Timeless Fringe

I started the day with a stroll up the Royal Mile where I happened to come across the cast of "Timeless: The Musical" performing which I saw last week, it was an excellent family musical time travelling adventure, with mummies following our hero's through several time periods including visiting Elizabeth I and the old Wild West.

I then headed to see a show called "Awake", which was a rather bizarre "play" about a guy who comes home to a surprise birthday party with a circus theme, the problem is he has terminal cancer! Cheerful stuff! The circus themed was supported by some clever rope acrobatics.

Luckily the next show I saw was more cheerful, "The Paper Cinema’s Odyssey" was brilliant, the story of Odyssey was told using paper puppet cut-outs beautifully drawn in black ink. The entire show was done use puppetry using a pile of these paper cut-outs in front of a couple video camera to project onto a big screen. The combination of old fashioned paper puppetry with some clever video tricks (e.g. to super-impose one paper puppet on top of another) was really well done and the entire show was supported by some beautiful live music and sound effects.

After the show I had a couple beers and before I knew time had flown by, I had planned to see a free music show but didn't have the energy to rush to see it in time (if I had bought a ticket I probably would have).

I had one more late evening show to see and decided to grab something to eat, I headed up to the Reverie where I had Pork Belly with pork scratchings served with Black Pudding "bites" on a bed of herb Rosti and Mange Tout, it was fantastic! I followed that with a lovely liqueur coffee to keep me awake for my final show.

"Whatever Gets You Through the Night" was at The Queens Hall, it was a medley of acts, some musical, some acted, some physical acrobatics and dance all around the theme of what of Scottish "youths" do at night; including drinking, partying, hanging out, skypeing, etc. It didn't paint a particular hopeful image of the future (or the present), but if you consider it was presented by Scottish "youths" maybe there is something to look forward to, there was certainly a lot of great talent on display.