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Gordon Aikman Theatre at Assembly George Square
First trip back to the Gordon Aikman Theatre in a long time, actually — certainly since it picked up that name. Worth a quick pause on that: Gordon Aikman was a political researcher (he ran research for Better Together during the 2014 indyref) who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease that same year, aged just 29. Rather than step back, he launched a campaign that got Nicola Sturgeon to commit to doubling MND specialist nurses in Scotland and raised over £500,000 for research before he died in 2017, aged 31. The venue was renamed in his honour in 2018. Nice to be sat somewhere with that kind of story behind it.
Bryan was buzzing going in — we’d only ever seen Gyles Brandreth “in conversation with” Judi Dench a few seasons back, so a whole hour of him flying solo felt like it was going to be a treat. Surely. Right?
Turns out the “Rosebud twist” the blurb promises — Gyles joined on stage by Harriet Jaine, producer of his podcast Rosebud — is really the whole show. It’s a constant reminder to go subscribe, and Harriet isn’t just sitting in for a chat: she’s got her own solo songs threaded through the whole thing, so at points it felt less like a show and more like a very long, very tuneful ad break.
To be fair to Gyles, he was excellent whenever he had the stage to himself — a natural, warm, easy raconteur, exactly as advertised. Harriet’s parts, unfortunately, felt sketchy by comparison: rehearsed in a way that never quite settled, nowhere near as polished as the rest of it.
By the halfway mark I’d nodded off for a solid ten minutes, which tells you everything. Every Fringe throws up one BooBoo Show for us — the one that just doesn’t land. This year, this was it.