Lots of people around me at Fresh Cuts were snapping away with big fancy cameras but all I had was my phone and it produces pics of this doubtful quality so I contented myself with watching the show.

It was great fun and there were even some clothes that looked wearable.

The models were of course ultra skinny and it wouldn't surprise me to hear that one or other had something in common with the protagonist in Mess.  Cleverly, entertainingly and amusingly presented, Mess dealt nonethless with the serious matter of anorexia.  Its moving last moments left us to ponder on the possibility or not of a happy ending.

There was no happy ending to The Intervention although the actor sobbing on the floor clutching a waste binful of alcohol as the lights dimmed bounced up pretty quickly with a big grin on his face to take his call.  A moment of sobriety to allow the audience to reflect on the game of who's to blame for Zac's downfall that we had all just seen would not have gone amiss.

But enough moralising.  That's my festival going finished.  I don't have time to follow up the recommendations specially prepared for imminent channel crossers so till the next time, ciao.       

I've never read Angela Carter's novel so I don't know how true Nights at the Circus is to either its narrative or its spirit but I do know that the dramatization of the book by Fourth Monkey is worth an hour or so of the fringegoers time.

It's a lively rumbustious piece in which the young actors bring convincingly to life the characters and animals of the circus.  The clowns are suitably tortured behind their jolly masks, the tigers pad around their wary watchers and arouse amazement and fear in equal measure when they dance on their hind legs, the chimps chatter as they swing their bodies along arms trailing close to the ground and the ringmaster struts and bellows pet pig under his arm.  There are lovely production moments; from the opening in which the clowns pop up out of the portmanteaux strewn around the stage to the rail crash in Siberia.  What's it telling us?  I don't know.  I'll try reading the novel to find out.

Thanks to my fellow theatregoer I know that Morning  is a portrayal of disaffected modern youth in all its self-obsessed, antisocial and unempathetic glory.  Well I guess if you go off to the woods with your chum and your boyfriend, the two of you toy with him, you batter him to death and then pop round round to his house to see his mum you are all of those nasty things and more.  Great production though.

You couldn't describe Karl Lagerfield as disaffected although he certainly comes across as a weirdo, albeit a loveable one, in a film running in the Fashion Festival that shows the last few days of the build up to a catwalk show in Milan. It's joyous and controlled mayhem around Karl the queen bee sitting stock still and occasionally flourishing a black leather demi gloved hand to condemn an outfit to oblivion or to produce a sketchy sketch that must be turned into a heavenly garment overnight.

He's unperturbed by the turmoil since, as he declares, he has the temperament of a professional killer.  What a hoot and what great fun.

I fought on the French side at the Battle of Agincourt tonight thanks to a brilliant show called Midnight at the Boar's Head that combines Shakespeare, music, drink and party poppers.  One couple of party poopers crept away during the battle but the rest of us stayed and enjoyed the fun.

That followed hard on the heels of a red-hot production of The Erpingham Camp in which a lively company of excellent young actors handled both the physical and verbal demands of Joe Orton's little satirical gem to devastating effect. 

If you've ever seen Alan Bisset's The Moira Monologues in which amongst other characters he plays two dogs you will not be surprised that in The Red Hourglass he counts four different types of spider amongst his roles.  It's clever, witty, funny and a performance to wonder at. 

Another excellent multi-character portrayal is Miriam Margoyles Dickens' Women.  She moves from one character to the next with seemingly effortless ease and gives us some insights into Dickens the man on the way.  His favourite number we learn was 17, sweet 17.  

The Rise and Fall of Little Voice and Proof were good, solid, well acted productions from Arkle that did Edinburgh amdram proud with in the former a delightful piece of work from Bev Wright.

Not everything I've seen this week has been delightful though.  Despite its having won the Sir Michael Caine award for new writing I thought Visiting Time was a pretty feeble play whose script did not display anything in the way of literary merit. 

That Old Noir Magic is a pleasant enough late night entertainment in which a dozen jazz numbers are played and sung against a background of short clips (sometimes only a couple of words) from black and white film noir movies, the whole being linked by the singer who is at times a protagonist in the story he weaves and at times a narrator.  I'm sure it was a lot of hard work putting the show together but it all seemed a bit incoherent and led nowhere.  I'd rather have watched the movies.

I dipped my toe into the latest addition to our gallery of festivals by going to a talk at The Fashion Festival.  Dressing The Self: Art, Fashion and Neuroscience was delivered by Ludovica Lumer who is a philosopher turned neurologist/physiologist/biologist as those really bright people cross boundaries in a way that we mere mortals can only wonder at.  She's busy putting people through MRI scanners to try to work out the relationship between the brain and beauty.  At least that's my nutshell view.  If you want a more extended discussion try here  (Italian required) or read her book (Italian also required).

The joint after-show party was going well as I dragged myself away at 2am, an early departure occasioned by my commitment to a day's walking with visiting Spanish friends.  I arrived at their cottage near Kippen at a relatively early hour and after a coffee and a catch-up on several years' news we set off for Callander and Balquidder.

We did a couple of lovely walks beside and above Loch Voil.  Coming back into the village we spotted a magnificent stag in woods by the lochside.  We were a couple of hundred yards away from him but I was nonetheless surprised at how unfazed he was by our presence.  He watched us for a fair while and then got back to the important business of grazing.  We continued on our way to some grazing of our own on scrumptious baking in the local tearoom.

Leaving Edinburgh for the day did not isolate me from all cultural activity since there was a concert in Balquidder church in the evening.  A duo from the Passacaglia Chamber Music Group  had brought a handful of flutes and recorders and a harpsichord 500 miles in the back of a van to set the Highlands on fire with some sparkling baroque pieces.  My image of the recorder as a squeaky tube was quite overturned by some lovely playing but I still can't warm completely to the harpsichard.

Before pitching up to the last performance of Dr Faustus I took in Edinburgh Theatre Arts production of Macbeth in Scots.  It wasn't an easy listen all the time and that venue gets tiringly hot but it was a very well presented production and although I dropped off now and then in the first half I saw enough to say that congratulations are in order.

That's not how I feel about everything I saw last week. I walked out of one dire production but they had had the good sense not to charge for admission so I'll return the compliment by refraining from naming and shaming.

A show that did have a name and star reviews to go with it, but which gave rise to a reaction no more exciting than boredom in me was And No More Shall We Part.  Someone a few seats away put my cold heart to shame by weeping as the play slowly ground through the business of  grappling with suicide in the face of the prospect of a certain and agonising death.

Blink and you'll miss it, which would be a shame because it's a great little play beautifully set and dressed and acted to perfection by a couple of young and talented performers.  It's a strange tale of how a relationship comes into being in a virtual sort of way and how it pans out in the physical world.

How things might pan out after Britain is destroyed by a nuclear attack is the subject of The Letter of Last Resort.  The four identical copies of the eponymous letter are held by the commanders of Britain's nuclear subs and contain the prime minister's instruction as to what whichever submarine is lurking in the depths at the time should do; retaliate or slink off to Australia and pretend it never happened.  The script has a lot of fun in a Yes Minister type of dialogue between the PM and a Sir Humphrey figure over the composition of the letter, for which alas a template does not exist.

That's paired with Good With People which I had seen in it's earlier appearnce in the A Play, A Pie and A Pint season and which I was delighted to see again.  There's a bit of a nuclear connection between the two plays because of GWP's Helensburgh setting and references to Faslane but the more important connection is that these are two excellent pieces of writing by contempory Scottish plawrights. 
 

Lots of Festival activity got underway this weekend and I sampled some on Saturday.  It was a lovely day and my attention was caught by huts, marquees and crowds in St Andrew's Square so I wandered in to investigate.

It turned out to be a marketing event for East Lothian tourism not a festival event.  There were various stalls advertising the delights of The Museum of Flight, Port Seton Holiday Park etc.  There was a family friendly farm showing off their pigs and goats and providing donkey rides.

A sandpit for toddlers had been set up.   It seemed to me a pity they'd fenced off the pool so no paddling was possible.  In imitation of Paris Plage I'd have made it a proper toddler's beach. 

One young man assured me that the large plastic fish he was carrying around was his day's catch and had it not been for his mum's well timed intervention he'd have returned it to the water from whence he claimed it had come.

Adults had not been forgotten.  Glenkinchie distillery was there extolling the virtues of their product and may have been giving away samples as they do when you visit though I didn't check.

However that visit was incidental to my festival going.  I saw a clarinet recital in St Giles which was pleasant if unexciting and a filmshow I'd rate similarly.  But these at least were free and I saw another free show in a cellar bar in Broughton Street that was excellent.  Billed as Andy and the Prostitutes - The Musical it was disarmingly introduced as not being a musical but some music and a bit of a story.  The story purported to be the eponymous Andy's life from his disappointment at realising that his father was not a Gedi knight through the travails of love and drugs and crime.  We were assured from time to time that it was just a story and the whole was punctuated by amusingly scurrilous songs and lively music played energetically on banjo, violin, guitars and a combination seating unit/ethnic drum.  Add to that a wildly dressed musician's friend in the audience banging rhythm sticks together.

I don't remember how Walt Disney came into the story but they sang a song whose refrain was Uncle Walt was a paedophile.  At the end of the show a guy came up to congratulate them saying "I live in California and I always thought uncle Walt was a paedophile".

Then a fairly feeble comedy, Lingua Frank, for which I paid good money but with a friend in the cast it was worth supporting.

Finally a super show advertised as a 60 minute history of the Blues starting with the quietly sad strains of a plantation harmonica building up through developments of the 30s and 40s on to rock and roll and beyond.  The later music wasn't entirely to my taste but I couldn't fault the band.  They were first class and their presentation was faultless.  Go see the show.

And why not the Grads shows which opened last night. After playing in tonight's performance of  Dr Faustus I'll be seeing Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us.  I loved when I saw it at the Traverse a few years ago and I'm sure Claire's production will be excellent.

Transport For London have thanked me a few times this week for "continuing to avoid the busy parts of the transport network at the busiest times and helping us keep London moving"

I'm not sure whether or not to tell them that from 400 miles away it was no bother at all.