It is late July and Edinburgh is gearing up for its August transformation as it hosts the largest performing arts festival on our planet. The city is literally buzzing with enthusiasm for the Edinburgh Fringe which celebrates imagination and artistic talent of every shape and size and from all corners of the globe. The Fringe takes over every part of the city, especially around the old town where all the nooks and crannies become performance spaces. With street performers, temporary billboards, buskers, people handing out flyers as well as the social media channels being flooded with promotion, the methods of attracting audiences are part of the experience. Top tip, it is always easy to tell the established performers as they naturally grab the best slots on the programme, but their shows sell out rapidly.
Overall, the Fringe is in total contrast to the relative order and organisation of the healthcare industry and always feels like a mesmerising concoction of creativity, chaos and caffeine-fuelled performers. It is the polar opposite of my life as a dentist where I spend most of my life encouraging health routines from morning till night. Breakfast becomes optional, lunch is nibbled on the street in the late afternoon, dinner wolfed down while queuing for an evening show and bedtime happens after the last standing ovation. Sales of indigestion tablets rocket but that is another story.
This year there will be 3649 shows across 258 venues with people from 71 countries descending on the city. For the detail people, last year had 54,474 performances, making this year the third largest Fringe ever at 53,884 performances. Whilst I am not going to quibble over the small difference, the city and everywhere around the College buildings will feel just as ram-jammed as usual during the four-week festival. Our College buildings undergo a metamorphosis into theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53). With 11 performance spaces and a total of 203 shows the campus takes on a different feel during August. Last year my wife bought tickets to an illusion show called “1 moment in time”. And as we sat down, we suddenly realised we had seen the same show the previous year, quite an impressive illusion.
What’s on at Venue 53 this year? One performance I picked out from the fusion of cabaret, comedy, dance, musicals, theatre and more is the play “Sherlock Holmes: The adventure of the Innsmouth crown”. This is a theatre production showcasing a family secret unearthed when clearing out the belongings of an ordinary woman. It turns out from the possessions that her grandfather was Dr John Watson and as the main character delves deeper, she discovers the truth about the final Sherlock Holmes case involving a crown of mysterious origin and the abandoned American coastal town, Innsmouth. How intriguing. There is even a theatre performance of Treasure Island. Shiver me timbers, I wonder how many people in the audience will appreciate Robert Louis Stevenson’s connections with the local area, particularly as Stevenson frequented Rutherford’s Bar on Drummond Street along with his acquaintance, Arthur Conan Doyle.
On a more serious note, “In her hand” is a dark and witty stage play about an unlikely friendship forged through service on the Balkan front drawn from real journals and letters from women serving with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in WWI. These hospitals were formed by Elsie Inglis LRCSEd, whose letters together with a fascinating collection relating to her remarkable humanitarian work, are preserved in the College archives. This collection demonstrates her devotion to charity and caring for injured soldiers throughout Europe.
If you are looking for something relating to the mouth within Venue 53, one performance this year is by Miss Lossie Mouth, who will do a cabaret-theatre show of hit stage and screen songs interspersed with comedy and honesty telling the story of a boy who grew up loving a fabulous dress. The flyer promises “queer resilience and gloriously camp theatricality”, so promises to be quite a mouthy performance.
What else is on offer this year for the oral health geeks at other venues? Ali Brice has a show titled “This is the way we brush our teeth” and whilst this is not a dental education show, Ali will explore his midlife, happiness and self-worth through tragicomic honesty. His promotional material touches on smiling, self-worth and smiling at dentists, but I doubt there will be any dental CPD during his hour on the stage. Jack Dee is on the A-list of performers this year; “Jack’s joke show” promises to poke fun at all sorts of areas of life. Will he make dentistry his punching bag again this year? Ruby Carr has a slightly worrying stand-up comedy performance called “Bite me”. The advert for her performance has her sporting a set of dental cheek retractors. I wonder if she will wear these for the whole performance? In the show, Ruby will wax lyrically about the promise by her dentist to have a Hollywood smile in 32 weeks. However, there is a catch, the NHS only has 12 weeks to fix her OCD and the duality of operating on both her teeth and brain simultaneously means there is a lot going on in her head.
Another fascinating show that caught my eye is called the “Spider witches of Appalachia” and whilst the performance weaves the stories of five generations exploring inheritance, knowledge and the interconnectedness of generations, there is a tangent to our college as this is set in a background of survival by healers and midwives. The show focuses on storytelling through folklore and folk medicine. I doubt there will be much information about oral health but as the saying goes, you will never know unless you go.
If you are looking for something Scottish, “Scotlandsfest: Ancient voices, living landscape – Scotland’s geomythography” promises to look at ancient Scotland through a new lens. Stuart McHardy promises to illustrate archaeology and history of the Scottish landscape. Whilst this is nothing to do with dentistry, I hope that McHardy puts
his teeth in before each show as it focuses on oral tradition. Oral history also features in show called “One house on Brick Lane” which might appeal to Londoners who want to know more about a Bangladeshi family facing eviction in 1985 with the show being a hybrid of oral histories and lived experiences.
As usual, there are other shows about health and technology. The Provocateurs have four shows this year. The team of Scottish academics will demonstrate how mathematics can help with predicting future energy systems, how soil can help in the prevention of antibiotic resistance along with exploring the ‘uncanny valley’ where we feel unease towards almost-human robots. Bipolarcoaster also caught my attention. This performance is a one-woman play about living positively with this wretched condition but finding a degree of freedom. Robert Louis Stevenson features again in “The body snatcher” which tells the story of ‘the resurrection men’ who helped advance medical knowledge in the Burke and Hare era. Chilling stuff. And more Stevenson work comes to the fore with “The Tale of the Original Jekyll and Hyde (told by a mad hatter from Stockport)” which chronicles the Deacon Brodie character in Stockport. This is of course an interesting parallel story. Finally, “Trust me, I’m a doctor” tells the story of Dr Rose Pratts, a respected GP. While she reassures patients by day that everything will be fine, she secretly battles with crippling health anxieties. In the process of comedic discovery, she has to confront her serial avoidance: herself and find that it is never too later to change your life.
Whether or not you are coming to the Fringe, healthy oral health routines are important and although caffeine seems to be the official drink of the Fringe, my observation on Fringe-goers is that coffee is rarely a solo activity, with a variety of sugar-containing goodies often accompanying the all-important caffeine infusion. Perhaps there is room at the 2027 Fringe for a performance bringing dentistry and the arts together. After all, dentistry and the arts both create smiles. If you are at the Fringe this year, spare a thought for your teeth, they will be working just as hard as the performers!
If you think I have missed a key oral health performance at the Fringe this year or would like to contact me about other Faculty of Dental Surgery work, please get in touch at dental@rcsed.ac.uk,