Have you ever wondered what it might be like, not just to visit the Edinburgh Festival, but to be part of the Fringe? Well, if you were at the u3a monthly meeting on the 2nd of December you’ll know a bit about the pros and cons!
The Edinburgh Fringe is the biggest event of its kind in the world with over 50,000 performances each year and two years ago, Christine Hayward was persuaded by friends to take her one-woman show, ‘Memories of the Early 1950s’, to be one of them.
The first hurdle was putting in an application online: no easy task for novice techies! Then there was the problem of finding a month’s accommodation, especially as the hotel they had booked into cancelled, with no explanation, just two weeks in advance. Naturally, by now there were no rooms of any sort to be had in Edinburgh itself but they managed to book into a Travelodge motel on the ring-road.
Meantime, there was the problem of getting from Farnborough to Edinburgh. Christine took the easy route and flew there but her long-suffering husband, Keith, drove up with all the equipment, He chose to drive at night, thinking that the traffic on the M1 would be lighter then. Big mistake. The road was crammed with lorries and other heavy vehicles. Then, outside Leeds, he suffered a flat tyre and had a long wait, in pouring rain, for the AA.
Getting from the Travelodge to the theatre involved a fifteen-minute walk to the nearest bus stop then a thirty-minute ride into Edinburgh. Next to the bus stop was a care home where Christine gave a free performance and, in return, was able to use their resident hairdresser. Later they were able to move into student accommodation with all that that implies (tiny room up four flights of stairs, shared toilet, leaky shower) but very close to the ’theatre’ where Christine was putting on her show.
Now for the venue. In Castle Street? I don’t think! It was a tiny, fifty-seat temporary theatre – one of five in an old tenement building in Niddry Street, an erstwhile slum area. Christine had the 1-2 p.m. slot - times that had to be adhered to religiously or woe betide. Help had to be enlisted to carry equipment to and from the basement storage area.
At last, Christine and her first pianist, Clive Pollard, were good to go and their opening performance attracted a crowd of – two people. This was despite a friend distributing leaflets for the show. Unfortunately, dozens of people were doing the same. Later, Christine distributed her own leaflets with Sooty (from the fifties’ TV show) perched on her shoulder. A ticket for her show cost just one pound – and you got a fifties’ ha’penny back as change!
The show itself was very informal: no costumes, no special lighting and, because of the audience size, Christine decided to arrange the front row of seats in a semi-circle to make it more intimate.
Many performers, dismayed by the size of Fringe audiences, gave up and went home after a few days but Christine and Keith stuck it out for the whole month – a month that cost them a total of £10,000! Was it worth it for the experience of a lifetime? You bet. Would they do it again? No way!
P.S. When not performing, Christine and Keith tend the National Collection of Cannas, and they will be talking about these glamorous flowers at a meeting of our Gardening Group in the new year. Don’t miss it!
2 December 2025