Roger Cox's Arts Diary: Brides are back to catch our attention

Published on Wednesday 1 July 2009 19:02

EVERY year, Fringe acts come up with increasingly ingenious ways of catching the attention of The Scotsman's arts editor, Andrew Eaton.

A few years ago, a magician managed to blag his way past front desk security and perform card tricks in the features department, but he was outdone last August by two "Russian brides", (aka actresses Emmy Sainsbury and Susan Momoko Hingley) who collared our bewildered arts supremo as he arrived at the office one morning and tried to get him to marry them.

The stunt was a plug for their play, Skolka, a quirky look at the phenomenon of the Russian mail-order bride, which picked up glowing reviews from this newspaper's Claire Smith, among others.

This year, buoyed by their success in 2008, the girls are coming back to Edinburgh with the sequel, Catch, in which two British men travel to Moscow to find their perfect partners. And – surprise, surprise – they are planning more publicity stunts.

On the Royal Mile, the brides will be setting up something called "The Royal Mile Dating Agency". Fringe-goers will be filmed talking about their ideas of an ideal other half, and the videos will then be posted on a YouTube dating page. The man and woman with the highest rated videos will win tickets to see Catch as their first "date".

In addition, the two male characters in the new play, Alan and Spralsy, will also be taking out lonely heart ads in The Scotsman throughout August. Sharp-eyed readers who spot them will receive half-price tickets for the show.

And are there more plans to harass The Scotsman's arts ed?

"Yes, I'm sure we'll be doing something to poor Andrew Eaton again this year," says Ms Sainsbury. "We're not sure what it'll be yet, but it will definitely be something a bit different."

Go west and marvel

LAST week, the diary stumbled upon what must surely be one of the most remote art exhibitions in the British Isles. The Old Waiting Room Gallery on the Island of Colonsay (population c.110), is a two-and-a-half hour ferry ride from Oban, but the work on show there, by Durham-trained artist Mary Frame, is well worth getting on a boat for. Frame's oils and pastels of island scenes are attractive enough, but the works that really catch the eye are what she calls her "watercolour collages" – fragmented landscapes and seascapes, painstakingly produced by chopping up and then rearranging tiny angular fields of colour.

Frame says she has been enjoying the recent heatwave on the west coast, but adds: "It's not very good for business – everyone's out walking." She needn't worry: there's heavy rain forecast for the weekend. The exhibition runs until 9 July.