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THE PITCH - A Diary - by Peter Houghton
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In 2006 I wrote a solo play called The Pitch. It premiered at La Mama Theatre, and then played at Malthouse Theatre. We (my wife Anne Browning, also the director) decided after these initial successes to take the play to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Herein lies the adventure that followed.
June 30
A few moments to take in the grandeur of this beautiful, eccentric, maiden aunt of a town. A lingering smell of porridge, hops and minced meat enshrines the city with a tinge of medieval menace. A kind of meaty compost which is an entirely suitable olfactory accompaniment to a fringe festival. More than four thousand witches were drowned or strangled in the castle moat according to Marco at the mobile phone store. And that was just a warm up for the hundreds of thousands of actors and writers who got strangled by the vigilantes who pass for critics in this town.
For those who haven’t 'done' the fringe it’s a humbling series of humiliations, mini triumphs, overwhelming disappointments and surprising successes. A kind of primordial swamp where the public decides. It’s capitalism at it’s most evil and impressive. Here goes.
July 2 – 4
We do three previews. Some cultural problems with the humour. New Zealand jokes don’t work though the Russell Crowe jokes go down a treat. It is clear from the laughter that he is universally recognised as the guy who chucks stuff around when he gets lonely. British Airways has lost our baggage, including our set so we scour op shops for a desk and chair, abandon hope of finding exact props and surrender to the ‘fringe’ ethos of second best bits and pieces – and try to focus on the meat in the sandwich – performance and writing.
There are over three thousand shows in the city, in several hundred venues – our room at Assembly Rooms has ten shows a day in it, starting with a kids show called Little Howard and the Magic Pencil of Life and Death. And finishing with a sexually explicit piece of vaudeville around one o’clock in the morning also involving a magic pencil but used in quite a different way.
A heartbreaking moment as my son Louis, aged three and a half makes his stage debut. Little Howard asks for volunteers. A quick witted little girl leaps up on the stage. Louis doesn’t notice and quietly, methodically, in his plodding way gets up and starts heading down the aisle. The audience laugh at his slow but deliberate progress. He is oblivious, focussed on the steps. Little Howard proves his greatness by including Louis in the show and drawing his picture in the cyberspace environment with his magic pencil. A triumph!
Audiences come and go in the previews – sometimes during the performance! Some deliberately sit in the back row, they give the show about ten or fifteen minutes and then leave, obviously hating it or looking for something different. No polite subscribers round here. If they have doubts they walk.
Some reviews come in... mostly positive, but clearly written by the work experience kid. They are grammatical disaster... but no-one reads them anyway. They just look at the stars. Our poster is now plastered with stars. You get stickers done and stick them on your fliers with quippy lines and stars. As you walk home you see your star plastered face staring at you from a discarded flier in the gutter in some reworking of Wilde’s line – “We are all of us lying in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars!” – instead it’s – “I may be looking at my face in the gutter but it’s covered with stars!”
July 14
The worst performance so far. Seven people in the audience, six of them with free tickets. They sit about a mile from each other in the empty auditorium. I push harder than usual and bathed in sweat run off before the clapping ends. The technician tells me not to worry, it will pick up.
I drink lots in the bar. The bar at Assembly is full of shonky B grade producers, quite good producers and promoters, desperadoes and fringy kids…. and some genuine artists. I sit with Jim, a new Yorker doing a play called A Glance at New York. This is a revival of a mid nineteenth burlesque by a company called Axis Arts. Jim lives in Manhattan and is philosophical about the whole adventure. He’s managed to fit in golf and other sensible activities. But it’s his love of the art that inspires me. There’s so much enthusiasm for the work here. There’s very little talk about the ‘industry’, or whingeing about auditions. All the talk is about the work itself. Artists here are inspired and pro-active. I can see now why the event is so intoxicating.
We go to a birthday party and I meet Phil Nichols, a former Perrier winner and who’s just directed Breaker Morant with Adam Hills amongst other people. Phil is an all rounder. He’s doing about four shows here, as a stand up, a director, actor and writer. He has the kind of bursting creative energy which is unstifled by dull institutions and predictable marketing concerns. He does what he wants.
I see a dizzying array of fantastic new work and am inspired in different ways by everything I see. This is a celebration of ‘newness’, every show is an adventure. Most enjoyable is the physical stuff, and the dance and circus. Much of the new straight play stuff is in the ‘misery theatre’ mould. A kind of English speciality where the word ‘bleakness’ is actually used as a marketing tool. But I see a number of gems such as a man call Kahlil who I predict will be the new Eddie Murphy in his solo show Basic Training. A circus piece called Traces, from Quebec, another solo piece Bigger Than Jesus... so many.
July 21ish
Our last two shows have been sold out on the back of a review in the ‘Skinny Mag’ and some good word of mouth. And we’ve picked up a gig in London, a kind of corporate show to an invited audience. But tomorrow is another day of handing out fliers and getting a new crowd.
July 27
Finished! A strong weekend and to use the vernacular, we kick arse... then finish on a Monday to a group of confused Swedish backpackers…
Would I recommend this to artists in Melbourne? If you’ve got a piece about an hour long and you think it’s original and you have no pride, fear or common sense then it could be for you. If you’re stuck in a rut or you’re bored with the whining about a ‘theatre in crisis’, or who’s got what job and why, or how the piece of nonsense you’re watching on television is ‘Australia’s favourite drama’ then Edinburgh might be just what you need.
Would I recommend it to audiences? Absolutely. The next big thing doesn’t look like the last big thing. If you want to see the next strange event that’s going to shift the culture, get a plane ticket. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the greatest show on Earth.
PETER HOUGHTON
Original article published in Arts Hub, November, 2007.
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See The Pitch at the Hume Building Society Butter Factory Theatre Wodonga from May 20-24.
Book now online, or by calling 02 6021 7433.
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