Edinburgh Day 4

The first show this morning is Female Gothic.  The tickets say Assembly Three, George Square.  We turn up at the Assembly Rooms, in George Street with 20 minutes to spare, only to find that this was not the Assembly we were looking for.  We leap into a taxi which delivers us, fifteen minutes later, to George Square in the Old Town.  Then we have an anxious few minutes searching though the various Assembly venues here before we finally discover Three, tucked away along a walkway, round a corner and down a flight of steps.  The queue is just going in. 

Female Gothic is three gothic tales, originally written by women writers, and narrated by a lady in black Victorian dress.  Her props are a leather armchair and a candelabrum with three candles.  The tales are not quite chilling enough to counteract the overheated nature of the venue, and I nod off for a few seconds in the second one.  The third is quite scary, though, and afterwards we spend some time discussing the subtext of infidelity and betrayal.

We had a plan to go to La Garrigue (favourite French restaurant) for lunch, but nobody is very hungry, and it is starting to rain.  Instead we find ourselves at the Brasserie in the new undercroft of the Chambers Street Museum.  I remembered the museum café as having reasonable food of the soup and sandwich variety but very lackadaisical service.  Things however, have changed.  We are briskly ushered to a table and offered a short but interesting menu.  The place clearly caters to mothers with small children, as the place is packed with them, but service is efficient, the food fresh and beautifully cooked, and the wine list short and well chosen.  There are also two person carafes of wine, so it is plainly a place where ladies who lunch go to meet each other, with or without their offspring.

There is just time for a short visit to Transreal Fiction before heading off to our second show, at the same venue as the imprisoned concubines.  Eurydice is a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, with puppetry, dance and physical theatre.  It’s a student production, but has some interesting and entertaining moments, and a genuinely touching ending.  The world of the dead and of the living exist side by side, invisible to each other, and Eurydice’s dead father dances next to her, unseen, at her wedding.  Messages pass between them pegged to a clothesline or pushed through the earth, but the dead and the living speak different languages and can’t understand each other.  In the end Orpheus and Eurydice are united in death but they have forgotten each other (sorry if that’s a spoiler).

Shopping at books and games shops, and then we have different plans for the evening.  In order to be Cultured, M and I have booked a concert at the real Festival, and Karen has arranged to meet up with C, an old friend from Cambridge.  M and I go and have tapas at Café Andaluz on George St (standout dish for me was the pig’s cheeks in red wine, honey and chilli sauce – the pork just falling apart, and coated in the thick, sweet and hot barbeque sauce). 

The concert is the Cleveland Orchestra performing Lutoslawki’s Concerto for Orchestra and the first four parts of Smetana’s Má Vlast, at the Usher Hall.  I had never heard of the former, and have to admit that I chose the latter because we had done it at school, but both were dynamic and exciting.  You could tell that we were in the posh seats by the amount of scent that was wafting over us from the surrounding audience.