David Bennett

Dott Cotton – Street Performer

She’s five foot nothing (all sizes are approximate) and clowns in her raggedy costume, reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin and Marcel Marceau.

When I stopped her on the Royal Mile to take her photo, she posed and then gave me her card. It says Dott Cotton – International Idiot.

“Dott Cotton?,” I quizzed in my best loud, incredulous, rising falsetto East London accent.

Meanwhile I was thinking – Dott with two ‘t’s? That must be to make sure there is no confusion with Dot Cotton, the fictional character from the TV soap EastEnders.

“Dott Cotton?” (rising falsetto East London accent again).

“Easy to remember,” she said with a wink and a smile.

“I’m a street performer and I’m also in The Greatest Liar In The World at the Fringe.” Sounds intriguing…

The Greatest Liar In The World: A darkly funny sequel to the story of Pinocchio: the carnival is breathing its last breath and with it so is The Liar. Tired of his lies, he hijacks the performance at gunpoint to tell the real story of his infamous origins.

Gordon Highlanders

In the swish and swirl on the Royal Mile, I didn’t work out which of the characters were from a play and which were the members of the Gordon Highlanders re-enactment group who had been invited along to add colour to the day.

I’m pretty sure this is one of the re-enactment players because his shoulder insignia and his cap badge with the tartan and the motto ‘bydand’ (steadfast) are accurate.

The Gordon Highlanders regiment dates back to the 1880s and soldiers were recruited principally from Aberdeen and the North-East of Scotland.

According to the Regimental Museum archive, of the 50,000 men who served in the regular, territorial and service battalions during the First World War, 27,000 men were killed or wounded.

Assigning men from one village or one small town to the same regiment happened many times in the First War.

It was a mistake that caused immeasurable grief when thousands were killed in one day on the battlefield, with the loss of every man in a village back home.

Even though I took this photo a few days ago, there was something about this man’s smile that took my right to the imagined world of comradeship in the heady days of the beginning of the First World War.

Superhero Snail Boy

I concentrated on his face when I took the shot because he he looked so sad, so mournful, so hard done by.

He had a giant snail’s shell attached to his back, but with a long lens on my camera, it was the expression in his face or the shell, but not both.

Superhero Snail Boy shows that even the smallest of superheroes can grow to be bigger than their fears. In a place where hope grows in the form of enormous flowers and breakthroughs are found in the smashing of plates, parents are parented by the wisdom of the young and solace is sought from a giant snail.

I Know Not Who This Is

She and her fellow actors were heading up the Royal Mile. She was the last in the line and I asked to take her photo and she obliged. But by then the others were further ahead, and I hadn’t the heart to ask her to tell me the name of the troupe and where she was performing, and how to spell the words, and….

So we smiled and off she went. And I know not who this is.

Edinburgh Fringe Festival

This production of Six Characters In Search Of An Author at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is by Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club and the tagline on the flyer is ‘Come along if you have the time – after all, it’s only a show.’

Don’t you think that this character looks exactly like someone in search of an author?

Six Characters In Search Of An Author

The play Six Characters In Search Of An Author by the Sicilian playwright Luigi Pirandello was first performed in 1921 in Rome to an audience whose reaction was to cry out ‘Madhouse!’

The plot involves a director who is rehearsing a play when six characters wander in looking for an author.

They convince the director to include their characters in his play and then proceed to argue with him about the direction the play will take.

They also complain that they are not too impressed with the quality of the acting by the actors.

The play ends with the director not knowing what is real and what is not, but certain in the knowledge that he has wasted a day.

From a distance, the plot of Six Characters seems absurd and funny. But the play the actors are rehearing when the characters happen by is another play by Luigi Pirandello, written two or three years earlier.

It is The Rules Of The Game, a play in which a man empties himself of all emotion when he discovers his wife is having an affair, and gets his revenge on his wife’s lover, who is killed.

So the play that is the ostensible centrepiece of Six Characters, is in fact a serious psychological drama.

Luigi Pirandello

In recognition of his literary achievements Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934.

He is sometimes seen as the father of the theatre of the absurd, central to which is the question of how to deal with a world apparently without meaning.

As inheritors of the theatre of the absurd, of Samuel Beckett, and of Monty Python, Six Characters In Search Of An Author may not seem that off the wall to us.

But in the Rome of 1921, it was ‘Madhouse!’

She’s a cast member from The Ants – a production by the American High School Theatre Festival – being performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

As it says on their website, in 1994 the American High School Theatre Festival (of Charlottesville, VA, Edinburgh Scotland, and London England):

… was developed with the help of high school and college drama professionals. Our festival is designed to complement high school drama programs and allow our nation’s drama students to showcase their skills within an international forum.

I came across this cast member with about seven others, maybe more, walking in a snaking single file up the Royal Mile and then gathering together and standing in a circle.

They were all dressed in the same striped blazers and with the goggles.

In a street packed with several thousand people, the ants stood out by their zingingly-clean, tailored clothing and attention to detail.

As they say in their flyer, they or their namesakes outnumber humans by a hundred million to one. And in the The Ants, in words and physical theater – the humans look at the ants and the ants look at the humans.

The play is based on the works of entomologists E.O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler who won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction for their book The Ants.

You can see E.O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler discuss super-organisms in this video from the Drexel Interview series.

They define super-organisms as having a complex division of labour with specialised roles, such as having only one or a few members who reproduce, and the mass of the population that does not reproduce.

They have studied various species of ants, from an ancient Australian species that has the most rudimentary organisation through to leaf-cutter ants that have a hugely specialised organisation with assembly line agriculture that enables them to farm fungi.

There are several parts to the interview, and in the later parts the talk turns to altruism and the nature-versus-nurture aspects of human nature.

Bees

‘Super-organism’ is a description that would fit honey bees, with one queen who lays eggs, many female worker ants who forage for nectar, and drones whose role it is to be ready to fertilise the queen and then die.

A couple of weeks ago, Tamara and I saw a bee colony at the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Harlow Carr in Yorkshire. The hive had been placed between two sheets of glass so that anyone who wants to see ‘bees at home’ could do so.

We saw the bees doing their waggle dance, showing their fellow worker bees in which direction the nectar they had found was located and how far away it was.

It reminded me of something I had thought before, which is that their is something heart-rendingly honest about the efforts of the bees in dancing in little figures of eight to tell their compatriots ‘the story’ of their nectar finds.

It contrasts sadly with humans – or some of them – with enormous power and yet who seem not to care at all about others or about the consequences even for themselves of what they do.

That lack of care and will to destruction is nicely expressed by Kurt Vonnegut in the book, The Last Interview, which I finished recently.

As a final note, if you come across a reasonably-priced copy of E.O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler’s The Ants – grab it, because second hand copies are going at around £100.00 on Amazon and on eBay…