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  1. Culture
12 August 2012

Edinburgh diary: No sleep ’til September

Nicky Woolf navigates day four of the Fringe.

By Nicky Woolf

August 11. Day four. 

The Edinburgh festival, for both performers and punters – and reviewers; anyone, in fact, who is planning on going up for a serious length of time – is a marathon, not a sprint. If Glastonbury is the Usain Bolt of festivals, Edinburgh is Mo Farah.

I’m sorry. That was a tragically tenuous metaphor, I know. Farah isn’t even a marathon runner. But as I write the closing ceremony is just starting, Twitter is full of Olympic pride and I feel I ought to get into the spirit a little. Twenty-nine golds! The most successful British showing in more than a century! Wonderful.

OK, it’s out of my system now.

Anyway. It is seductively easy up here at the Fringe to end up, ahem, sprinting nonetheless. There is an embarrassment of riches on offer here – live music, comedy revues, dance, theatre, and endless bars and clubs – and they go on all through the day and the night. Most people get strung out at some point along the way, and usually it happens about now, half-way through the month; performers have been rehearsing, performing and promoting their shows non-stop for more than a fortnight now, and it begins to take its toll. This phenomenon is called Fringe Fatigue.

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Conrad Sharp, 32, is a cast member of Enfants Terribles’ The Trench. “I’m exhausted,” he tells me. “We’re doing a show in the day, with warm-up and notes before that, then we’re handing out flyers all afternoon, then after that we fix all the props – and then you go out all night to blow off a little steam, you know.”

Edinburgh during the festival is a truly 24-hour party city. The Penny Black, the first pub to open, does so exactly five minutes after the last one closes, at seven in the morning. There is always a queue of people outside; several times, I have been among them.

“…Then you get up the next morning and do it all again,” says Sharp. “It’s pretty full-on.” I ask how much sleep he thinks he gets, on average. “Ooh. Four hours, maybe? Five? And I’m sharing a room with another cast member, so of course we come in at all different hours.”

That punishing schedule is not limited to August for performers. “We arrived on the 1st, but we were rehearsing eight hours a day for four weeks before then. Because it’s a brand new play, there was lots of devising, trying to figure out how it was going to work.”

It’s not just performers who burn the candle at both ends. Lauren Archer, 18, is a reviewer for Twitter-based review site Fringebiscuit. She is asleep on a table in a café in the Pleasance when I see her. I ask if she’s tired, and she laughs, wiping sleep from her eyes. “Ha! Oh yes. I don’t think I’ve got more than four hours sleep since I got here on the first. Everyone is properly tired, dead out by now.”

“I haven’t slept since July,” says comedian David Mills. “Sleep? No sleep.” He pauses. “Seriously, though, I see this as work. I’m trying not to let the fatigue get to me. It’s like boot camp. This is training for comics. You smash one, then you fail the next one, then you fail, then you smash one, then you fail, then you smash another night. It’s a gauntlet. I’m trying to stay focussed and committed.”

“There’s a lot to distract you up here,” he goes on. “The problem with playing hard is that it makes it difficult to work hard.”

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