"Do not expect to understand the text or to follow a linear story"

Those are words of warning that could be applied to many Fringe shows and were certainly apt for Maria de Buenos Aires in whose programme they appeared. This show resembled nothing so much as a series of animated three dimensional surrealist paintings. It opened in dim light with a sort of Mother Courage figure pushing a large wire shelved structure across the stage and dragging a laden trolley behind her. Having positioned her burdens she lifted the skirt of a semi-recumbent actress sitting downstage, picked up a steak that was resting on her thigh and popped it into a hot frying pan, then returned to the shelves and continued to cook it.

It got more bizarre as time went on ending with a woman (Maria?) singing the closing number inside a vast transparent plastic bubble. Despite the music of Astor Piazzolla and a beautiful and athletic tango couple Maria de Buenos Aires did nothing for this Argentophile.

The Tailor of Inverness on the other hand had bizarre and surrealist overtones but was a real and moving story of the actor's father. Born in Poland of Polish and Ukrainian parents he was buffeted about by the ebbs and flows of the machinations of the European powers, serving in turn in the Soviet, German and British armies during WW2. His part of Poland suffered inter-ethnic brutality as it slid into the Ukraine, the Poles and the Ukrainians massacring one another including members of his family. Demobbed in Britain he eventually found his way to Inverness and made a life there leaving (unknown to the actor) a wife and daughter in Poland.

Music, poetry and video projection supplemented the story as the actor played himself, his father and other characters. I got a bit lost at times when the story jumped around but this reflected (whether intentionally or not) the various conflicting stories of his father's wartime life that he had heard over the years.

The piece grew from the actor's uncovering of the various events of his father's life and his efforts (eventually successful) to meet his half sister. The sad fact is that this moving individual story is only one of millions of similar stories of people throughout the world afflicted from time immemorial to the present day by man's inability to live without conflict.

Those were my final ventures into the Fringe and I cast it off completely by getting rid of Alonso's beard.

At the art college yesterday I caught Gordon's animation in which I discovered various bits of my head and chin appeared as well as my hands. My hands served well there but weren't up to scratch in the snooker hall last night when I played roughly four good shots in two hours.

Let's hope they do better when I resume my golf career at Les Dryades this weekend.