Way back in the Long Ago, a teenage version of myself went to see the Jim Rose Circus, in a big tent on Calton Hill. It was scary, it was freakish, it was filled with people who had honed their bodies to a state where they could truly claim to be Performers. Back then, they even appeared on the X-Files. If it said Jim Rose on the tin, it was guaranteed to be entertainment, if not necessarily in good taste.
He's not been back to the Edinburgh Festival for years, and when I saw an advert I immediately decided to go. After all, he can only have become more bizarre in the intervening decade!
So Graeme and I went to see Plague! the musical, which was a touch overlong but generally very funny. Songs will be stuck in my head for weeks. A quick wall up from C on Chambers Street to the upside-down purple cow which the Underbelly install in Bristo Square every year put us in the queue for this year's Jim Rose spectacle. And, after waiting for close to an hour and having just decided to give up and go, we were finally let into the tent.
Pretty lights, a caped man with a chainsaw, creepy voiceover... Ah, thought I, this should be good. Graeme is sure to poop his pants at this!
Oh, how sadly mistaken I was.
After a moody preamble by the man himself, explaining that he hadn';t been doing any shows because he wanted to do something New and Exciting, the show got going. And when i say Show I'm not talking about a Circus or a Freak show; this was one notch away from a Live Sex Show.
Other than a handful of things - face in glass, eating a lightbulb... old favourites - this was nothing more than some passable Metal covers and some very skinny, very grumpy girls doing eccentric things in the nude under the faint veil of a pseudo-satanic plot. It made us squirm because of the constant crotch shots rather than, for example, the Girl Squirting Blue Paint Out Of Her Ass (whitch was quite obviously a bulb of paint up there. I mean, come on! Jim Rose reduced to tacky trickery? What happened!?).
I didn't walk out surely because I was hoping - vainly, I might add - for some redeeming moment which would make it all worthwhile. Instead, we exited the theatre at two in the morning having endured an hour of what was no better than the wank fantasy of an American teen rock wannabe from the early 90s.
If you want to watch girls pulling underwear out of their orifices while an ageing, drugfucked disappointment letches over them, then go see the show. Otherwise, pay money to avoid it.