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With the Edinburgh festival shelved by Covid, standups have turned a garden shed into a stage for an online extravaganza. Our writer enjoys flashes of brilliance amid a dislocating experience
There are precedents when it comes to memorable Edinburgh fringe shows in sheds. Nutshell Theatre performed their show Allotment on, er, an allotment a few years back, shed firmly centre stage. Toby Jones’s journey to movie megastardom detoured via Edinburgh 20 years ago with Wanted Man, a very funny garden-shed fantasia. In both shows, sheds represented – as they tend to do – narrow horizons, cosiness bordering on claustrophobia. Who, in those days, would ever have imagined a whole Edinburgh fringe – or at least, the online substitute for one – unfolding between a garden shed’s four walls?
Actually, make that three walls. The Shedinburgh venue is open on one side to its audience – watching on screens at home, mainly, although at the comedy shows I attended, there were usually a handful of people watching live at Soho theatre, on whose stage the shed stood (there is also a shed based at Edinburgh’s Traverse theatre). That must have been a blessed relief to the performers, for whom gigging in front of a 100% empty auditorium could only be a thoroughly unnerving experience. Continue reading...