Plays For Today

Edinburgh Fringe.

- Si Hawkins

It is very apparent that the Edinburgh Fringe was not designed with football fans in mind. The vast arts festival occupies most of August, those optimistic early weeks of the season, before grim reality sets in. It is not the time to be watching “twee Radio 4 nonsense and irritating student leotard productions”, as the comedian Alex Perry harshly but memorably puts it.

His show, The Game of His Life, was part of a noticeable trend this year, however: football shows. These ranged from small one-handers addressing heavy themes, to much bigger productions staged at actual football locations. Some will live beyond the Fringe, too.

Practically everywhere in Edinburgh becomes a venue – swimming pools, tunnels – and one novel new stage for 2017 was the East Stand concourse at Easter Road. Here Hibernian hosted their own play, A Field of Our Own, an ambitious 90-minute affair featuring 15 actors and a four-piece band.

It came about when Hibs’ community project, GameChanger, asked local theatre group Strange Town to dramatise Hibernian’s history, and the impressive result tackles wider issues such as immigration and religious intolerance. Still, nobody really knew whether football at the Fringe would actually work. “Mixing the two together hasn’t always been that easy,” admitted the play’s director, Steve Small.