Edinburgh's grim endurance test of character

How a comedian survived the Fringe and kept going back.

James Cary

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

Three actors stand on a stage, in costume, surrounding a metal conical structure.

Expensive prop? Check. Just Out of Reach performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2008.

EFFC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This article was first published 22 August 2023.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is probably the greatest arts festival on earth. And it’s getting bigger every year. In 2001, 666 groups presented 1462 shows in 176 venues, selling 873,887 tickets between them. By 2017, everything had doubled. 3398 shows at 300 venues sold 2.9 million tickets. Even Covid19 couldn’t burst the balloon. This year, the Fringe is as big as ever. How does it keep on growing?

I have a controversial theory based on my experience as a Fringe performer. And it’s not about the insatiable demand for tickets, but the strange supply. Let me explain.

Every year, tourists arrive in Scotland’s capital to sample an exciting buffet of comic and dramatic treats, alongside a smorgasbord of bizarre spectacles. It’s a hit-and-miss affair, for sure. But most punters know that most shows are, well, a punt. The fringe programme contains comedians, theatre troupes and performers you’ve never heard of performing something that’s rather hard to get one’s head around, until one’s seen it. And sometimes not even then.

The average Fringe goer might well take in half a dozen shows over a long weekend. One might be a favourite Mock the Week comedian of the telly in a venue that seats 800. But the rest are small, intimate, dank spaces that may be uncomfortably packed, or embarrassingly empty. Again, that’s all part of the experience. Add some beers, some unfamiliar street food and just enough sleep to function, and that’s the Edinburgh Fringe experience.

Spare a thought for the thousands of performers you leave behind. There are the ones trapped in that outré fringe show which runs until the end of the month.

Except it’s only one side of it, oh Fringe goer. As you jump on a train from Waverley station and return to the office with a sore head and some good stories about some weird outré theatre that really didn’t work, spare a thought for the thousands of performers you leave behind. There are the ones trapped in that outré fringe show which runs until the end of the month, doomed to perform the same deeply flawed show twenty-seven times, like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hillside.

If you’re a fringe performer, and I speak from the experience of having performed or produced various shows at the Edinburgh Fringe between 1996 and 2017, things are rather different.

The Edinburgh Fringe is not a talent show where the obscure but gifted performer finds an audience, acclaim and fame through sheer hard work and pluck. That is the experience of a few, but for most, the Fringe is more like running a marathon in the rain wearing an amusing but extremely absorbent fancy-dress costume. It is a test of grim endurance.

It’s not just an endurance of physical stamina, although the odd hours, the alcohol and the ill-advised street food all take their toll. Ultimately, the Edinburgh Fringe is a month-long examination of character. You will experience emotions and feel frustrations that only happen in this annual cauldron of dysfunctional ambition.

It’s not about the show. The 60 minutes spent on stage in front of the barely adequate lights is the straightforward part of your day. The show, even if it’s improvised, is broadly the same each time. How you spend the other 23 hours is real test.

You might think that the task is simple. Every day, you leap out of bed, eat a hearty Scottish breakfast, grab your stack of flyers, and go out and spread the word about your show. No?

Here’s the problem: within a week or so, you’ve worked out that your show is not what you thought it was. What seemed to be an hilarious off-the-wall idea back in February, now seems like a joke worn thin, that technically didn’t quite work in the first place. You are not in contention for an award. Your show doesn’t have any ‘buzz’. Your temporary friends console you that you’re being penalised by doing something different. Or you’re in the wrong slot. Or in the wrong venue. Or getting the wrong audience… when you get an audience.

The expensive prop from your show that is carried around the streets to sell tickets now feels like an albatross around your neck. Your costume hasn’t been washed for over a week and probably never will be. And every punter you speak to has already booked to see the hot new show that has captured the zeitgeist. Oh, and the Cambridge Footlights. And that comedian who was on Mock the Week. Or as it Live at the Apollo? And then they’re going out to dinner with some friends.

At that moment, you remember how much this is costing you, the largest amount of your budget going to your temporary landlady who is currently sunning herself in Malaga having rented you her broom cupboard.

And then it starts to rain.

There’s something about the Edinburgh Fringe that keeps performers coming back year after year. Next year, it’ll be different. And it isn’t.

It appears that I have not made my case for the continual expansion of the Edinburgh Fringe. I have demonstrated a thousand reasons to abandon Auld Reekie and never to return. But let me tell you about what happens next to our hapless performer.

In the short term, the embittered, disenchanted performer may give in to the seven deadly sins, justifying all kinds of self-destructive and narcissistic behaviour. Terrible food, too much booze and ill-advised liaisons. But this is Edinburgh where everything is multiplied many times over. It’s not the seven deadly sins, but seventy-seven deadly sins.

In fact, wait. ‘The Seventy Seven Deadly Sins’? Is that an idea for a show for next year? You start to design the flyer in your head. In the midst of your frustration and exhaustion, you’re already planning your return next year.

Here’s where the wisdom of the ages kicks in which explains my theory. In the Bible, there is a wonderful proverb from King Solomon which runs thus: “As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.” There’s something about the Edinburgh Fringe that keeps performers coming back year after year. Next year, it’ll be different. And it isn’t. But maybe the year after it will be. And so every year, alongside the newcomers, the old timers return with a new show. And the fringe grows a little bit more every year.

Actually, the first half of that proverb sounds like a great title for a Fringe play. And after my years of experience, maybe it’s time I went back…

Review

Culture

Film & TV

4 June 2024

7 min read

The problem with The Three Body Problem

The possibility of love in a universe of terror.

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

a man leans against one end of a table one another sits against its other end.

Two bodies contemplate a problem.

Netflix.

If you are prone to nightmares or paranoia you might want to steer clear of the first season of Netflix’s sci-fi epic, 3 Body Problem. Adapted from Cixin Liu’s multi award-winning Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, the story starts in the Chinese Cultural revolution of the 1960s and ends twelve million years in the future. Mercifully the narrative is non-linear, so we’re spared a minute-by-minute account. It begins as a global mystery - scientists all over the planet are taking their own lives in mysterious circumstances – and ends with advanced alien weaponry collapsing the universe to a single dimension. All based on a true story, apparently.

Why the paranoia? At the heart of both Liu’s novels and the Netflix adaption, is a particularly terrifying solution to the Fermi Paradox. Enrico Fermi was one of the physicists working on the Manhattan Project (played by Danny Defari in the Christopher Nolan depiction of it in Oppenheimer), who presented his now famous paradox to his colleagues at Los Almos. The paradox goes like this: in a galaxy of billions of stars similar to our sun it is almost certain that advanced alien life is out there, and yet we have not received any convincing evidence of their existence. This, it seems, requires some explanation.

Interestingly, this question was also the starting point of C.S. Lewis’ sci-fi cycle The Cosmic Trilogy, and lies behind the title of its first book, Out of the Silent Planet. According to Lewis, the Earth has been placed under a kind of galactic quarantine, as a result of the fall of humanity, nothing and no-one is allowed in or out. The solar system is teeming with life, but we are partitioned from it. We’ve been blocked from the cosmic WhatsApp group for breaching behaviour standards. The aliens are out there but they’re keeping clear. We are the silent planet.

Cixin Liu however opts for a darker and more disturbing solution to Fermi’s question, which provides the title of the second book in his trilogy, The Dark Forest. The aliens are out there, but it is not we who have been silenced, it is they who are silent. The universe, according to this theory, is like a forest filled with predators and the most sensible thing any intelligent life can do is hide in the undergrowth to avoid attracting attention. Telegraphing our existence into the void by sending signals into space is to naively invite destruction. Alerting the universe to our presence is an act of existential self-harm. The universe is silent because everyone is hiding. For Lewis the universe shone with a love from which we had been excluded, for Liu it is saturated with malice from which we should exclude ourselves.

If Nietzsche was right, that we can survive any how as long as we have a why, then Liu’s characters are saddled with the opposite burden: endless hows and no why.

It probably isn’t too much of a spoiler to acknowledge that the inevitable happens. Aliens are contacted. They do make plans to invade. It is arguably a bit more of spoiler to give away exactly how this happens. The distance between them and us is so vast that, even travelling at one percent lightspeed it will take their invasion fleet four hundred years to get here. And in the meantime, just to ensure we can’t mount any meaningful defence against them, they fold a planet-sized computer into a photon-sized particle and send it to earth to sabotage all technological development. They can watch our every movement, overhear every conversation. We know they are coming and can do almost nothing about it. The bodies of suicides hanging in the fog from every lamppost lining the Thames underline the overriding despair. It is deliciously bleak. I did not sleep well after watching it.

Liu’s brilliance is not in doubt. The Netflix adaptation can barely capture the fireworks of creative inventiveness that crowd every page of his books (indeed the producers even dropped the definitive article from the book's title). In China, his fellow science fiction writers simply call him ‘Da Liu’ (Big Liu) in honour of his works of towering imagination. But I can’t help feeling that the overall atmosphere of The Three Body Problem is an example of what the theologian Carver Yu, another Chinese author, claimed characterised our culture: technological optimism and literary despair. Liu’s characters respond to the relentless encroachment of a malevolent universe with endless technological innovation. They possess an inexplicable will to survive in a cosmos where no one would wish to live. If Nietzsche was right, that we can survive any how as long as we have a why, then Liu’s characters are saddled with the opposite burden: endless hows and no why. They are thirsting for purpose while drowning in applications.

What struck me most watching the Netflix adaptation was that it seemed to extend the experience of living in a post-industrial society to the whole universe. Our sense that many of the organisations to which we owe our allegiance are clever but inhuman, technologically advanced yet amoral, is expanded to fill the farthest reaches of our imagination. Of course, human beings have always done this. Our ancestors saw faces in the clouds and gods in the constellations. We peer into the emptiness of the skies and populate them with our fears and hopes. Faced with the Copernican revolution and the rise of science, Pascal anticipated the cosmic horror of Liu by nearly four hundred years in confessing, ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.’ The Three Body Problem, unlike Lewis who saw planet Earth as an aberration in an otherwise benevolent cosmos, takes our global technological arms-race and makes it the ultimate reality of the entire universe.

The crucial point is that we are not obliged to populate the blank canvas of the cosmos with the malice of Liu or the terror of Pascal.

The Three Body Problem then, like much science fiction, is a valuable and ingenious thought-experiment, but not one I wish to dwell on for too long. I prefer to contrast it with something closer to the cosmology that informed C.S. Lewis. One in which the core operating principle of everything is not the necessity of violence, but the indispensability of love. Something akin to Teilhard de Chardin’s assertion that in the dreams, wonder, exploration and imagination of love, a thread is woven that reaches the very heart of the universe. Despite all appearances to the contrary, love is the deepest reality of all.

This assertion is problematic in many ways. Not least in the face of the evident brutality and violence that traumatises human life. But even more fundamentally than that, how can we intelligibly assert the primacy of love while gazing out at a vast indifferent universe? What are we to do with those infinite silent spaces that so terrorised Pascal?

Perhaps we can try another thought-experiment. This one is drawn from the work of philosopher Chris Barrigar. He calls it the Agape/Probability account. The full argument is long and detailed, so there is no time to explain it all, but the broad brushstrokes are enough. Here’s the thought. What if we live in exactly the kind of universe required to produce creatures who can freely choose to live with self-giving love? They couldn’t be forced or coerced into it, but the conditions could be set in place that would lead to the emergence of such beings. The principles of ‘asymptotic’ statistics suggest that some things may not be determined but they can be so highly probable as to be inevitable. Barrigar asserts that the appearance of a species with the capacity to love was a cosmic inevitability. What is required to turn this possibility into something pretty much certain? Two things – lots of opportunities and lots of time. In other words, with apologies to Carl Sagan, if we want creatures capable of love, we need to build a universe.

Of course, a universe like that – a universe like ours – will throw up many other things in addition to love: violence, rock music and apples pies. But the crucial point is that we are not obliged to populate the blank canvas of the cosmos with the malice of Liu or the terror of Pascal. The cold silence of space does not in itself contradict our intuitive sense that the capacity to love is somehow ultimately significant. On the contrary, when we look at the vast distances between the stars, we could be looking at the minimal amount of spaciousness required to bring about beings with the capacity for self-giving love. At the very least, it’s a thought-experiment worth trying.