Last year I helped Aindrias de Staic win a ThreeWeeks Award for his “bonkersly brilliant” show about ending up playing the fiddle at Glastonbury. I thought it was one of the most charming things I’d ever seen. Now, in a smaller room, de Staic repeats the trick of playing the fiddle while telling tall tales. For a newcomer to this world, this show would earn a fifth star but, in the context of having seen his show last year, I found it a little more ramshackle, as he clambered over chairs, looked into the whites of your eyes and hey-diddly-dee-ed. It had energy, passion, movement, desire, craft, yet I felt it dragged in the final third as he rushed back to Galway from Australia. Each tale of drug busts and playing Irish fiddle music on the basis of his nationality was amusing, and there were great tonal shifts where it wasn’t likely that de Staic would escape jail or get out on bail. He always did, so the story had a happy ending, and the message of the production seemed to be that drugs were a good thing. Whether it was satire or hyperbole I don’t know, but it was certainly a gripping hour where you were taken inside the mind and talent of a lad who should become a Fringe institution if only he could rein in the drugs. Just say no, Aindrias….
Around the World on 80 Quid
Sweet Grassmarket
Misc times 16-30 Aug
