Edinburgh 2002

Fringe

A Stitch
The Garage

Dolan Cummings

Appropriately, I was a couple of minutes late for A Stitch.

Fumbling in the dark for a seat, I glanced at the stage, and immediately considered feigning confusion and dashing straight back out. Seven youths stood in large cardboard boxes and screamed, as another youth dressed as a lifeguard reassured them that they were not about to die. Oh, it's like that, is it?

I had only a 35 minutes between this and my next show to buy a much-needed pair of new shoes, and my first thought was that this was an hour I could use better. On reflection I was probably right, but then how many plays, or works of art in general, can really be considered an efficient use of time? Time is what A Stitch is all about.

After the screaming, the box-bound youths presented a series of sketches featuring a 'literal timeshare salesman', one half of a self-help book writing partnership, and a man so busy that he didn't have time for priorities.

The last of these spawned the show's most memorable line: 'Always make time for oral sex - you never know when you might die'. It's quite deep, really. The literal time-share salesman offered three different packages to a woodcutter (not sure why a woodcutter): buying time from the inefficient third world (a comment on globalisation?), from the bored (menial labour?) or from celebrities (vicarious living, I suppose).

There were certainly plenty of ideas in the show, though none were pursued in any depth. The lifeguard stopped and rewound the action once or twice, and acted as a channel surfer linking the various bits, but his role never took off enough to make sense. The performers sometimes seemed to be trying too hard to be liked, though to be fair to them it kind of worked, and by the end I had stopped worrying about the time.

I got the shoes with time to spare.

Run over.