The Opening Night

Monday 7th August

We travelled through to Edinburgh in the afternoon with a few of the props and odds and ends.

There was a lot of hanging about and sitting in offices as the last of the paperwork was finalised. Victoria seemed a bit stressed out by the whole day.

The Royal Mile was jam packed with street performers and people flyering.

After a drink in Greyfriar’s Bobby pub we looked for somewhere to go over our lines one last time. We went for Greyfriars Kirk, finding a Shakespeare in the Graveyard style show just starting we walked deeper into the Kirk grounds. Until, that was, we came across a junkies’ den. We decanted to the Meadows and ran the lines once more.

Personally I hate going over the lines at the last minute if it’s not completely necessary. I prefer to forget about it util showtime.

After that Graeme and I had a feeble attempt at handing out flyers, as Victoria discovered that half the set failed the PAT testing.

As for flyering as I protested there were guys on the Royal Mile juggling chainsaws. How can we compete with that?

So to opening night. We had an attendance of 8. Apparently the average audience of a Fringe show is 7, so not too bad for the first night.

There were laughs all throughout the show, which was good. A few things of course went wrong, mainly with props and forgetting to put things where they should be on the stage.

Graeme also had an instance of corpsing, but we quickly got it back on track.

The finale means that I have a quick costume change, but it was worth it as the audience seemed to like it.

All in all it was a pretty good opening night.

We went for a cheap drink in the Cowgate afterwards to celebrate. Here’s to the next 12 shows.