The Ike Award Hall of Fame: 2015

Skip to: Curious Incident, Request Programme, Boris: World King, I Am Beast, The Woman in Black

Now we move into the fourth year of the blog. Again, a good haul of outstanding plays to match the previous year. No haul of terrible plays this time, but I did have an agonising choice over what to name best play of the year.

There was also a sixth piece that didn’t quite make it into the hall of fame, but instead is notable for a related reason.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time

The National Theatre is an odd one. For some reason, almost all the plays I’ve seen I considered either excellent or over-rated, with very little in between. The star player of the National, however, is surely Marianne Elliot. War Horse was such a success the puppet horse became the iconic image of the National, but edging ahead is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.

Most Ike Awards are picked on the basis of a single innovative idea executed well; this, however, makes it to the list as an excellent all-rounder. Every stage of this creation is excellent: a great story in its own right from Mark Haddon (Haddon said he never said any proper research on  autism, but it doesn’t matter, he got it spot on), Simon Stephens captured what matters in the play script perfectly, but the icing on the cake was the data-themed projections over all the stage. Trying to put your own stamp on to a stage adaptation of a successful book is a risky business – I’ve found this technique to backfire as well as it succeeds, but it is a prime example of how to do it right: a play just as iconic as the puppets in War Horse, but nothing important lost from the original book.

Looking back, the only thing that surprises me is why we are not hearing more of Marianne Elliot. It was only when doing the research for this that I discovered she’d been directing West End hit Company (not seen it but everyone raves about it). No disrespect to Rosalie Craig or Pattie Lupone, but I’d have thought a production directed by the person responsible for War Horse and Curious Incident is something you’d be shouting from the rooftops on the publicity. I guess shining a light on the actors instead of the directors is the way the West End does things. But her phenomenal achievements deserve talking about a lot more.

Request Programme

And now, from the biggest-scale production to the smallest: a solo site-specific performance in a small Brighton flat. Before going any further with this, a warning that this is the kind of play it’s impossible to talk about without giving away where it’s going. If this is on your to see list, I advise you to stop reading now.

Request Programme was written decades ago, but it could easily have been written yesterday. Unlike most solo plays to Xaver Kroetz’s play, just a detailed sequence of stage directions, but it was Thrust Theatre’s idea to set this inside a real home – and this gives the play the uncomfortable edge it needs. For this play is the final day of a woman’s life. We never find out what is the cause of her trauma, but it’s plain to see that whatever stress she is under is taking her to breaking point.

Rachel Wood was superb in this role. There was a lot of little clues something not right throughout script, stage management and actor, but it was Wood’s performed that was pivotal. Her obsessions, nervous tics and constant tension was brought out superbly.

Boris: World King

I had a very difficult choice picking a winner for best production in 2015. There were two plays shown first at the Buxton Fringe and then at the Edinburgh Fringe, both of whom would have romped home to take the title in a normal year. I can’t remember how I resolved the tie-breaker, but this was the winner: a brilliant political satire from a theatre company who had never done anything political before.

Three’s Company were, for many years, the star attraction of Buxton Fringe. Tom Crawshaw and Yaz Al-Shataar brought a succession of surrealistic plays, always inspired, always funny, usually featuring them in the cast and usually involving compulsory audience participation. Their greatest success, however, instead features David Benson playing Boris Johnson, everyone’s favourite comedy politician getting up to his usual scrapes whilst everyone laughs and goes “what are you like?” But underneath is a very persuasive political argument about how Bojo get away with everything by pretending to be a buffoon. It’s probably summed best when he gets a scoop from a woman speaking in French. “But I just though you were an English idiot”, she says. “Yes, a lot of people think that” he replies.

Boris: World King ran into 2016, requiring two rewrites when a certain referendum came into play. It received praise from across the political spectrum, with the most surprising endorsement from Boris Johnson’s own mother and sister. At the time I thought this was a gesture from the Johnson family to show what good sports they are, but I’ve since come to suspect that actually they can’t stand their brother/son and enjoyed it on those terms. However, in case you missed the news, Boris Johnson is now Prime Minister. Ah well. I think Tom Crawshaw sums it up best when he says that comedy is tragedy plus time – this is a rare example of the reverse.

I Am Beast

Sparkle and Dark might have been pipped to the post for best production, but they are the first theatre company to scoop the Ike Award twice. The Girl With No Heart was carried over the line for what was at the time a big gamble. By 2015, Sparkle and Dark were an established name at the Edinburgh Fringe, so a second Ike would have to be carried on the play alone. They they duly delivered, for I Am Beast was superb by every measure.

This is the play of Ellie, battling with depression after the death of her mother. The two of them were superhero comic book fans, and so the play switches between the real world and the fantasy world of Paradise City, where Ellie is Blaze, searching for her missing partner Silver, whilst her arch-nemeses Dr. Oblivion and Yolanda increasingly resemble her father and his new partner. And in Paradise City is the “beast”, expressing her own darkest thoughts. Or is the beat in the real world? Or if the beast’s destruction really just Ellie’s? As the darkness ramps up the line between fantasy and reality becomes terrifyingly fragile.

There wasn’t a weak link in the cast or crew, but I have to specially single out Lizzie Muncey, who was superb as Ellie. Many of the fringe groups I’ve singled out for praise have since moved on to other things, but Sparkle and Dark are still going, with the plans for their new play I Hear the Fire looking exciting. Only two theatre companies have two plays I’ve rated as outstanding – could Sparkle and Dark make it three?

The Woman in Black

This last one is more specific than the play. Few would dispute the success of The Woman in Black; at the time of writing, it is the fourth longest running West End show of all time, between The Phantom of the Opera and Blood Brothers. But, excellent though the West End and touring version is, that’s not what this Ike Award is for. Instead, it’s for the place where is all began: the Stephen Joseph Theatre. Few people remember, but it began as a hastily-comissioned play to fill a gap in the studio theatre (then the old one at the previous Westwood home).

As anyone who’s seen The Woman in Black can testify, it’s the minimalism of Stephen Malltaratt’s adaptation that makes it the success it it, but a small theatre such as the McCarthy auditorium really tops it off. It’s only when you get to sit close to the action that you realise how much the intimacy adds to the play – something that’s never quite reproduced when you sit in a larger theatre.

Many of the achievements apply to both – the story within a story working perfectly, with a light-hearted beginning slowly giving way to horror, and a precious few sound effects giving more frights than special effect-laden slasher flick. The Woman in Black is excellent no matter where you see it, but take it from me – if you have the chance to see it at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in its occasional journey to its birthplace, for God’s sake do it.

Also of note …

As these articles double up as a retrospective, there’s one other thing from 2015 that needs a mention. I spend a lot of the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe raving about Lie Collector. I seriously considered putting this in my “Outstanding” category – at the time my equivalent to 5 stars – but in the end I decided that I haven’t seen enough comedy to rate this against other comedies. I did, however, note how much she’s made of the potential I first saw in Yve Blake three years earlier. I she can come this far in three years, I commented, what can she achieve in the next three.

The answer, it turns out, is more than anyone would have guessed. On returning home, she applied for a scholarship to develop a music, won, developed it, and based on what I’m hearing Fangirls going from strength to strength. The bad news is that this is all happening in Australia. This has been showcased in the UK so I may one day see what all the hype is about. But there’s fewer greater joys on this blog that finding someone who you think could go far and it turns out to be right, and to date nothing has shown this better than Yve Blake.

And that winds up 2015. But don’t go away. We’ve got a big one coming.

The Ike Award Hall of Fame: 2014

Skip to: Blink, Samantha Mann, Inheritance Blues, Chaplin, Roundelay

Now we go into the third year of the blog, and the plays I rated as outstanding step up a notch. I’m not sure whether I was seeing more plays or getting a better radar for the good ones, but there was quite a haul.

2014 also was noted for a different reason, but we’ll get on to this later.

Blink

It is rare for me to rate a play as outstanding, but it’s even rarer for a play to get me emotional. Nabokov’s play is one of those rarities. There’s so many plays and films of “will they or won’t they get together?” (spoiler: yes, duh) I’ve long since been desensitised to it, and yet Phil Porter’s story of Jonah and Sophie has you desperately wanting these two the happiness they need. Both outsiders on the fringe of the society, they way they come to know each other is far from ordinary,  something that would easily be misunderstood by an outsider, but the script always explains why they do what they do.

The thing that move the play from excellent to outstanding, however, way the ending. It might be the ending that no-one wanted, but it was the only ending that could have happened. A bog-standard love story would have ended with them getting together and living happily ever after – but real stories don’t end there. It’s a punch in the guts when the inevitable happens, but that’s the way things go sometimes.

Add to the this innovative set perfectly depicting the unreal, this could not have been a better start to the year.

Ms. Samantha Mann: Stories of Life, Death and a Rabbit

I’ve been aware for a long time that, far from being two distinct genres, theatre and comedy have a big overlap, but it was this show from the comedy sections of Buxton and Edinburgh Fringe that I rated as outstanding on the terms I rate theatre. On the surface, Samantha Mann is drag character comedy from Charles Adrian on a fuddled middle-aged spinster doing a poetry reading. If she ever gets round to the poetry. In fact, she spends half an hour whittering away before getting to this poem.

But it’s in the whittering where the real stories. At first glance you might think she’s giving away past acecdotes of ineptness, but it’s deeper than that. Slowly an unhappy story is pieced together of Samantha Mann’s lonesome life. The shy spinster she is now is the product of distant parents, a fun brother, and a tragedy that comes out of nowhere, very cleverly disguised underneath the laughter. The final poem “Who goes there” is accidentally the most moving poem of her set. There have been companion pieces produced for the world of Samantha Mann since, but the original will always be unbeatable.

Inheritance Blues

Student theatre has a notoriety for many reasons: badly executed, unoriginal, or mistakenly thinking they’re being deep and profound – and, boy, I’ve had my fair share of those. So Dugout Theatre is a prime example of how it can go right. I first saw them do a excellent faithful-but-menacing version of Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice back when they were still students, and then I thought nothing of it until everyone started raving about their smash hit Inheritance Blues. And that, it turned out, was extraordinary. I’m not sure whether anyone in this cast of six had professional training, but I don’t need to lower the bar: this was a superb play easily at the same standard as full professionals.

The story is simple enough: a three-piece band come to play at a funeral, and after the wake they are trapped by a storm with the thee sons, with the one who was closest to his father trying to rope his brothers into an ill-advised scheme to run his late father’s hotel. But what made this play stand out was the music slickly combined with the story. Starting with the “Hot Air Ballues” observing the first between the three brothers and later getting drawn into the story themselves, it really comes into its own, especially the surrealistic re-enactments of the outlandish stories the favourite son of the departed believe about his dad. And yet, for all the bells and whistles attached to a funny play, there is a lovely poignant bitter-sweet ending.

I’ve seen most of Dugout’s plays they brought to the Edinburgh Fringe and loved all of them, but nothing could ever top Inheritance Blues. The last play that featured the Dugout ensemble as we know it was the aptly-named Swansong in 2017 – since they they have acted as producers for other solo plays, still to good standard, but never a replacement for the ensemble we know from their greatest hits. But Dugout Theatre harm thoroughly earned its place amongst the greatest fringe ensembles.

Chaplin

There’s a lot of plays going round at the moment about Charlie Chaplin, but the one I saw and loved has an obscure origin. ACE productions is based in Finland, operates all over the world, and the Edinburgh Fringe production was a rare foray into the UK. This really could have done with being a full-length production, but in the 75 minutes given they did a perfectly potted history of Charlie Chaplin, warts and all. How he began, how real events worked into his films, the suspiciously high correlation between the leading female role and who he’s currently copping of with, all culminating into his disgrace and exile from Hollywood.

It was the final chapter that was done the most memorably. Whilst some of his indiscretions come back to bite him, this play makes a lot of his naivety over the upcoming communist scare, with the iconic speech from The Great Dictator used against him in ways no-one could have foreseen. And closing footage was perfect too: Charlie Chaplin’s Honorary Award, his rehabilitation into Hollywood thankfully before he died. It’s a pity play was never heard of again, but what a one-hit wonder it was.

Roundelay

With so many successes under his belt, Alan Ayckbourn has set himself a huge task: how do you write something that doesn’t feel derivative of anything he’s written before? For me, this was achieved with Roundelay. At first glance this looks like a re-hash of Confusions – isn’t five one-act plays in two hours old hat now? – but there was one difference whose significance you must not underestimate: the five plays can be performed in any order. Indeed, the order is decided randomly for each performance. And, truly testament to Ayckbourn’s writing skills, the p[lays work in any order. One way round a play will plant a seed that forms crucial background knowledge in another play. The other way round, instead of a seed you get a revelation that changes what you thought you know about a story just gone.

It wasn’t perfect – perfection is not a requirement of an Ike Award. The Agent was, I thought, the weak link of the five, played for too many laughs at the expense of believability. But The Judge was wonderful, in my view better than any of the five famous plays from Confusions: an elderly man set up to meet a woman made up to look like his wife as she was when they first met. For some of Ayckbourn’s later plays, I’ve not shared the enthusiasm of the critics, but this one I think is a very underrated. Hope we have not seen the last of this.

But not …

2014 also had the dubious honour of being the year I saw a lot of terrible plays. I have a long-standing rule that I lay off low-key performances from low-key groups, but it’s bigger-budget performances from people who ought to know better are fair game. However, there was one play that scored the unholy trinity: no artistic merit, morally repellent, and a high-profile group that makes it open season. Looking for Paul achieves all three – I don’t know any other way a play can get me that angry.

As I’ve previously said, Paul McCarthy, the “artist” this play idolises, is someone I have a problem with. He’s a bit like Damien Hirst, inexplicably lauded by the fine arts world (and if you don’t like it it’s your fault for not being cultured), except that Damien Hirst  does at least draw the line at shitting coloured diarrhoea on paper. Damien Hirst also has the defence that no-one’s forcing you to look at his spot painting. Not so for Paul McCarthy, who is the darling of “public art”, especially ones involving giant turds of butt-plugs. This is the entire premise of this play, a woman who objects to a butt-plug gnome outside her window and ends up getting roped into a closing scene that is disgusting for the sake of it. It appears to be a two-fingered salute to anyone expressing incorrect opinions about what they do and don’t want built on their doorstep.

The play (if we can call is a play – an opening forty-five minutes of reading out an exchange of emails is a tenuous claim) plays on the notion that controversy is good because It Provokes Debate™, a catch-all term used to invalidate any arguments to the contrary. It couldn’t be a bigger love-letter to Paul McCarthy if all the actors gave him a blow job on stage, nor that have been any more disgusting to watch than the final fifteen minutes. I suppose it’s a bit much to focus all my ire on either this play or the artist it celebrates – it’s more that embodies everything I hate about the elitist culture of contemporary fine art. Nothing I have seen since gets anywhere near my feelings for this – but don’t worry, when it finally happens I’ll certainly let you know.

The Ike Award Hall of Fame: 2013

JoSkip to: The Thrill of Love, Jordan

Continuing the backdated Ike awards, our next year is 2013. There were only two plays to make it to the list this year, but what a two it was.

The Thrill of Love

Amanda Whittington’s play about Ruth Ellis is my favourite play of hers, but it was James Dacre’s directing that upgraded this from a good play to an outstanding one. I’ve seen three plays directed by Dacre, and the common theme he works into all of them is a sense of the unreal. It suited this play perfectly, as the world of Ruth Ellis was an unreal one on many ways: the bizarre world where so many women were expected to dive into the sleaze if they were to become famous; the hypocritical world that indulged these sleazy lives and condemned them in equal measure; and the tragic world of a woman who could not stop herself loving a man no good for her.

No play can be outstanding without an outstanding script; this is a strongest script I know from Whittington’s already strong catalogue, and telling Ellis’s story through through the women who knew year worked very well, as did the sub-plot of friend Vickie Martin, who believed the club where she worked would be immortalised by her some – such cruel irony. There was also a strong all-round cast, but Faye Castelow as Ruth Ellis was superb, making very believable act of someone apparently describes by her executioner as the bravest person he ever hanged. I am now used to high standards from Amanda Whittingdon, James Dacre and the new Vic, but it was the combination of these three that topped it all.

Jordan

It was easy for The Thrill of Love to explore what would make a women kill her cruel lover, but much harder to explore what would drive a mother to kill her blameless child. But that is the subject of Jordan, a solo play on the tragic tale of Shirley Jones. It’s a play that lays bare a reality that many people won’t consider – it is possible for someone to be depressed to the point that not only do they feel there’s no future in a life for themselves, they also feel there’s in the lives of those closet to them. Even someone convinced any child-killer is a monster would be hard pressed to come out of this play without seeing Shirley Jones for a tragic victim.

Moira Buffini originally wrote this play for herself*, but Stickleback Theatre couldn’t have followed in her footsteps better. Sian Weedon was a superb Shirley Jones, getting every aspect of her character down to a tee, from the rough and ready Shirley from Morecambe, to the broken woman after she does the terrible deed, to the fairytale story of Rumplestiltskin. The only pity was that, outside of the Edinburgh Fringe, where there is a niche for just about everything, this one seems to struggle to get an audience. And this play deserves a big audience. There’s few times I tell people to see a play for the good of society, but this is one of them: a valuable play that puts understanding and compassion ahead of knee-jerk judgementalism.

*: Technically this is co-written with Anna Reynolds, who shared a cell with Shirley Jones, but Buffini was the main creative force behind this.

The Ike Award Hall of Fame: 2012

Skip to: The Girl with No Heart, Mess, A Government Inspector

This is something I’ve been meaning to do ever since I introduced the Ike Awards back in 2017. Since Brighton Fringe that year I’ve been using this as my equivalent for a five-star rating in a blog that otherwise doesn’t do star ratings. But there’s still five years of material before then, many of whom also deserved recognition. So, whilst there’s nothing else to keep up with, let’s do the long-overdue backdated awards.

We start with 2012, beginning with the reason Ike Awards are named after Ike …

The Girl with No Heart

Sparkle and Dark have had three highly successful runs at the Edinburgh Fringe, but the one that started it off wasn’t what anyone expected. They came into 2012 best known for The Clock Master, three linked fairy tales with a subtle dark undertone. It was billed as a children’s show but massively popular with adults as well as families (always a good sign). This doubtless would have been a big hit had they taken it to the Edinburgh Fringe, so it came as a big surprise when they instead took a brand new play, taking on the considerably darker subject of nuclear war.

Both The Clock Master and The Girl With No Heart were produced to an excellent standard. Writer Louisa Ashton, director Shelley Knowles-Dixon and musician  Lawrence Illsley are an excellent team who between them put together an excellent mix of puppetry, music, choreography and Grimms-style storytelling. But the thing that pushes The Girl With No Heart to Ike Award level is the courage to take and extraordinary gamble: having a tried tested surefire hit ready and instead going for something untested they thought were better. It was a reckless gamble too, and I’m no ready to recommend anyone else tries this, but it paid off. Congratualtions Sparkle and Dark, you win.

Ike, by the way, is one of the characters from The Girl with No Heart. When I was trying to think of a name for the awards I eventually settles on an arbitrary name, like the Oscars of the Tonys. As the first place to meet this standard, Sparkle and Dark, have (with their permission) the honour of the award being named after their creation.

Mess

There was one other name I recognised in the Edinburgh Fringe listings, and that was Caroline Horton. Like Sparkle and Dark, she’d come to my attention the previous year, this time with the You’re Not Like the Other Girls Chrissy, a lovely recreation of her French Grandmother’s story of being separated from her English fiance is World War Two. Unlike Sparkle and Dark, this has already had a successful run at Edinburgh, so moving on to something new was the only option. Her follow-up, Mess, had an even more personal connection than the last one – and it did not disappoint.

Mess is a semi-fictionalised story of Horton’s own battle with anorexia. For most of of, it’s the most puzzling of illnesses – what would make anyone do something so self-destructive? This does a lot to help understand why. The most memorable moment is where Josephine sees in hospital another woman, little more than a skeleton. One would think that would be a horrible warning of what to avoid – instead, it’s a target to beat. Another strong theme in the play is what effect anorexia has on the people around you, in this case Boris played by Hannah Boyd. And yet – the play as a whole is uplifting and often funny, help along by Seiriol Davies’ brilliant musical score. It was a very brave thing to take to the stage, but such a great thing to bring to everyone.

I’ve not written much about Caroline Horton lately – after Mess she moved in a new direction, and I don’t get her new work. I’m not knocking it – she has amassed a big following for her new work so she’s doing something right. But Mess remains one of my highlights of 2012, and for most of the year is was a very tight run between her and Sparkle and Dark for best production of the year.

A Government Inspector

And then, just when it looks like I’d have an agonising choice for best play of 2012, something came along and pipped them at the post. I’d been aware there was an up-and-coming pair of names at Northern Broadsides, with director Conrad Nelson and writer Deborah McAndrew almost functioning as a company within a company, and their innovative adaptation of Accidental Death of an Anarachist. But it was their re-telling of The Government Inspector that shines at their all-time best.

The concept is a pretty obvious one to do: some things never change, and Gogol’s story of corruption in 19th-century Russia fits perfectly almost anywhere, this time an unspecified borough somewhere in Yorkshire or Lancashire. Council chairman Tony Belcher is big fish in a small pond, loving his position of tinpot tyrant. The rest of the council official are equally opportunistic and self-serving, so when a low-grade civil servant is mistaken for an inspector to root out corruption, they pamper him. Jonathan Sapper ought to be another villain, but he is such as idiot whose delusions of grandeur are inflated by corrupt official you can’t help like him. No Northern Broadsides production would be complete without their signature touches, and the on-stage brass brand and Yorkshire humour completed a perfect transplant to the region.

Conrad Nelson and Deborah McAndrew hold the unique achievement of winning best production twice. They were the natural successors to Barrie Rutter when he stepped down as artistic director, so the foregone conclusion of taking over the rein was sharply contrasted with leaving Northern Broadsides completely after a year with Conrad Nelson as interim director. They are now working at a much more local level with their own Stoke-based Claybody Theatre, and I intend to catch up with this when I have the chance. In the meantime, congratulation once again for superb execution of a long-over idea.

The top 10 times I got it wrong

This might looks like another novelty lockdown piece, but it’s actually something I’ve been planning for over a year. It’s the eight anniversary of my theatre blog when I wrote this. On the third and sixth anniversaries I wrote about what I’ve learned, but for this milestone I thought I’d do something different. It’s sort of about what I learned, but only what I learned the hard way.

As any regulars will know, I made up my mind quite long ago that I don’t want to be an unconditional cheerleader for theatre, and definitely not a cheerleader for the people in charge of theatre. I want to be noisy and frequently off-message, supporting decisions when they’re right, speaking out when I think it’s a mistake. Nor do I go along with consensus just to fit in with what everyone else think of plays. I plan to keep it that way, because there have been times I’ve stuck my neck out and later been proven right, the most obvious case being Pantogate – I was asking questions long before their treatment of staff and actors came out in the open. But I don’t always make the right call. There several thing I’ve said that, looking back, I now thing I got wrong. In general, I’m embarrassed I wrote this now.

So, let’s get straight to business. The worst mistake I ever made is …

…

…

…

wait for it …

15 ways Coronavirus might change theatre for good

As you might have noticed, my last article on Coronavirus didn’t age well. I won’t go over the embarrassing details just yet, but pretty much everything I could have got wrong I did get wrong. The latest I’ve heard is that consensus is most theatres are provisionally planning things to get back to normal in September, with a few having plans on standby for started sooner at short notice.

Do you think I’m making any more predictions after that fiasco? Of course not. So what I’m doing instead in, instead a single vision of the future, I’m going to give fifteen. I will stress straight off that none of these are predictions – indeed, most of them are mutually contradictory. But all of these are, in my opinion, plausible outcomes. There’s still a multitude of things that could happen in the short term, but this is my speculation for how things might turn out in the long term.

So, imagine it’s 2025. Coronavirus is long consigned to the history books, as is the great shutdown, but it’s legacy lives on. But what is that legacy? It might be any of these:

1: Edinburgh Fringe reinvents itself for the better

[This is the scenario a lot of commentators are hopeful for. I am sceptical about this one myself, but let’s see how it might work anyway.]

It is August 2025, and Edinburgh Fringe has a record-breaking 4,452 acts. Any observer from the now-infamous 2019 fringe, where the 3,841 acts seemingly pushed the it to the limits, might call that a disaster waiting to happen. But the pessimists are confounded and the Fringe has sorted out its problems.

In hindsight, the problem was time. For all the Festival Fringe Society’s efforts, they could only achieve token victories single-handedly. What they really needed was the co-operation of the major venues, but the moment the fringe finished the venues had their hands full planning next year. Suddenly, the shock cancellation of the 2020 fringe gave all the venues time on their hands. With the PR disaster for Hogmanay 2019 still reverberating, Assembly, Pleasance and Gilded Balloon were all eager to show they’d learnt the lessons Underbelly hadn’t – Underbelly was forced to go with the flow. Edinburgh University, Edinburgh City Council and the Scottish Government got on board, and an unprecedented level of co-operation arose.

Will Coronavirus clobber the fringe season?

Update 29/03/20: As you are probably aware, pretty much every prediction I have made so far with a resolution one way or the other turned out to be wrong. I will write an update once we have a better idea what’s happening – in the meantime, here’s the original for you to laugh and point at.

It’s not often I do stand-alone news articles. Normally I wait until the end of the month and put it in odds and sods. However, this is a fast-moving situation and what was idle speculation a few days ago is already a serious possibility. So, it turns out that, unlike Sars, Swine Flue, Bird Flu and pretty much every other lurgi where the panic was way out of proportion, with Coronavirus there actually is something to worry about. There’s been lockdowns of various degrees going on all over Europe, and this morning the Scottish Government has announced what appears to be a ban on events with more than 500 people. It’s not clear exactly how that’s going to work, and one important detail is that the reason for the ban is to free up emergency services to deal with Coronavirus cases, rather than preventing the spread. Even as I write this, the English football leagues have announced a one-month delay of their matches.