12th August 2024
Edinburgh
THE
PRESS
Kara Wilson
61 years ago I brought a play to the Edinburgh Fringe as an undergraduate with GUDS, the Glasgow University Dramatic Society. To this day, I still have the Fringe programme, listing all 38 shows. Now, at 80 years old, I am returning to a Fringe that has expanded almost a hundredfold. Why now and where have I been in the meantime are the questions hanging in the air. There is something about reaching 80 in good health that needs celebrating I feel and the timing of having a new onewoman show warm and ready to go, happily previewed and well received in London, seems to make the moment right to return. But, I haven’t been absent from the Fringe in recent years. I’ve lived for the last
twenty Augusts in Edinburgh breathing in every Fringe minute as a grandmother supporting a Fringe artiste through thick and thin. I’ve watched my daughter Nina Conti flourish and find fame and played my part babysitting her sons. That ranged from lurking with a buggy at all hours outside venues for the necessary breast feed to being on hand for the early rising of small members of the family who had not performed late night gigs and were very well slept by 6am. We’ve sampled flats all over Edinburgh with the obligatory Edinburgh mouse welcoming us at most. Later the job was for the evenings only with pizza on Portobello Beach, cycling at Cramond and sunset climbs on Arthur’s Seat.
NY reviewer described me as ‘the veteran Scottish actress’. What will they call me now, I wonder? And I haven’t made it easy for myself. My show involves completing an oil painting every day onstage in one hour with all the mess that wet paint entails. It’s the fifth in a genre of ‘painter plays’ I invented for myself so that I could embody an artist and tell her life story while painting in her style. This year’s creation about Beryl Cook just arrived at the right time. I have enjoyed the utter privilege of working with Beryl’s son John on the script. That was a first – my other artists were long dead with no surviving family. I love Beryl and always have and there is no greater happiness for me than to hear from her family that I have ‘captured’ her.
I have often been heard to say that the last twenty years of my life have been the happiest and grandparenthood the reason. Edinburgh communal living has played a large part in that.
So now this year finds both mother and daughter performing at the Pleasance Courtyard, Nina at the Grand and me in the Attic. The two good-looking young men outside, thrusting flyers in your hand, are the grandsons, quietly delighted that it is time that Granny gets a go.
But now, the grandsons are grown and I am out of a job. So here I boldly go onto the Fringe as an octogenarian. 25 years ago a
Beryl Cook: A Private View Pleasance Courtyard - Attic