Okay, boys and girls. Like Trevor Nelson I'm going to give you the Lowdown on what's been going on so far in the far distant reaches that are the Northern wastes of Edinburgh.
Firstly though, for those of you worried about my state of mind having read my previous admittedly depressing entry, my financial worries have in some small way been ameliorated (though after the tragic loss-making exercise that is the Edinburgh Fringe I may find myself back to square one in September) and the show came together a lot more satisfactorily once we started actually performing it.
A number of previews in and out of London during the end of July (the out of London ones providing simple practice in doing the show, those in London providing the opportunity for our friends and family to laugh at us and tell us, yes, it's all right, you are funny) set us in good stead for the trip North.
Disappointingly, when we arrived in Edinburgh, everything was not fun and games and instant success.
What I seem to forget about the kind of shows that I do with Population:3 is that for the last two years we seem to spend the first week at the Fringe just making and fixing props. This is definitely not something I enjoy, particularly when the small amount of time you have to do it before your first show makes the whole process incredibly unpleasant and stressful. So our first few days up North found the three of us sewing puppets, jig-sawing holes in the set, painting polystyrene balls to look like our faces, gaffer-taping pieces of card together in the forlorn hope that they wouldn't all fall apart again in the damp environment of our set storage area, and barely having any time to think about the actual things we have to do in the show.
Similarly the time given to us for our technical rehearsal - an admittedly generous six hours - is fraught with problems, mainly because of the impossibly unwieldy lighting boards fitted in most of the venues in the Pleasance this year, resulting in the first five hours being spent programming the lights, only to find that the last hour is wasted when all the previously programmed cues suddenly disappear.
And so we find ourselves getting up at 6 a.m. the next morning in order to get in to the Pleasance for another couple of kindly allotted tech hours at seven. Some of the problems are solved, but we are also without a director (David can only make it up to Edinburgh for the second show) and a substantial part of the show - mainly the traditionally troublesome third act - has been completely reworked, but in not a terribly satisfactory manner.
Anyway, we finally get on stage in what is basically a fantastic venue (I'd definitely recommend Pleasance Two to anyone) and smoothly make our way through the first forty minutes of the show only for it to all fall apart in the last twenty.
Not apocalyptically, you understand. The audience know this is a preview, the tickets are only five pounds for those who have paid and many are just there for free to bulk up the numbers, and so thankfully they give us a lot of leeway to mess up. The end result is a show they seem to have enjoyed, but which still has lots of problems (mainly from the Music Hall scene onwards).
However, when David arrives the next night to watch the show we have a bit of a stinker (no reviewers in yet luckily, indeed by pure chance we put off one from Metro, thank God) and his notes are copious.
We spend much of the next day on another radical change to the last third, and although tentative, it feels like it might be a better solution to the inevitable malaise audiences feel around the forty-minute mark in Edinburgh shows. We cut all the acts from the Music Hall, changing it to An Evening With Oscar Wilde, and add in a 'silent film' sequence to outline the denouement. Thankfully when we perform this new version on Friday, although still a bit unsure of ourselves, it appears much more successful and we have a pretty enjoyable show, which is comforting when we discover that there have been reviewers from the Independent on Sunday, Metro and the Evening Standard (Bruce Dessau, who is also Chairman of the Perrier panel) scribbling in the darkness.
A bit more work on Saturday afternoon on the silent sequence and by Saturday evening's show it all seems to be coming together. Pleasing The Elephant Woman is now looking at least as good if not better than The Wicker Woman and hopefully we're off to a good start. Certainly the director of another clown show in our venue thinks it's the funniest show he's ever seen. Let's hope those first set of reviewers feel the same.