Kerplunk

Pregnancy, my husband said, sitting in the hospital chair next to a big green birthing ball, is a bit like a very long game of Kerplunk. I didn’t like the look of the birthing ball, but as getting to a stage where I might be able to double over it in complete agony  was pretty much best possible outcome, I found myself gazing at it with a sort of wistful longing.  He was right about the Kerplunk.  Pretty much from the minute I weed on the stick our mutual tension had been palpable. One wrong move, we were both thinking, and the kid gets it. 

We are plagued with concerns that we, a useless pair, can’t grow a tiny human, not, like, a real one. Surely I can’t actually grow its fingernails and eyelashes while simultaneously performing a sketch show and directing a company of eight international actors in a Basque tragedy?  This has got to be over ambition. I’m walking around Edinburgh like a king with an axe suspended over his head.

In terms of the pregnancy, there’s only a one percent chance of it all going tits up at this stage. That means there’s a ninety nine percent chance of it being fine.  In any other situation, I’d take those odds. If it was ninety nine percent likely there was a God, for example, I’d be on the Royal Mile flyering for Jesus.  If there was a ninety nine percent chance of someone falling off their stool in a comedy fashion I’d definitely warn them (I’m not really into slapstick). 

But that’s the festival in general, that raw, exposed feeling.  Even when things are going well, you pretty much spend the whole thing waiting for it all to come crashing down around your cold, wet ears. Why can’t I believe that audiences might carry on coming, that someone might not actually publish a torrent of abuse that shames me publicly, and that it might not rain so much I think about chopping up the TV cabinet and making my own arc?

The foetus is there, fine, alive, and kicking my inside really hard.  If you actually saw it, it would mostly look like a sort of ten centimetre long veiny frog – pretty gross. But it definitely floats our boats.

Maybe that’s how they keep us coming back, with our hour of material and year of worrying - by making the stakes high. By making the whole festival like a month long game of Kerplunk.  And if you can get to the end of August without drowning in either the rain or your own tears, you’ve won.

The Umbrella Birds will be performing ‘Sketches in a Shop Changing Room’ at Assembly Rooms Wildman Room at 18:20. Emily is also the Artistic Director of You Need Me.  Their new play, Certain Dark Things, is at the Underbelly at 21:05.