Stamina is a necessity for the Festival and Fringe goer.

Since I last posted, I've been to a fringe Clowning event called Pas Perdus. It was performed by four multi-talented young men from Belgium. Catch them if you're in Edinburgh, at Southside, 2.20 pm for the rest of this week.

 I was introduced to clowning by an actor friend who took me to a show several years ago. She'd not been able to 'get it' during her training but loved to watch. So do I. Good quality clowning is an art form and fascinating for those of us whose business relies on the spoken word. How do they do it? I watch and try to learn how silence might enhance my own work.

Then out to the Royal Lyceum Theatre, one of my favourite places in the world, for the Wooster Group's  Vieux Carre by Tennessee Williams. It featured many of his usual themes: the cloying slightly mad nature of mothering, the homosexual author discovering himself, untreatable diseases in the 1930s like TB, poverty, the American South. Updated for a modern world of multi-media, the actors moved through a dream-like set of apparent clutter with some appearing only in film on the screens at the back of the stage. Two hours passed. Brilliant.

Greek tragedy featured in the major production of Gospel at Colonnus. Wonderful blues and soul singing from the company including The Blind Boys of Alabama. They moved around a stage of differing levels with confidence, unobtrusively assisted by other cast members.

Not listening to much music of this kind, I had a slight sense of being 'not good enough' as an audience member as much of the cast was known and loved by sizeable portions of the audience. I experienced this once before at a flamenco concert in Madrid where the audience 'owned' the singer. The female vocalist supporting the headline act must have felt the waves of hostility from the female audience members who quite simply couldn't wait for their hero to re-appear. This grumpy Edinburgher sees it happening on shows like Britain's Got Talent where the audience are so keen to applaud she often can't hear the act. Only last night, the audience at the Usher hall spent a long time settling down while they pointed out their friend in the Festival chorus or the Scottish Opera orchestra. Ah well, it was probably a lot more interactive in Puccini's time.

Today's a Fringe day only. Off out quite soon to GRV and the Roxy Art House. Sometimes the venues are as interesting as the events. GRV was the canteen when I was a student at Edinburgh Uni. It's also great to get into places that are closed for the rest of the year or available only to members.