An inexplicable fairy puppet

Going to see A Midsummer Night's Dream : The Rock Musical illustrated just how strange days become when the Fringe festival is in town. Firstly The Moose and I made the mistake of taking the bus all the way up to South Bridge for a 1:05pm show. Traffic is always bad at lunchtime and at one stage the bus genuinely began to move backwards.

Eventually we made it to our stop and fought through the crowd towards C Venues. The festival crowds are difficult not just because there are a great many people but because they are full of performers not used to busy cities. This is a dangerous combination; performers are self-absorbed people who make grand gestures as a matter of course. Take this dramatic waving of arms and lack of concern for the existence of others then scatter it onto a busy city street and you have a recipe for chaos.

Last year I was walking along a narrow pavement when a man in front of me suddenly stopped and started dancing backwards towards me to show his friends a dance move. On this occasion, though, we just had to duck under the arm of a man who decided that when pointing directions to his friend a simple finger point would not do and that he had to thrust out his hand at a right-angle to his body like an old-fashioned policeman directing traffic.

At C Venues we discovered we were in the +3 room - the room right at the top of the main building. The Moose and I charged up the stairs, up and up, until we reached '+3' and ran right into a couple of Korean men dressed as pixies. Refugees from the previous show.

Once we got in and the show began it was weirdness followed by weirdness. Firstly the Infinity Repertory Theatre, performing the piece, seem to be an American youth theatre - which was a surprise. I know professional actors who struggle to put on a show at C Venues. They're a professional location and somehow a youth theatre managed to cross the Atlantic and put on a show there. My old youth theatre were good but they never considered going to the Edinburgh Fringe and they were in the same country!

So, the age of the performers (12 to 18 as far as I could figure) came as a surprise. The music was more High School Musical than rock and at first I thought I had finally found a dreadful show to cheerfully lambaste but... it worked. At the very least it was entertaining and Helena in particular was a very impressive young actress, singer and dancer - what they call in the business a 'triple threat'.

For some reason I never figured out, Oberon was a puppet. It wasn't like every fairy character was a puppet (none of the others were) or that the person operating the puppet couldn't have played Oberon - they had just made the inexplicable directorial decision to make Oberon into a hand-puppet. In a show of surprises, that was perhaps the oddest.

Once the play was over we made our way back down. The '+2' area on the floor below seemed to have been taken over by a cult; the doors were wide open and loud chanting was coming from within which the people waiting in the corridor outside were enthusiastically joining in with. We high-tailed it further down the stairs for fear of being sacrificed to the demon Oberpuppetron.

Leaving C Venues we passed a crowd of people in togas performing vocal warm-ups on the street. Up until that moment I had never considered car exhaust fumes conducive to vocal exercises and I probably never will again. Then it was on to a breakfast pint at the Greyfriars Bobby pub. Just another typical visit to a fringe show...