Edinburgh Fringe, Day 9: Good comedy shows and advice from Max Bialystock

My disappointment in this year’s Fringe continues apace. Today I again saw nothing but successful, well-crafted and perfectly-performed comedy shows.

WHERE IS THE SHIT???

I can’t take much more of this excellent entertainment!

Alexander Bennett’s Terrifying Smile (I went back a second time to see it properly) delivered exactly what you would expect from an experienced 37-year-old veteran of the Fringe with 20 years in the business. The fact that Alexander is actually still only 24 is extraordinary and makes it a near-certainty he has made a blood pact either with Satan or the Illuminati.

Sophisticated Thom Tuck: When you got it, flaunt it. Flaunt it!

Thom Tuck, following him at the Dragonfly, is also sickeningly skilled beyond his years.

His involvement with The Penny Dreadfuls and the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society must surely mean he is older than Alexander Bennett.

But, then, who could be younger than Alexander Bennett apart from the baby who won one of the increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards last year?

Individual, unique, hand-crafted Tuck flyers

Rule No 1 in Edinburgh is Always plug your own event(s) even if you are talking about something else.

In the immortal words of the great Max Bialystock: “Baby, when you got it, flaunt it. Flaunt it!”

Thom Tuck’s shows are sophisticated, intellectually clever. And, this year, he stuck a cigarette in his belly button.

He is – as per the title of his show – An August Institution.

Another tradition in Edinburgh is that Thom will create individual flyers – well, pieces of paper in lieu of flyers – to hand out to promote his show.

Why both Alexander and Thom are not regularly on television in Python-style ensemble shows is beyond our ken.

Jollyboat with their rousing, mass-appeal piratical jollity

Likewise unlikely-looking but actual brothers Jollyboat, drawing large queues in the Cowgate with their Why Do Nerds Suddenly Appear? show and delivering crowd-pleasing OTT comic songs and disco/festival type entertainment for the masses of whooping Yoof.

And that is a genuine compliment. Their audience-appeal and audience-control is extraordinary.

Lovely and now loved-up Archie Maddocks

In the evening, I saw two other assured performers and audience manipulators in the best sense of the word.

I first blogged about Archie Maddocks in 2013 and now he has, he says in his IlluminArchie show, fallen in love for the first time – with his accidentally racist girlfriend.

Like several good performers in Edinburgh this year – the Siblings sisters,  Will Hislop of Giants and Ashley Storrie – Archie comes from a solid bit of showbiz breeding. His father Don Warrington became famous in the TV series Rising Damp and his mother, Mary Maddocks, was in The Rocky Horror Show in London’s West End.

Alex Martini – style maestro never knowingly underdressed

Meanwhile the (I’m sure equally well-bred) Italian comic Alex Martini – one of the pack of talented Italian comics based in London – shared his love of both Britain and (even more surprisingly) British food in an assured English language show Martini Dry – his solo Fringe debut show.

His show is entirely family-friendly and there was a lift in the building but I think the age-restriction on some Fringe shows should be linked not to sexual content and language but to the number of stairs and near-vertical cobbled streets you have to climb to get there. I can only hope the trek to some of these shows is strengthening rather than buggering-up my heart.

Tony Green out shopping in the Grassmarket

While leaping around betwixt venues in Edinburgh, I was having a welcome breather walking through the horizontal Grassmarket when I bumped into comedy font of anecdotes Tony Green, who spends half his year in Edinburgh, half in London and half in the 1980s.

Well, I thought, at least this means I won’t have to talk for the next half hour.

He told me that he would be performing in the Edinburgh Horror Festival later this year – 27th-31st October.

“Will you be performing as Sir Gideon McVein?” I asked.

“I’m to quite sure yet,” Tony told me..

Some might say, as they climb the stone stairs to some third storey venue atop a cobbled hill, that the horror festival is already in full swing.

Comedian and comedy critic in fist fight at the Edinburgh Fringe yesterday

Charmian’s show about early comic days

Comedians and critics tend to have a love-hate relationship. Critics tend to love comedy and comics tend to hate critics.

Yesterday morning, I bumped into comic Charmian Hughes. She told me she gets nervous when critic Steve Bennett of the influential Chortle comedy website comes to see her shows, but not for the reason you might think.

“My show (When Comedy Was Alternative) has been going well and getting huge laughs,” she told me, but I’ve always had a phobia about Chortle, because Steve Bennett reminds me of my dead mother. She used to wear a big hat and gatecrash my gigs when I was seven.”

Steve Bennett, owner and editor of Chortle website

“But Steve,” I pointed out, “does not wear a big hat – or any hat.”

“He wears a metaphorical hat,” said Charmian. “It’s a spirituality thing. I would see my mother in the school concert, making her notes. She was a very difficult woman. Steve reminds me of my first boyfriend too – He wore glasses.”

“Wasn’t your first boyfriend disgraced politician Chris Huhne?” I asked.

“You’re going to ruin my life with this blog,” said Charmian. “And everything’s been going so well so far. It’s a new show, but it’s getting better and better… except when I see my dead mother in the audience.”

Joz Norris in his inexplicable freezer last night

According to Alexander Bennett’s highly inventive late-night gameshow Hell To Play, all comedians end up in hell. Alexander – all hail to him – could be a wonderfully effortless, reassuring and self-assured mainstream TV gameshow host, but I suspect might not want to be.

(From left) Eleanor Morton, Joz Norris, Alexander Bennett, Michael Brunstrom

Last night, Joz Norris and Archie Maddocks were competing, with Michael Brunström in a black, backless dress as Countess Elizabeth Báthory aka Countess Dracula. It was a role to rival Mary Quant on a whaling ship.

Inexplicably, when I arrived at the building early (it is the Cowgatehead, so you have to allow extra time to actually find any venue within it) Joz Norris was in what looked like a glass-and-metal coffin. In fact, it turned out to be a freezer. This had nothing whatever to do with the show. And it was not an attempt to win an increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt Award. I have no explanation that seems at all likely.

I had seen Joz earlier when he sat behind me at Michael Brunström’s unique and wonderfully absurdist The Golden Age of Steam. Later, we bumped into each other at the late-night ScotMid grocery store. It seems possible Joz Norris may be stalking me.

Last night, I also saw the Papa CJ: Naked show in which Papa CJ almost stripped physically and did strip psychologically. Voted Asia’s Best Stand-up Comedian last year, he is off back to India tomorrow with no immediate plans to return. Our loss. VERY smoothly professional, great audience control and, with stories of his marriage, divorce and child, very touching.

You may have noticed I have not mentioned yesterday’s Grouchy Club, the daily chat show I am co-hosting with comedy critic Kate Copstick.

Peter Michael Marino in his showbiz romp Late With Lance!

Yesterday, I was not co-hosting it, because Michael Brunström’s Golden Age of Steam, here for a limited run, overlapped. But I turned up to see the show which precedes us – Peter Michael Marino’s Late With Lance, a staggeringly energetic showbizzy romp starring his OTT alter ego Lance. I saw it with my comedy chum Janey Godley.

Janey is not a woman to mess with. She was once arrested when the police found a whole cache of firearms hidden in her family home.

After Peter Michael Marino’s show, she and I went into the lounge bar of the Counting House where Kate Copstick was waiting to go in for The Grouchy Club. The two of them got into conversation and pretty soon a fist fight erupted. I took photographs. It seemed the right thing to do.

Kate Copstick (left) and Janey Godley face off to start the fight in the Counting House bar yesterday

After the fight, Janey looked for solace in the arms of American comedian Bronston Jones

There are two things to be learned from this, both relating to my blog a couple of days ago when I discussed the increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt Award.

One is that, of course, you should never believe the announced context of the pictures you see.

The other is that, as I have said before, during the Edinburgh Fringe, self-publicity is everything.

The Grouchy Club is at The Counting House, 3.45pm daily until next Saturday.

Janey’s show Honest To Godley! is at The Counting House, 7.45pm daily until next Sunday 30th August.

The increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show is in the Counting House on Friday 28th, 11.00pm-01.00am.

The newish comic most likely to become successful? I get sidetracked by Chaucer

Archie at the Soho Theatre in London this week

You can never tell who is going to succeed. Some extremely talented performers crash and burn. Some with minimal talent strike it lucky. (See vast swathes of BBC3.)

So who do I guess is the current reasonably-new comedian most likely to succeed…?

Archie Maddocks.

Maybe as a comedian.

Maybe as something else.

I blogged about him back in October last year.

I saw him recently in the Amused Moose Laugh Off Awards semi-finals. He got through to the final at the Edinburgh Fringe on 3rd August.

And I was one of the judges at the English Comedian of The Year a couple of weeks ago. Archie was competing but was not in the first three.

“What about talent contests?” I asked him when we met at Soho Theatre this week.

“I completely understand why they’re there,” he told me. “But I really don’t like them. The judging panel could love someone on one night then see them another night and think they’re shit. There’s so many different things go into that one night.

“My ideal way to do it would be to have a final every night for a week and put the comedians in different places on the bill, then take an average score. That would make sense for me in terms of comedy.”

“You’re at the Edinburgh Fringe this year,” I said, “but not in a solo show.”

Maddocks’ & Oliphant’s Fringe show 2014

“I’m not going to do a solo show,” said Archie, “until 2016 at the earliest. At the Fringe this year, I’m one of the acts in Just The Tonic’s Big Value Showcase. And I’m doing a free show called Cookies & Cream with Jamie Oliphant who, surprisingly, doesn’t have a joke about his name. And I’m doing lots of other little things. But not a solo show. I’m not ready.”

“What’s your Unique Selling Proposition?” I asked.

“Probably confidence,” said Archie. “Everyone seems to say I’m stupidly confident for my position. But I’m very at home on stage. Some people have said that to me as a criticism, but how can that be a criticism?”

“I guess,” I said, “you feel comfortable because you grew up in a theatrical family where it was not abnormal to stand up in front of people and do strange things. Do you get stage fright?””

“No, but you can tell I’m nervous if I speak faster. I used to do this pacing thing just cos I wasn’t comfortable standing still and talking. But now I am. I only move when it makes sense to move. Coming to stand-up from an acting background is weird. I think there’s more recognition for acting. When an audience watches an actor, they recognise what that person’s job is. Whereas, with comedy, they’re not quite clear what job the comic is doing.”

“If you’re an actor,” I suggested, “the audience knows you have artificially created that atmosphere in the room but, with a good comic, it feels like they are just chatting to you in a non-artificial way so it feels like they are not performing, just being themselves.”

“I guess,” said Archie.

“You’ve probably,” I joked, “written 15 plays since the last time I chatted to you.”

Fringe Compulsion: self-punishment & flagellation

“I’ve written a few plays,” laughed Archie. “One is going to be at the Fringe. It’s my first Edinburgh play. It’s called Compulsion and it’s about self-punishment and self-flagellation.”

“Sounds like comedians,” I said.

“Sort of,” laughed Archie. “It’s set in the minds of this one man and it’s him compulsively going over whether or not he has been a good person, looking back at memories of when he found himself being ashamed of something. It’s about him kind of descending into insanity.”

“You’re not performing in that?”

“No. I’ve written and directed it.”

“And a ‘serious’ actor plays the part of the man?”

“There’s several of them.”

“Different facets of the mind?”

“Exactly. They are called The Facets. Four of them altogether; one playing the same character throughout; the other three switching between facets and memories.”

“Directing is dead easy, isn’t it?” I said. “You just tell ‘em to stand over there and put more emphasis on a couple of words.”

Archie straddling comedy and theatre at the Shoreditch venue

“It is much harder work than I anticipated,” replied Archie. “It’s the first time I’ve directed a proper production; I’ve directed youth theatre before, but that’s very different. I think it’s something I’d like to do more of later on. It’s interesting to be so much more immersed into a text – moreso than when you are just acting. I feel I am the eyes of the audience and I’m conducting how I want them to see it.”

“It’s like writing,” I suggested. “The way to write is not to think of yourself as the writer but to go round 180% and look on what you are writing as if you are the reader, seeing the words for the first time as they appear on the page.”

“Exactly,” said Archie.

“As a director,” I asked, “did you change any of the pearls of wisdom you wrote as a writer?”

“Yes. Cut words. Cut entire scenes. Added in new scenes.”

“Was that,” I asked, “because you changed your mind or because the actors played it differently to the way you had imagined?”

“A combination of things,” explained Archie. “And we have no budget, so there were some scenes I thought we would be able to pull them off and we couldn’t.”

“Because of scenery and effects?” I asked.

“Scenery and time constraints, because it’s only a 50-minute play. There was originally a scene where they were going to be talking in metaphor about how a man has to use his tools in order to be a good craftsman and how that translates into actually being a good man. It was a nice scene but, in the whole dynamic and rhetoric of the play, it didn’t add anything. I would have had to dress them up in high-visibility building gear. That’s an expense we don’t need. We would have had to build a soundscape for the builders’ yard. So I threw that out. Now we have people in parks, people in showers. Very easy to do just with subtle lighting changes.

Archie – stories not words are precious

“Obviously I found it hard directing my own writing because I’m so close to it – It’s hard to cut certain things and, if the actors dropped a line, at first I would get a bit precious. Oh no – I wrote that for a reason! But, if rhythmically the actors are not getting what I saw and it’s coming out not as I thought it would come out, then I’ll change it around to make it make sense. The exact words are not that important. The story is still being told.”

“It’s like spelling,” I said. “Correct spelling is much over-rated. Shakespeare couldn’t even spell his own name.”

“And he made up words,” said Archie, “No-one complained about that.”

“Did he?” I asked.

“I think he made up the word ‘swagger’ and made up the phrase ‘heart on your sleeve’. Something like 500 words and phrases have been attributed to Shakespeare.”

“I think Roald Dahl invented the word ‘gremlin’,” I said. “You could die happy if you got a new word in the Oxford English Dictionary.”

“This is why,” said Archie, “I get really annoyed with people who don’t like kids who talk in slang. It’s their own language. You can’t be annoyed at that. If you don’t understand it, don’t say You must talk like I talk.”

“Chaucer is unintelligible,” I said. “Have you read Chaucer?”

“Yeah. I love Chaucer. But it’s hard to get through.”

“I couldn’t cope with Chaucer,” I said. “Shakespeare’s within bounds, but Middle English is another language.”

Seer Gahwayn and Te Green Kennihte or however it was pronounced in the far-off Middle English days

“Sir Gawain and The Green Knight,” said Archie. “Great story, but its readability… phwoah!

“I remember,” I said, “reading some Edgar Wallace novel which was written maybe around the 1910s or 1920s and thinking it was written in a slightly different language from the 1960s and 1970s.”

“Yeah,” said Archie, “Language evolves and people should accept the evolution of it, rather than try to kill it.”

“Presumably,” I said, “English will develop into the world language, but there will be Indian English and Chinese English as well as American English. I mean, Yorkshire English and Glasgow English and Kerry English are all slightly different.”

“There will,” said Archie, “be just be loads of different versions of pidgin English.”

“Which is why it’s a great language,” I said.

Last month I slept with Arthur Smith; last week I talked to new comic Archie Williams Maddocks; both write plays

Arthur Smith: man, myth and playwright

Last month I slept with comedian Arthur Smith.

Oh, alright, we stayed in different rooms in the same house on different storeys after I saw him perform at the Comedy Lounge in Totnes. He left before breakfast.

No depth is too deep for me to plumb for a shallow, eye-catching headline.

But the point is… on the bill with Arthur at the Comedy Lounge was a young comedian called Archie Williams Maddocks who showed remarkably good stage presence and audience control. I wondered why, so I had a chat with him in London last week. He is 25.

“I did my first gig just over a year ago,” he told me, but I’ve been going properly – trying to gig every week – for about ten months and I’ve only started gigging three or four times a week since June of this year – about four months.”

“Why do you want to be a comic?” I asked him. “You don’t appear to be mad.”

“It’s a problem, isn’t it?” laughed Archie. “I’m not unhappy. I’m not crazy… I was doing an improvised play and someone came up to me afterwards and said The way your mind works is very quick: maybe you should try stand-up comedy. I had always liked comedy but never thought about trying it… It looked like a horrible life to me.”

“It is,” I said.

“Well,” said Archie, “I thought I’d give it a try and, when the first wave of laughter hit me, it was like Fuck! That’s amazing! It’s like a drug. I’m addicted to it now.”

“But you didn’t want to be a comedian before that?”

“I’m a playwright by trade,” Archie told me. “In the summer, I had something on at the Royal Court Theatre as part of their Open Court season.

The Bush Theatre is to be the site of a Brixton funeral parlour

“And I’ve just been commissioned by the Bush Theatre to write a play about gentrification in Brixton seen through the eyes of guys in a West Indian funeral parlour. It’s all about the idea that Brixton was once a very West Indian area and it’s becoming gentrified and the West Indian community which was there has moved out to other places like Barnet and the shops serving the diminishing West Indian community no longer really have a purpose. So my play questions the role of tradition and whether you should re-invent yourself, which means losing a bit of what you established in the first place.”

“Is this going to be totally straight or with laughs?” I asked.

“The first three-quarters is going to be funny and then…”

“… then you undercut the audience’s expectation?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Archie. “I find with a play, if you make it funny and accessible, they’re going to warm to it more quickly. If it’s a serious drama the whole time, you can’t help like feeling you’ve just been beaten up. It’s hard work watching a drama for two hours, so I want there to be laughs – not massive ones, but little titters here and there and quite big laughs.”

“Will you be acting in it?”

“No. The whole idea of playwriting in the first place was to be in the plays but the more I write them the less I want to be in my own plays, because I think I would get too controlling. I kinda just want to create them and I’m getting all my performance needs from doing comedy. I’ve always loved people looking at me, watching me and enjoying what I’m doing or hating what I’m doing – as long as I get a reaction from them.”

“Isn’t there a problem about people doing something with your play that you didn’t intend?” I asked.

“It’s kind of like you’ve made a baby, but then you’ve given it up for adoption and you watch someone else raise it. You think it’s going to come out one way and it doesn’t and it can be a bit of a shock but, at the same time, it can be amazing. So far, I’ve been lucky and directors have kept in constant contact.

“I’m also working on a play that’s going to be put on in London and in New York at the same time. It’s about the relationship between Africans and Caribbeans here in London and black Americans. This notion of blackness in two different spectrums and the dichotomy between that.

“It’s going to be about a West Indian woman meeting a black American man in America and it’s going to be about their different attitudes and perceptions towards race. Two black people from two different countries talking about race in America is almost like a black person and a white person talking about race in England. I think it’s quite an interesting dichotomy to explore.”

“How many plays have you written now?”

“Nine. Well, including short plays, I’ve written about eighteen.”

“And you’re 25.”

Yes.”

“You always wanted to write?”

Archie Williams Maddocks, as seen in his 15-year-old dreams

“No. Until 15, I wanted to be a wrestler.”

“An American wrestler?”

“Yeah.”

“Because they’re macho and showbizzy?”

“Yeah, pretty much. And because you get to say the most ridiculous things.”

“Did you have a wrestling name you were going to use?”

“I was going to be The Dominator… or Half Man Half Amazing.”

“So when did you lose your ambition to be a wrestler?”

“When I properly figured out it wasn’t real. I figured I wanted to do something more serious than this. I wanted to act and follow in my father’s footsteps.”

“Your father’s an actor.”

“Yes.”

“So,” I said to Archie, “you’re very serious about writing plays and you think you will be able to continue doing that as well as doing a little bit of acting and doing stand-up comedy?”

“Well,” replied Archie, “I’ve started to put the acting on hold a little bit, because I’ve grown to love comedy so much that I want it really, really badly: I want to be out there every night. Comedy and playwriting sort of go hand-in-hand: it’s two different forms of writing.

“If you’re doing comedy, you’re out to make people laugh and to forget themselves and their troubles whereas, as a playwright, you’re out to make people think and evoke questions and loads of reaction. But I think you can do both at the same time.

“For me, the comedy brain works very quickly; it’s off-the-cuff and instinct. Whereas my playwriting brain I let cultivate ideas over time so the ideas I have are fully-formed when I come to them and I can write them out in two or three weeks.

Archie Williams Maddocks is no longer an aspiring wrestler

“What I’m doing now is four days a week of playwriting, three days a week of comedy writing and trying to gig every night. Yesterday I was in Wincanton in Somerset; tonight I’m in Brighton; over the next few weeks, I’m going to be in Stockton-on-Tees, Newcastle, Leeds. That’s what you gotta do. You gotta get out there.”

“How would you describe your comedy?”

“I’m an observational storyteller, an anecdotalist.”

“Totally scripted?”

“I try to do a bit of improvisation in every gig and I try to do something new at every gig. There’s no set script. There’s beats and units in my mind where I know what I want to come next, so there’s a flow to it. But I never end up saying it the same way two nights in a row.”

“Are you going to the Edinburgh Fringe next year?”

“With a comedy show. I would never take a play up there at the moment. Far too expensive.”

“Yes,” I said, “The cost of hiring a venue – and the free venues don’t really put on plays.”

“And,” said Archie, “in Edinburgh, if you have a choice between seeing a play that you pay for and a free play, what are you going to see? You’re going to see a play that you pay for because you think it will be better quality. Whereas, in comedy, ‘free’ is the way it’s going at the moment – ‘free’ is not taken as being rubbish any more.”

“Your father is an actor?” I asked.

“Both my parents are actors,” replied Archie. “My mum, Mary Maddocks, is an actress: she was in The Rocky Horror Show when it was in the West End; and my dad is Don Warrington (of TV’s Rising Damp etc).

“The main thing I get from both of them is they understand the art of performance and the need to perform. It’s not something you choose to do. It’s something that you can’t not do. I’d rather be poor and do something I enjoy than be rich and have to go into work every day at something I don’t like and be miserable. I’d rather live outside in the cold literally – I hope I don’t, but…”