The festivals are back and crowds of visitors with them. Not in quite such overwhelming numbers as we've been used to in recent years but enough for the Grassmarket to be packed with outdoor diners on a sunny Saturday. 

 The Royal Mile has it's entertainers again, who like policemen get younger every day.

Not everyone enjoys the shows they go to see and some go to extreme lengths to leave the venue.

Luckily most of the shows I've seen so far have been worth the investment of my time and treasure.

I started off with Phantasmaphone at the French Institute.  Alone in a little cubby hole just inside the building you pick up a phone and have a fifteen minute chat with someone in Paris about whatever you like but which ends up with them reading you a poem.  The reading will be in French but you can chat in English though I gave my French a whirl in what was the first conversation I've held in the language for two years.  A great start.

A little later came Granny Smith, also at the Institute.  The billing reads "Join us for a show full of humour and gentle instruction on language and cooking."  What I hadn't picked up was that it was really a kids' show.  In fact that made it even more fun.  The actress (English but working in France for thirty years or so) explained that the show had been developed following requests for a show that would help with language learning.  So she potters about getting up in the morning, having a cup of tea and so on the while getting across various French words.  She has the whole audience up doing a French hands kness and boomps-a-daisy at one point.

The centrepiece of the show is the making of a cake and by this time she's got three kids on stage reading the recipe, mixing the ingredients and generally having the time of their lives.  Three adults in the front row were handed a pear and a peeler each and instructed to "épluchez les poires et enlevez les trognons".  It's pretty obvious that means "peel the pears and take out the cores" but I don't know that I'd ever come across the word "trognon" before so the language learning objective was met in my case at least.

Unfortunately there was then a fire alarm and we all had to leave the building.  We hung about for a while chatting and one little girl who'd been sitting near me and sticking her hand in the air whenever a volunteer was called for and who had obviously been deeply disappointed at never being chosen bravely went up to Granny and asked if she could take part when the show resumed. 

I had a lunch date so didn't wait for the resumption.  I've since had an invitation from the Institute to go again but I doubt that I will though I highly recommend the show even if you don't have a kid to take you.

In the afternoon I saw Moonlight on Leith.  This had a faint whiff of Under Milk Wood about it as the doings of several denizens of Leith are displayed and in the heightened language of the narrative.  There's not what you'd call a plot but there's a romance here and there, a glimpse at interconnecting lives, animal as well as human and the exposure of the nasty developer who wanted to tear down the red sandstone parade in Leith Walk but was foiled by the community.  Ably presented by recent graduates of acting courses offered by Napier and Queen Margaret universities. 

I thought I was going to see a play but Love in the Time of Lockdown was a sketch show.  Some of the sketches were quite substantial though and one quite a moving riff on loneliness. The accent in general however was on humour.  Even the slightest was entertaining and very well played by an excellent cast.  The opening sketch was love blossoming between a man and his lady vaccinator which she explains as he goes off happens several times a day.  My own particular favourite was the woman in love with her car who it turned out returns the feeling and has a voice with which to tell her so. 

Miss Lindsay's Secret at the Netherbow was the sad story told through letters to her of a romance that never flowered. Her young man left Glenesk to seek a fortune in the Yukon gold rush at the beginning of the twentieth century and conducted a correspondence over a period of years.  All we know of what she said to him is conveyed by what he said in reply because she kept his letters but we have no idea what happened to hers.  He talks about how he longs to come home and how his luck is bound to change soon but it never does.  The letters stop or she didn't keep them or they got lost after fifteen years or so.  She died unmarried still in the glen at 85.  He also died unmarried in Canada never having been home.  As well as two actors there was a musician on stage whose playing sometimes for my taste intruded on what was a fine if depressing production.

It hasn't all been about festivals.

You no longer need to book an entry slot to the Botanics so I had a pleasant stroll around them last week and went on to Stockbridge where I bought some tasty bread and cheese and things.  I had a delicious dinner at the Outsider.  I was supposed to go on to a show but lingered over dinner instead.  It turned out to be a good choice because I'd have missed it anyway.  I thought it was at the Pleasance, not far from the restaurant.  But it was at "The Pleasance@EICC",  a much further away venue.

I had a rehearsal (online) for a short podcast play and I went to the dentist.

Back to the festivals for my next post.