We’re back!
After a crazy month at the world’s largest Arts Festival, we’ve returned to London to recover. We’ve caught up on sleep, worked through the obligatory post-fringe flu, given our liver a rest, and adjusted to life without a rainbow of lanyards.
It was a mad month, but since so many people couldn’t make it up to Edinburgh, we thought we’d give a quick update/recap on how it all went… the ups and the downs.
We also have some lovely new photos from Richard Davenport, so if you’re not interested in the text, just scroll through those!
We were on the front cover of The List
For all you London-lubbers, The List is the Edinburgh/Glasgow equivalent of Time Out.
After a lovely interview with Gareth Vile, their theatre editor, he casually mentioned the next weeks’ issue had just gone to print, and suggested we might want to look out for a copy.
Fast forward three days, and we woke up to this:
…with three further pictures inside, alongside a lovely article. We were doubly lucky with the timing of publication, which meant the issue was around for almost half the Festival.
We had to cancel some shows after a horrid injury
The most unfortunate point in the tour came towards the end, when one of our actors suffered a very nasty burn, spilling almost two litres of freshly boiled water directly onto her lap.
As you can imagine, she was in worlds of pain. But the whole team were right there with her, helping her through.
We ended up cancelling eight performances in total. But a few days of rest post-festival and she’s healed well.
Thanks for all your well-wishes and messages of support on twitter!
We were on the BBC
We appeared on BBC2’s Edinburgh Nights, part of a feature on female roles onstage.
We had some lovely reviews
The most frequently occurring words in our reviews…
In terms of critical response, this was far-and-away our most successful year ever, with some really wonderful and thoughtful reviews, and a veritable galaxy of stars (well, 93½, but who’s counting…?)
We made some videos
Including our brand-spanking-new Trailer:
A quick look at the Titus cleanup:
And some other promos:
We had loads of great press and appearances
As well as The List and the BBC, we were also invited back onto Mervyn Stutter’s Pick of the Fringe (such a lovely guy), and appeared on oh-so-many podcasts (five at last count).
We had an amazing audience
We sold a little over target (excluding the cancelled days of course), and we had such a wonderful crowd in. The feedback was phenomenal and humbling. We’ll post some photos of our feedback book at a later date.
The is one of the reasons we love the Edinburgh Fringe – the audiences are wonderful, and that’s vital to developing new work.
We went to A&E three times
The boiling water incident wasn’t the only case of misfortune this fringe.
Our lovely ASM injured her ankle on our day off. What’s worse, it was her birthday that day (and, before you ask, she was stone-cold-sober). Luckily, it wasn’t broken, but it did take four hours of waiting overnight in A&E to figure that out. On her birthday.
And then, our poor Production Manager was struck down with a suspected case of gastrointestinitis, completing the hat-trick of visits.
Transfer
Finally… we’re very pleased to announce, after its success at Edinburgh, Othello is transferring back to Greenwich Theatre in October!
We’ll be there 20th-24th October – five performances only! This could be your last chance to see the show for a couple of years, or maybe forever, so check out smoothfacedgentlemen.com/shows/othello for more information!
That’s it…
As you can see, it was a successful but very busy festival. We love the Fringe, but we’re glad to be back home. Now, we’re straight back into rehearsals for our October Tour of Othello.
If you saw Othello before the fringe, or early on, do come by and let us know what you think of how its changed. And if you missed it… now you have no excuse!
