Embro at the Ploy

The Edinburgh Festival and Fringe remains as exciting for me now as it was when I was a little girl growing up in Edinburgh in the fifties when it was all very new. In those days I might expect to go to a puppet show, perhaps the ballet, the Tattoo and, as I got older, to the main event in the Assembly Hall at the mound, most notably in my memory Ane Satire of the Three Estaites and The Trojan Women (with Jane Asher so that really dates it!)

Now the International Festival is much bigger, busier and blousier and the Fringe is a bewilderingly (ridiculously) huge cornucopia of events. Not for the faint hearted. This year, circumstance dictated that I would have very little time to attend between rehearsals and obligations on Arran. The only advantage in this was that choice was severely limited.

So on one Wednesday in August, Stuart and I set off for the ploy with the intention of seeing two of our young Arran actors in different shows on the fringe. The first was to see Christopher Jenks, now already started at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, in a play which he and Katharine O’Donnelly had both helped to create the previous year as part of the Scottish Youth Theatre’s writing festival with writer, Christopher Patrick.

Called The Constant Soldier it is an interesting play about what happens to soldiers after war. Ben, broken and psychotic has lost his memory not only because of what he has seen but of what he has done. This central(and huge) part was played by Chris and he performed so well, illustrating, convincingly, with a depth beyond his years the internal struggle of a man who has gone where no man should. Impressive stuff.

Then what a treat to go with Chris and his parents to see Paul Tinto perform in a play called Claustrophobia by Jason Hewitt. This was an intense and foreboding play about a man and a woman stuck in a lift, the two actors performing in a chalked out area the size of a small lift, the man hiding his distress behind a show of control, brought about by army discipline. He appears blank and cold. She is panicky, hysterical, frightened.

As the play unfolds their past lives emerge and madness takes hold as their control of the situation disappears. Paul’s performance was incredibly assured, utterly convincing and moving.

What a privilege to see two such talented young people from Arran give such commendable peformances.