Finding meaning along Edinburgh’s maddest of miles
The same could be written over the mast of the Edinburgh Festival. Anyone who has run the gauntlet of the Royal Mile in August will agree with me.
The famous old castle at the top of the street, overlooking the rest of the city, is besieged by men dressed like Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and characters from shortbread biscuit tins.
In the Fringe centre on Bristo Square dozens of venues rattle with the sound of laughter as seemingly every working punchline-drunk comedian on the planet is crowbarred into this little piece of real estate. Stalls sell tickets, beer and ponchos to a city that doubles in size during the month.
I noticed earlier in the week as I sheltered from the familiar rain that one of the more flyered — if that’s a verb — shows on at the Arts Festival this year, is one entitled Federer v Murray.
First, let me add that in my experience, typically, shows at Edinburgh — apart from the stand-up comedy gigs and good music — are ‘clever’ musicals about Nazism, improvised comedy battles or Shakespearean tragedies re-imagined in a modern setting: think Othello in Iraq, Hamlet as a prevaricating X Factor judge and you’re not far off.
To have one play, then, in which the main thrust seems to be sport is unusual. Federer though, seems to occupy the same space in the national Scottish psyche as Toto Schillaci does for the Irish.
But this is not Roddy Doyle.
A tragic-comedy by Gerda Stevenson, this piece is focused on ‘war on many levels’, man versus wife, nation against nation and Murray versus… the Swiss star.
The now late David Foster Wallace might have enjoyed the play I think. The writer — who died three years ago — wrote a piece in the New York Times in 2005 which appeared under the ambitious heading: Roger Federer as a religious experience. In it, Foster Wallace described, with a jeweller’s attention to detail, watching the Swiss master hit an unlikely winner against Andre Agassi in New York and its effect on the spectator.
Behold the longest sentence ever written about tennis: “There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner ... until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to centre, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centreline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a top-spin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands.”
Religious experience is right. That one line about a return was longer than Mass. Wallace then, I reckon, would have appreciated Fed v Murray played out as more than a slog from the baselines in Flushing Meadows.
In a claustrophobic, little flat in Scotland the audience watch a couple on a painful journey from their son’s death in Afghanistan, money problems, a creaking marriage. And all from behind nationalistic face paint. This is not Sue Barker and Pimms.
As the rain stopped I shuffled off to find another venue, while someone under a hood diligently sprayed glue on the play’s posters and slapped another four-star rating across it. It’s a winner.
As Wallace concluded after watching that point of his: “And there’s that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his colour man’s headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), ‘How do you hit a winner from that position’?”
- Contact: Adrian@thescore.ie; Twitter: @adrianrussell
