‘A Spaceman, a Cowboy and a Disco-Dancer are going on a journey. A journey undertaken in the spirit of discovery. There’s a gig that they’ve got to get to and they’re the performers. The gig’s 468 miles away and they’ve only their feet to get them there. This will be 30 Days to Edinburgh.’
And they did it! James Baker, Rob Jude Daniels and Andy Roberts – collectively known as Bootworks – walked the whole length of the country to get from Chichester in Sussex to Edinburgh on the very last day of the Fringe, just in time to present the show made en route. In fact, they got here early and had to dawdle for the last day before making their triumphant journey down the Royal Mile singing The Proclaimers’ I Would Walk 500 Miles (inevitably, I suppose).
I’m in seeing another show and sadly miss them arriving at the door of Summerhall at 7pm. By 7.30, they are hanging out in the corridor chatting to mates. I give James (aka Spaceman) a hug – it’s odd hugging a guy in a slinky silver jumpsuit laden down with a giant backpack.
We file into one of Summerhall’s lecture theatre spaces, three mics placed in the stage area, and the Bootworks boys take to the stage, take off their backpacks and begin…
It’s (unsurprisingly) a bit of a ramshackle performance. Notebooks in hand, fluffs on the mic, lots of in-jokes. All-in-all it’s like a cross between stand-up comedy and performance poetry, with a few bits of mildly entertaining physical action chucked in. There’s a very funny failure to erect a tent (some children in the audience are called upon to help). There are jokes aplenty about Spaceman’s dangly bits, clearly outlined in the slinky silver suit, and about his bad poetry. Disco Dancer (Rob) is honest about the fact that he has found it all a bit hard going – he hasn’t had sex in ages, and his feet hurt, really hurt. The Cowboy (Andy) channels the energy of those that have gone before him: Jon Voigt in Midnight Cowboy, and John Wayne in – well, in everything John Wayne has been in, which is a lot of cowboy movies.
We get a whole lot of numbers and lists (meals eaten, animals spotted, towns passed through, pubs visited, constellations gazed at) and a fair few namechecks – Josh and Hannah who phoned them regularly from Edinburgh (there was a mobile number given on cards placed next to the Lego map in the hallway at Summerhall that showed their daily progress with little flags); Mim who called from a train going through Cumbria mid-August, saying she was probably very near them right now, and they were all looking at the same sunset; Winnebago Jeremy and the various nice landladies whose cafes provided them with life-saving All-Day Breakfasts. There’s quite a bit about food, and I particularly like a eulogy to the great British tradition of the Ice Cream van (‘Knobbly Bobbly! Mr Whippy with two flakes!’) There’s a lot about blisters and boots, about moments of friendship and fights, about torches and tents. Andy reads a letter composed en route: ‘Dear Vango, I quite like your sleeping bags, but please could you stop making tents?’
There are some nice moments of rhythm and repetition in the spoken text (the refrain of ‘We could have taken the train/car/plane,’ for example). Some of the observations from the journey and the recalling of encounters along the way are witty and interesting, but rather too many are not particularly inspiring, and there are more than a few dismissive comments about towns encountered along the way – although our lads are always keen to emphasise that ‘the people are nice’.
A criticism that has to be made is that it is all geared towards those in the know: the family and friends who have followed the progress along the way. A posse of international delegates in to see the show are completely bemused. Essentially, this is raw, undigested data, and life takes a lot more mulching down to become meaningful theatre. Compare and contrast to (say) Forced Entertainment’s The Travels, which similarly uses tales of journeying and random encounters across the UK – but which took many years of writing and editing and theatrical crafting to become the great show it is.
Which brings me to say that I feel that the choice to do the show was a mistake. The 30 days on the road was the show – a beautiful, wonderful thing, in a noble tradition of walking-as-art that includes the work of Janet Cardiff, Richard Long, and Wrights & Sites. The interaction with people from afar (by phone call, text, Facebook, or Twitter) was of course an intrinsic part of this. It is a wonderful achievement that is somehow lessened by being reduced to an hour-long hurriedly constructed theatre show. A celebratory welcoming party would perhaps have been enough to close the 30 days.
Should the company feel that a theatre show could emerge from the project, then that could be worked on with the sort of rigour and structured process that is needed to create an hour-long theatre piece, and what would emerge would be something of a standard worthy of Bootwork’s wonderful track-record.
But as said, I don’t feel that the theatre show is at all necessary in any case. 30 Days to Edinburgh was an extraordinary performance art project, a beautiful challenge to the Edinburgh bubble – but the art happened before they stepped into that lecture room. Nothing more was needed.