Our anonymous actor columnist hasn't acted in Edinburgh in many years – but despite the late nights, small audiences, constant flyering and drunken outbursts, the Fringe provided some of the greatest acting experiences of his career. Here, he tells all...
I haven’t played the Edinburgh festival for years, not since the year of the eclipse when we all slogged up Arthur’s Seat and gawped through the clouds at the sun without anything to protect our eyes.
We were raw and drunk and yet completely serious about what we were doing. Hidden behind the f**king and fighting and constant drinking was total commitment to our plays. We protected the characters we played better than we protected ourselves, and the unrefined energy and libido of our student lives fed the charisma of our performances.
It’s strange to remember the sort of actor I was back then, relying on the excitement of youth, using my performances to discover who I was and who I might be. For me acting meant total freedom. There were other actors there with more maturity that knew the care and method and attention good acting required, but as far as I was concerned acting meant a rejection of all those sober values.
Each night was my own little horror show, a stage for my anti-social spirit to dance on. I remember that when a performance went well it felt like rage – it had the same integrity of thought, feeling and motion that rage has. Like a child finding the words for his fury.
We had a slot at a small venue on Princes Street and we performed alternately at 9pm and 1am. Our play was crude and funny and it suited the few pissheads who turned up for the late slot and that lateness played to my idea of theatre as scabby, messy and irreverent.
I was less enamoured by the brutal free market that required more and more ridiculous publicity ruses to draw an audience in. Because of our late slot I wanted to be in bed all day, not making a tit of myself so that people would notice our show.
I was selfish and bullish and constantly in conflict with the producers over my reluctance to flyer the show. I was also actually too shy to perform in the streets for publicity. I needed the costume, the lights, the wall of darkness and the legitimate excuse to perform that a stage gave me. Oddly enough, despite my nightly drunken outrages, I wasn’t a natural exhibitionist.
The lack of professionalism is what makes Edinburgh so special, though there are always managers-in-the-making, ligging around the arts and trying to parrot the commercial world, and agents hawking for a finished product and of course the producers want to organise and make their money back, but for the actors it was a place to kick against the pricks.
Never again will an actor have so little pressure to be polished and professional. So much at Edinburgh is a delightful failure. Everything I’ve learnt about acting since that time has served to quieten me and teach me to be methodical. But having my exuberance indulged by a paying audience was wonderful and my performance in Edinburgh that year is still what my friends remember of my acting.
Nothing I’ve been paid to do has pleased them half as much.
More Actor X:
Banking on success
Currently casting
Read all of Actor X’s previous columns.
IdeasTap will be running a series of career-boosting events at the Underbelly, Bristo Square, Edinburgh, from 8 to 23 August. Find out more on our Edinburgh microsite.
Image: Adam Kesher by djenvert, available under a CC BY-NC-ND license.