Festival Diary: You must see my show … it's so mediocre!

Published on 16/08/2010 14:59

AN EPIDEMIC of modest behaviour is sweeping the Fringe.

Actor Andy Linden, at the Gilded Balloon with his storytelling show, I kid you not, tells everyone he is "aiming for mediocrity".

"It's a nice little show, I hope people will sit there for 50 minutes - I wouldn't ask them to put up with any more - and then walk out, saying: 'Well. That was all right."

Meanwhile, the already overwrought Lewis Schaffer - at the Counting House with Free Until Famous - was in pieces after receiving a four-star review from the indomitable Scotsman critic Kate Copstick. "It's a DISASTER. Everyone will have such high expectations. It's AWFUL. No really I love it. It's just the PRESSURE. My God the PRESSURE". He really does speak in capitals.

Fred Goodwin's song, from Broke Britannia! the musical. "They call me Fred the Shred, I inspire a certain dread … My Royal Bank was the best and gobbled up NatWest, then, desperate to grow, pounced on ABN Amro. First the share price sank and then the giant bank, I lost the bloody lot, but saved my pension pot…"

A little in the style of William MacGonagall, but you try finding a rhyme for "quantitative easing".

Ace of spy-writers

SPIES and thrillers, real and imagined, run in Dugald Bruce-Lockhart's family. He wrote and stars in The Cage, a chilling Fringe tale of murderous intent at the Pleasance Dome, as Jack, hell-bent on revenge after his fiance runs off.

It is Bruce-Lockhart's playwriting debut, but authorship runs in the family, along with espionage. His great-uncle, "Uncle Bertie", was RH Bruce-Lockhart, author of Memoirs of A British Agent, famously accused of trying to arrange the assassination of Lenin. Uncle Bertie's son Robin penned Reilly, Ace of Spies, which became a popular TV series.

Dugald's acting brought a Scottish best actor nomination for Mephisto in Faust and he was in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at last year's Festival. But he has recently been on tour as Richard Hannay, in John Buchan's vintage spying tale, The 39 Steps. He is contemplating a new show on Bertie. "It must be in the genes."