The Free Fringe is a generous proposal at the worst of times, but when it offers up shows like this, ones that feel like they've been dreamed up out of pure love and shared free of charge out of sheer benevolence, you really start to wonder why you bother paying for any tickets at all. This is the true story of Aimée Corbett and Vanessa Hammick, who last year walked from Wales to London in search of adventure and are now in residency at the Free Sisters with a storytelling piece about the tales they were told and the encounters they had along the way.
This is the best kind of travel writing brought to life; a kind of state of the nation half-rhyming epic that mixes Chaucer, JB Priestly, and Robert MacFarlane in a great kaleidoscope of modern Britain. Yet it is suffused with a sweet affection for the old England and Wales now lost. The two performers tell us that their journey was made on hobby horses, called Marmalade and Marley. At first this whimsy threatened to be the kind of over-kooked conceit that really grates: two grown women prancing about on hobby horses for an hour? But the point of the horses becomes clear soon enough: they are a link to the past, referred to as the next in a long line of famous questing horses from mythology and Tolkein. Hammick and Corbett understand the heritage of their chosen form, and the horses give a great lyrical romance to the tale, once you've bought into them.
The romance is the performers' escape from the drudgery of urban life; like Tolkein, they appreciate the pleasures of the old England, coming across a Vanity Fair early on that comes straight out of Bunyan. But unlike Tolkein they also love the modern nation; a nation of immigrants, council estates, and uncertain people. All are presented with great sympathy and wonder, all tales equally worth telling. The voices come from all walks of life: a wonderfully Welsh rendition of ‘Merry Hell’, the cattle drivers' song; a Tuareg nomad with useful fables to impart; and questionable couchsurfers. They blend together without clear delineation, brought to life by the two troubadours as they bound around the space, into the audience and up and down the aisles. They are backed by the musical effects of the cello-playing Ellen Jordan, creating a brief but effective ghost story at one point through nothing but a repeated screech.
The sadness of the Marches, the lingering scent of Austen's country houses, post-industrial canals in which bicycle-riding fish are imagined – this is the most quintessentially English (and Welsh) work I have seen in a long while. It is really about something important, a great many people attempting to find some meaning in their lives including the performers, though it never preaches. Even the eccentricity and quirk of our storytellers is interrogated by a Londoner during the riots: ‘Your madness benefits you. Ours doesn't’. Indeed, their quirky style is not for everyone, and they are by no means the most impressive technical performers in Edinburgh. But this is fresh and honest and beautiful, wholly and deeply thought-provoking, and free in more ways than just financially. Trot down to see it.
