moment in time rather than a real place or actual event. It comes into sudden being, clamps onto the city like the suckers of the colossal squid, squeezes the life out of it and then is gone. Every festival is different, yet none feels unfamiliar. An annual Brigadoon, fleshed out by our adventure and passion. Jaded comedians, squealing student drama troupes, and audiences in varying states of anticipation or mystification, join the river of humans flowing through the streets. They wash up in sauna-like venues and pop-up bars, budget hostels and five-star hotels, state funded theatres, and Ladyboys of Bangkok circus tents.
Performing at the Fringe is intense enough but falling in love at the Fringe is Extreme Jeopardy. Your heart is already full of self-love and self-doubt, your judgement is warped. We are all in the same boat – but we are often not who we appear to be. In the late eighties, I went to the Fringe with my exciting new comedian boyfriend. I performed in The Hole In The Ground, a venue consisting of a ‘bender’ on the building site that later became the new Traverse Theatre. It was all so dramatic! And romantic! And sexy! We tried to be like cool couples in films, doing shenanigans behind the bins in a stranger’s garden, but ended up covered in someone else’s horrible chips and special brew. You could just about get away with this at the Fringe, but at home people were a lot more precious about their bins.
In an early-90s fringe, I fell in love with a mysterious and ephemeral performance artist. We swept in and out of each other’s shows, but you could never pin him down! He transcended bourgeois definition! We drank, got stoned and danced all night, walked through the Meadows at dawn. We cried when we parted as thwarted soulmates do. When we met up again in London it turned out he was a homeless alcoholic with a personality disorder which still didn’t explain why I had to pay for his train-fare home when he didn’t have one.
The following Fringe, after some psychotherapy, I was in the safer territory of unrequited love. I got a crush on a National Treasure. My path to his heart was to make myself indispensable. I helped on the interactive community improvised in situ theatre production he was doing. I dressed like an Edwardian mental patient and stood chest deep in the sea off Portobello while his crew filmed me, but after all that effort, at the cast party, he still got off with the woman who looked like Ursula Andress – before my hair had even had the chance to dry.
Two years later I had enough of co-performers and married a member of my audience, guaranteeing me oodles of admiration rather than competitive trauma. But come the Edinburgh Fringe, I still can’t go past the bins in a certain street in Stockbridge or smell the fish and chips at Portobello, without feeling that stab of sweet nostalgia...