Thursday, 13th Aug -4 Show Day

I begin the day with a taxi ride to the Royal Botanical Garden, to hear David Leddy`s play Susurrus, an audio installation, that enfolds in your ears a rich potion like the one Oberon places on Titania`s eyes to make her fall in love with an ass. I listen and follow a map to eight stations around the superbly manicured garden. The story weaves together; Mid Summer Nights dream, sparrows, socially singing song birds, a story of a sons love for his father, incest, interviews with an RSC type actress, and the garden. I start in the Orchid house, a huge elegant glass house, I take photographs of the exotic many colored orchids. The audio tape explains the root of the word orchid is testicle. Themes are carefully spun into each other, and into me as I walk beneath the canopy of ancient trees and carpets of flowers. I see lovers lying in each other laps reading beneath the trees, children running, picninc`s, inscriptions on park benches...(Bumped into David Leddy, the author of Susurrus, he was postering outside his second AWARD WINNIG show AT THIS FRINGE, White Tea, I had a brief conversation with him, as we met in Feb at the Push Festival in Vancouver.
(He`s a bit of a genious and very prolific).

Bus to Assembly Venue at Geroge St for next show: 1:30pm Wife of the World. I meet Susan and Terry from Norwich. We talk about our show choices...juggling scheduals, we have made schockingly similar choices out of the thousands of shows to choose from. The Wife of the World was a good poetic show, the actress covering alot of character ground, playing 20 wives from Medusa, Penelope, Quosimo`s wife, Devils wife, and many more. I felt a bit hot and fidgity pressed like a sardine into a small venue.

5:06pm Third show: Rabbit Faced Soup, by Laura Salon (Perrier award winner), brilliant, young actress, fantastic relaxed performance, great character shifts...I loved this show....it could have been twice as long, didn`t want to leave...wanted more. She plays a young woman with her dream job as a literary agents assistant...she is a master of the British ironic put down. She plays a bitchy New York style literary agent `Marcy``who calls her , the assistant,`shut up` rather than by her name...revealing she`d rather be single living with her cat. She imagions ``marrying her cat and producing children that could lick ther own assholes and that they would probably be the next winners of Britain`s Got Talent!``
Salon`s entertaining characters include an Eastern European Tyrant, the new owner of the Publishing house, French Radio Host and French writer who mock english Culture or the lack of it.

Next I go to Art Gallery of Scotland to see the Renoir exhibit and the permenant collection of European and Scottish Art...impressive quick visit, I will return.

6:30pm Dinner with Jennifer Scarce, a lovely Scottish University Professor I met in Budapest last fall. She recommends a Spanish restaurant Andaluz with great tapas...we agree to meet for a play on Saturday, Irania.

9:45pm Forth show of the Day: Bourgois and Maurice: Social work. Bourgois is like a young Tim Curry, in rocky Horrow, but with weirder costumes. He is sexy, skinny, flamboyant, with thick emerald eye shaddow and glorious three inch eyelashes...and the reddest lips in town. He wears tight fire engine red sequin knee length pants with sequin suspenders over a tight red long sleved shirt. He wears a hot pink fetish body suit with small green poka dots and a matching face mask. He wears a black body suit covered in black flapper fringe, that he shakes to his advantage. He climbs over the audience, saying 7 years cabaret school taught him that is was improtant to get to know your audience and let them get to know you. She is Maurice, and has great black wig piled high like Marge Simpson. She plays the piano, she is supposed to be his brother, sex change, she is elegant with fine features.
They warn `Sex can sometime lead to children.
They sing`songs of Little Pins, Addiction, Celebrity, Ritilin and my favorite``If you don`t know what to do with your life, kill yourself``.
As promised the show is ``sexy, macabre, inovative, provocative and irresistable.``