Virtual Edinburgh Fringe 2020: Week 1

“Bless us who keep creating,” affirms writer and performer Jo Clifford in the first of her A Space to Bless (★★★) poetry-sermons, recorded amid the echoing chambers of the temporarily dark Summerhall venue. “Our actions will be witnessed. Our voices will be heard.”

Recited in the character of Queen Jesus from her celebrated show Jesus, Queen of Heaven, and offered online every Wednesday and Sunday throughout this month, which would otherwise have hosted the Edinburgh festivals, Clifford’s benedictions have a soothing, inspirational quality.

Her words also offer a rationale for the virtual replacement of the festival, facilitated by several venues and individual artists, and marshalled under the banner of the fringe’s own website (at the time of writing, no public performances are permitted in Scotland, be they outdoor or indoor). In the absence of one route to creativity, effort and ambition will open up another.

While venues including theSpace and the Laughing Horse Free Festival have put their own programmes of new fringe work together as part of the festival’s crowdfunder platform – and the fringe itself is broadcasting its own weekly variety show, AJ Bell Fringe on Friday – the biggest of the fringe’s players with its own platform is Gilded Balloon.

Much of GB’s content is archive material, including comedy from its Late’n’Live and So You Think You’re Funny? strands, but Fringe Search Party (★★★★) is a novel interactive idea that takes its audience out on to the streets of the city safely.

Beginning outside the Gilded Balloon’s traditional – and now sadly shuttered – Teviot venue, the online game invites teams of up to four to journey the streets of the old town, solving satisfyingly tricky puzzles and receiving encouraging messages from the likes of Jo Brand and Alan Cumming. It is, in the context of the more experimental theatre that Edinburgh usually hosts, as theatrically directed a live experience as we might hope for at the moment.

It also wouldn’t be an Edinburgh Fringe programme without at least one show based around an attention-grabbing gimmick that ends up provoking unexpectedly deep thoughts. This year’s eccentric talking point is ImprovBot.ai (★★★★), which bills itself as “the world’s first AI-generated arts festival programme”.

The ImprovBot itself takes the form of a Twitter feed (@improvbot_ai), whose nonsensical stream of bot-generated listings inspires sporadic humour but also unexpected nostalgia for leafing through the last-minute word salads contained within the pages of the fringe brochure. After all, the perfect storm of virus transmission and technological advances leaves us wondering whether we’ll ever see that publication again.

The ImprovBot also raises the question as to whether algorithms might one day replace art and whether the fringe might welcome a chosen-at-random show such as "Pandora Fanny: This is a real tragicomedy about control and sparkling interviews… ’Beautifully compelling’ (West Edinburgh Stage)."

In the meantime, we can make do with comedy troupe the Improverts’ daily Zoom riffs on a randomly generated ImprovBot title, for some semblance of a human connection to the Edinburgh milieu.

A Space to Bless

Fringe Search Party

ImprovBot

See listings.edfringe.com for full show details and information on how to book and donate