The Bird and The Bee

August 11th, 2008 • festival, theatre

Al Smith’s pair of plays - writing one, exec producing the pair - have picked up a pair of strong reviews in The Scotsman.

IT’S inevitable that people will want to compare Matt Hartley and Al Smith’s two new interconnecting plays. Smith, the writer of The Bird, has had an illustrious career at the Fringe with company Kandinsky, while Hartley won the prestigious Royal Exchange Bruntwood Competition for new writing last year. Both met and decided to create separate pieces, drawing inspiration from the Bridgend teenage suicides and a bizarre condition called “colony collapse disorder” – where honey bees willingly leave a colony to die, seemingly without reason.

It’s really pleasing to see both works reviewed as part of a whole, proving that kind of experiment in writing can find a critical home. Pragmatically, a pair of four star reviews should sell also tickets through to the end of the festival, and puts both in the running for a Fringe first. Fingers crossed.

you killed facebook

August 11th, 2008 • scenes from the web

The arrival of the London theatre and comedy scene to Edinburgh has pretty much broken facebook - only the brave or foolhardy sign in to brave the onslaught of e-fliers, invitations and group invites to plays, comedies, launches and 2-for-1 promos for plays by friends of friends of friends.

At the best of times, the ease of inviting just about everyone you know to anything at all means that facebook’s social network has had a fairly large noise-to-signal ratio: right now, it’s all noise. Even with free WiFi access across many (if not most of) the venues across the city, I’ve spoken to several people who’ve abandoned the site entirely until the end of the festival - falling back on older, more reliable (face to face) networks to rediscover their personal signal.  Few, though, have ever mentioned a cull of the friends of friends of friends that produced the avalanche of largely unwanted content in the first place.