Edfringe 15 & 16

The people who do not like it at all.

Gosh this fringe is getting away from me! One week to go. I've been buzzing around like a little bee and you'd think you'd have time to do a little blog a day. It's turned out to be one every two days, and I didn't put my podcast up this week. Maybe I'm getting old or lazy or some combination of the two. Sorry all. Back on the wagon asap.

I sold out on Saturday night. Friday night was also lovely. In fact other than a few calmer older crowds and one proper badly timed heckler on a review night, all the audiences have been lovely. It's been an incredible fringe - and with one week to go i'm pretty sure the wheels aren't going to fall off. 

Which is not to say everyone has enjoyed Empire, by any means.

‪This show I'm doing has got everything from a five stars to one two star (the night of the heckler) from reviewers. Both in Aus and here. I seem to have vastly pleased and displeased everyone from conservative old chaps to very hard left activists. Sometimes both of each in the same night.

Most people have laughed, a couple have cried, though the story is a small quiet one (hidden in shoulderpads and quantum bigness, it's pretty little and simple), and deals with a much more delicate point than my previous two shows. It's been called everything from "confident" and "coherent" to "confusing".

Which is to say, either the show is very different from night to night or within each night the view changes radically between seats, or that people are varied and wonderful in their scope and taste.

I lay out the topic sentence of the show in the first two minutes: "good and evil are more complicated than we want them to be", and yet... some people really don't want things being more complicated than they want them to be. 

This dislike of complexity is particularly true for some people when it comes to comedy, which is arguably a process of simplifying ans condensing - refining and minimising complexity into bite sized pieces, cutting things down, rather than the slightly weird  exploding and messifying (messifying is a word if I want it to be) game that I play.

Part of me is very pleased about the fact that I've had such a broad range of reactions. I've said before there's no point doing this unless you're actually doing something interesting. And maybe it's my liberal bubble or my fence-sitting conflict-avoiding but I'd much rather challenge both sides of an argument than take an established line. On the other hand, that can mean you end up nobody's friend, and part of me worries about hurting people's feelings or starting one of those terrible twitter bile-loon fights. Someone said to me the other day "you're actually quietly very controversial, in your own way".

Which is funny because I don't think of myself as controversial. I mean, obviously. Duh. I'm not offending myself - except sometimes when I suddenly create a new smell. 

I mean... it all seems to me like a game of lines of logic slowly unpacking along an inexorable course, with jokes as buoys to avoid sinking into a sea of smug self indulgent academic ponderousness. I think it's all quite neat and fun and harmless. 

Word games and interesting points, and within the bounds of those logical cages, a few glimpses of some raw untamed human emotion. Thats the point and purpose of it all for me.

 I mean, I want to think that will please the audience, obviously. I wouldn't do this job if I didn't think I would/could/might make people happy.

But I don't, always. And I know that it's not possible to please everyone, and I think I'm more okay with that than I have ever been before.