Posts tagged ‘the collective review’

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14 December, 2009

The Stefan Golaszewski Plays

Bush Theatre, 2 December 2009 – 9 January 2010

Reviewed for the London Theatre Blog and cross-posted to The Collective Review

Two one-act plays back to back don’t usually make a successful two-act play. Right? Which suggests it’s probably no coincidence that Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About A Girl He Once Loved and Stefan Golaszewski Is A Widower work so well as a double bill; it seems likely they were always meant to be performed together.

It was clear from the plays’ debuts, a year apart at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, that they were stylistically and thematically of a piece. Each is a monologue in which Golaszewski relates romantic episodes from ‘his’ life, or a fictionalised version of it (in Widower he imagines himself in the year 2056, following marriage and a moderately successful TV career), aided by some simple props and a gift for writing fresh, cliché-free imagery.

What wasn’t immediately obvious back then was how neatly the two would bolt together for their London transfer. At around an hour each they were bite-sized enough for the choice-rich, time-poor Festival theatregoer, but the double bill is substantial enough to be worth a London audience’s while. More importantly, the emotional and thematic trajectories of Golaszewski as a character and a playwright are revealed and reinforced by the juxtaposition; images, foibles and techniques introduced in About A Girl pay off with interest when revisited in Widower.

Little gimmicks used in About A Girl simply to create sight gags give rise instead to pathos when they recur in the altered context of Widower. Golaszewski’s tendency to idolise women is the quirky fulcrum of About A Girl, but Widower acknowledges the disadvantages of such an attitude when applied to a more adult kind of relationship; the wide-eyed, innocent awe of female beauty that characterises About A Girl is only briefly retrodden in Widower before tragedy abruptly erases it in favour of a whole new range of grown-up emotions like bitterness, desperation and regret.

Individually the plays are snapshots of a man at two different stages of emotional maturity. Combined, they sketch a more complete portrait of a man learning the hard way that the reality of long-term commitment can never be as idealistically romantic as rose-tinted recollections of unrealised adolescent love. Underscoring it all are the insecurities of a young playwright coming uneasily to terms with his own premonitions of future emotional disillusionment and bodily deterioration. The whole is unquestionably greater than the sum of its parts – and given all the stars, awards and praise each play received individually, marrying them is sure to result in a critical mass of acclaim.

Written by Stefan Golaszewski

Crew includes Phillip Breen (director/designer)

Cast includes Stefan Golaszewski

Need a second opinion?

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14 December, 2009

Lady Julia

Annabel Topham and James Kenward in Lady Julia

Annabel Topham and James Kenward in Lady Julia. Image courtesy of In The Lamplight

Hen and Chickens Theatre, 1 – 19 December 2009

Reviewed for the London Theatre Blog and cross-posted to The Collective Review

In The Lamplight’s Lady Julia brings August Strindberg’s seminal Miss Julie bang up to date, throwing together high-born Julia (Annabel Topham) and her father’s valet John (James Kenward) on New Year’s Eve 2008. It’s possible the company are hoping to replicate the success of Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie, which updated the unlikely lovers and their tragic liaison from the 1874 of Strindberg’s play to 1945, but Lady Julia takes poorly to its new 21st century context.

The daughter of a Duke (or an Earl; James and Ben Kenward’s modern vernacular translation contradicts itself on this point) having a one night stand with the hired help just isn’t the life or death matter it would have been in 1874, or even 1945. John and Julia seem more concerned with the jeers of the other household staff (who hilariously sing Ali G and Shaggy’s ‘Me Julie’ from offstage) than the media or the Duke’s reaction. Modern culture is tolerant enough of sexual indiscretion that the stakes for Julia and John never seem high enough to justify her second act histrionics. They’re certainly too low to justify suicide.

Finicky contextual details like this would be easier to overlook if the whole production were as engaging as the first act. From her first entrance, Topham asserts herself as a flighty but nonetheless confident and commanding celeb-aristo, forever drumming her fingers to dissipate nervous energy, in contrast to Kenward’s stoic John. But once the deed is done and contemporary attitudes to sex and reputation actually become relevant to their predicament, the incongruities become harder to ignore.

The downward slide begins with an incongruous physical theatre sequence, the only dramatic purpose of which seems to be to suggest the passage of time (which could be achieved with a blackout) and how John and Julia are spending it (which becomes apparent soon enough anyway). A scattershot and repetitive second act follows, in which director Gabriella Santinelli makes use of Topham’s impressive emotional range by having her change mood instantaneously every three or four lines. Each moment is believable in itself, but when strung together the impression they give is that Julia is bipolar, rather than simply tired, drunk and naturally skittish.

Amy Rhodes provides welcome relief as Christine the cook, delivering a comparatively understated and consistent performance, and refreshingly calling John out on all the bullshit Julia willingly swallows. For Strindberg, the character represented everything he despised: a peasant without aspirations to higher things. In this production, her unambitious pragmatism actually seems an attractive alternative to the others’ flights of fancy.

Written by James and Ben Kenward after August Strindberg

Crew includes Gabriella Santinelli (director)

Cast includes James Kenward (John), Amy Rhodes (Christine) and Annabel Topham (Lady Julia)

Need a second opinion?

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7 December, 2009

Bush Theatre re-opens to unsolicited script submissions

Written for The Collective Review, 7 December 2009

The moment the Bush Theatre axed its script reading team, citing a lack of funds, was the moment the recession became real for me. Beforehand I’d been taking my usual naïve/optimistic view of the situation, confident that it couldn’t be as bad as the media made it out to be, and that it would soon blow over with no major consequences. The discontinuation of script reading at one of London’s premier new writing theatres, though? That was a major consequence.

Which is why it’s excellent news that the Bush are back doing what they do best, only this time with an additional social networking element. Bushgreen.org is a site “for people in theatre to connect, collaborate and publish plays in innovative ways”. Playwrights can submit their manuscripts directly to the Bush’s team, or publish them publicly on the site for other writers to critique, or for publishers and producers to peruse. There’s even the option to charge for downloads of your script.

When I signed up on the site myself, I discovered that, whether deliberately or unwittingly, the Bush have taken a stance on the issue of whether critics are part of the artistic establishment, or whether, as the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer would have it, they stand apart (“the belief that critics are part of the theatre community” is, says Spencer, a “great misapprehension”).

You can register on the site as a Playwright, Actor, Agent, Director, Dramaturge, Choreographer, Composer, Costume Designer, Lighting Designer, Literary Manager, Producer, Production, Production Manager, Publisher, Set Designer, Sound Designer, Stage Manager, Student, Enthusiast, Theatre Company, Group or Other. Critics – in fact journos of any kind – apparently aren’t “people in theatre”, or worse, we’re the feared and exiled Other.

I doubt very much that the Bush are actually trying to make any kind of statement with this; it’s much more likely I’m drawing random conclusions having happened to stumble on the site not long after wading through the critical blogosphere, catching up on the debate. But it’s worth stating that I think critics absolutely are part of the theatre community, and that reviews – and increasingly, comments on reviews – are as much a part of the creative process as writing, rehearsal and performance. A show doesn’t end when the house lights come up. Its influence continues to resonate as long as it’s inspiring debate.

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27 November, 2009

Belt Up, Tim Crouch and breach of contract

Written for The Collective Review, 27 November 2009

At this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, Belt Up premiered a new piece of experimental theatre called Leasspell. It involved the company and audience standing together for half an hour, all blindfolded and telling one another love stories. While Belt Up themselves readily admit that Leasspell was not the most successful of experiments, it did raise certain issues that the company explored further this week in a discussion event charmingly titled ‘Chatting Shit: Immersive Theatre and the Actor/Audience Contract’.

I was particularly interested when the discussion – held in a remote attic of the BAC and, thanks to short notice and a start time that fell during office hours, attended mostly by BAC staff – turned to the work of Tim Crouch, having seen the self-proclaimed “darling of the universities” in conversation with playwright and lecturer Dan Rebellato only the previous day, at Royal Holloway University.

In The Author, which I felt pretty favourably about when I reviewed it for the London Theatre Blog, Crouch and his three co-performers repeatedly encourage the audience to contribute. We’re asked, again and again, “Is this okay?’ or “Do you want me to stop?” or “You say something”. At one point, a performer is uncomfortably hot-seated, in character as a survivor of sexual abuse; the sequence ends with the appeal, “Would anyone else like to ask Karen any questions?”

But when members of the audience respond to this encouragement they are ignored. If someone says yes, they would like Crouch to stop, he continues regardless. If someone fires a question at Karen she remains resolutely mute, and after a pause the play continues. And in conversation with Professor Rebellato, Crouch insisted that there is no space in the play for audience participation, claimed not to understand why anyone would continue Karen’s interrogation, and likened the audience’s desire to contribute to a prima donna actor demanding space to improvise in Shakespeare or Beckett.

The consensus amongst the Chatting Shit attendees was that by inviting the audience to speak, the cast of The Author implicitly alter the actor/audience contract that exists in ‘traditional’ or ’straight’ theatre, whereby the actors act and the audience passively observe. Belt Up create similar implicit contracts when the cast of The Tartuffe mingle and chat with the audience in the bar pre-show, or when they adorn the audience with hats and neckerchiefs at the beginning of The Park Keeper. Symbolically loaded actions such as these inform the audience that the show’s boundaries are not in the usual place, and that the environment they’re entering is more permissive.

So are Crouch and his co-performers in breach of contract when they refuse to respond to audience contributions that they have explicitly invited? Similar questions have been asked of Ontroerend Goed, in whose Festival Fringe smash Internal punters confide personal secrets to performers in intimate one-on-one encounters, then sit helpless as their confidants pass on the information in group discussions.

The difference, as far as the Chatting Shit participants could discern, is one of dramatic intent. It was felt that Ontroerend Goed’s dramatic intent is clear: Internal is an interrogation of emotional openness and vulnerability and, most importantly, you get out what you put in; your humiliation extends only so far as you willingly bared your soul in the one-on-one.

The dramatic intent behind The Author, on the other hands, seems to be to get a habitually passive audience to speak up against onstage events that they find morally offensive, but in actual fact, Crouch seethes behind his smile when members of the audience question Karen, feeling that they are perpetrating an act of abuse. But it’s the contract that he, as both a playwright and a performer, implicitly creates between himself and the audience – the permissive environment woven by the words he wrote – that permits this act of abuse to occur. So really, he should be seething at himself.

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25 September, 2009

Launched: theblogpaper, the troll’s soapbox

Written for The Collective Review, 25 September 2009

This time last week, thelondonpaper published its last ever issue. Just one week later another publication seeks to fill the resulting vacuum.

Anton Waldburg and Karl Jo Seilern-Aspang, creators of theblogpaper, style their new freesheet “the first user-generated newspaper in the UK”. Users submit articles and photos to theblogpaper.co.uk, where their content is rated out of five by the community. The highest rated content in each category is then published in a weekly print edition, distributed for free around London à la thelondonpaper, London Lite or Metro.

So far, so bleeding edge*. Crowdsourcing is the new self-lacing trainers, after all; theblogpaper should (in theory) be to thelondonpaper what Wikipedia is to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

That theory holds up pretty well until you actually pick up an edition and read it. It’s not Waldburg and Seilern-Aspang’s fault; they harbour the naïve and optimistic hope that their newsmaking community will be self-moderating. “[W]hen constructed by the general public,” they opine, the process of reportage “becomes naturally incredibly accurate, due to the fact that people who write about specific subjects tend to already know a great deal about it.” Which doesn’t take into account the vast number of internet users who think they know a great deal about something but are in fact ignorant cretins. But wait, the community will filter out the ignorant cretins by rating them poorly, and their content will never see print! Well, not necessarily; you can’t trust an anonymous online community to engage in civil debate, as anyone who’s ever felt their eyes scorched by the abyss of flaming spam beneath every YouTube video, good or bad, will testify.

The result is that despite its creators’ good intentions, London’s latest freesheet is composed as much of ill-informed, dreary and bilious ranting as it is of well-researched, dreary and irrelevant pontification. More importantly, very little of the first edition’s content can accurately be described as news. A couple of articles respond to events that were newsworthy weeks ago (Cartrain’s theft of pencils from Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy, or Usain Bolt’s latest record-breaking sprint); but it certainly isn’t news to anyone but the contributors that last.fm’s recommendation algorithm is quite accurate, or that music festivals are a bit commercialised these days.

If theblogpaper survives long enough for its community to grow, perhaps in the future it could feature articles by genuine experts, rated by a pool of voters big enough that the open minds and level heads outnumber the spammers. Until then it’ll continue to read like a collection of op-eds by right-wing forum trolls from two weeks ago.

*Well, ish. Joshua Karp founded The Printed Blog in the US in late 2008. Karp’s paper takes the idea further, printing twice a day and producing different editions for different areas, with content filtered by geographical proximity.

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11 September, 2009

Reviewing the upholstery

Written for The Collective Review, 11 September 2009

I spent a pleasant hour on Wednesday experiencing Theatretank’s ÁTMAN, which involved wandering the residential streets and footpaths of south Wimbledon while listening to an abridged audio version of Peter Handke’s Self-Accusation.

Theatretank’s mp3 player setup was one of the better ones I’ve come across when investigating audio-assisted productions. The player was small and simple to use and, even better, came with a lanyard, so I could hang it around my neck instead of cramming it into one of my already overloaded pockets like I had to for Rotozaza’s Wondermart; but the headphones themselves, though they were great at blocking out ambient noise, kept working their way free of my lugholes.

I spent a good long while during and following the performance trying to decide whether to mention the wayward earbuds in my review. I kept coming back to this question: would reviewing the apparatus as well as the content be equivalent, in straight theatre terms, to reviewing the theatre upholstery as well as the onstage action?

I don’t have a concrete answer. And there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with reviewing the upholstery; if your seat is uncomfortable it impacts upon your experience of the play. The West End Whingers often take leg room, sight lines and bar tariffs into account in their reviews, rating their entire night out, not just what they see on stage.

What does excite me – as a combined theatre geek, language geek and futurism geek – is the effect audio-assisted productions are having on one small corner of the critical landscape. The language of criticism as it stands is inadequate to describe performances like GuruGuru or Rotating in a Room of Images, so every article or review written about such productions must experiment and re-evaluate until a new vocabulary is formed.

The term ‘production’ gains precedence over ‘play’, because ‘play’ implies an audience and performers, and many audio-assisted productions have neither; which in turn necessitates the use of a term like ‘participants’ for those involved. There are ‘audio-instructed’ productions like GuruGuru and ‘audio-assisted’ productions like ÁTMAN and David Leddy’s Susurrus.

As the landscape evolves, language evolves so we can continue to describe it. You don’t have to be a language geek like me to appreciate the symmetry.

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4 September, 2009

Arts futurism – theatre in the newsfeeds of the future

Written for The Collective Review, 4 September 2009

So let’s assume for the moment that print newspapers are, indeed, nearing the end point of a lengthy and unintended suicide at the hands of their own free online content distribution systems. Let’s briefly put aside the alternative theories and concentrate on the one where the presses are silenced and all professional journalism moves online to compete directly with the blogosphere, and with traffic-driven content aggregator/distributors like T5M.com.

What happens to the theatre page in this new order?

Not the most pressing question facing the industry, perhaps, but I’ll leave the pressing questions to the big hitters and stick to my area of interest (I would say ‘expertise’, but apparently I need 10,000 hours’ experience for that).

Theatre is a niche subject. Those of us on the inside can scream and kick at the glass walls all we like, but they’re thick and soundproof and all that wailing about the educative and community-forming power of live performance just doesn’t reach the ears of the general population.

Keeping that fact in mind, consider this: T5M.com is all about the traffic stats. Look up there to the top right of the page and you’ll find a box displaying the ten most viewed posts in the arts channel. You see any of my posts in there, or any of Ben Cooper’s? No. Because only theatre fans are interested in what we have to say, and there aren’t nearly as many theatre fans as Kate Bosworth fans out there.

Consider also that T5M.com operates a revenue-share policy, so while this channel gives me valuable by-line exposure and a platform for airing my views, my only material reward for writing this stuff is half the channel’s ad revenue. Ad revenue is determined by, you guessed it, traffic. By choosing to write about a niche concern like theatre rather than, say, celebrity gossip, I’m effectively capping my own income.

If this is representative of how things are going to work in the journalism industry from now on, then it’s no longer worth anyone’s while to write about theatre – or, for that matter, any minority-interest subject.

Call it social Darwinism if you like, but no print newspaper would get away with excluding coverage of theatre, or folk music, or LGBTQ culture simply on the grounds that the majority aren’t interested, and I don’t think the newsfeeds of the future should be allowed to either.

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25 August, 2009

Traverse Theatre sweeps first week awards

Written for The Collective Review, 24 August 2009

It’s traditional for shows playing at the Traverse Theatre to clean up when the Scotsman and the Bank of Scotland start handing out their Festival awards. It’s equally traditional for the rest of the Festival to complain that the Traverse cleans up so regularly and predictably. There hasn’t been as much of that flavour of carping as usual this year; perhaps everyone’s realised that complaining is less constructive than putting on better theatre.

The usual complaint is that because the Traverse is a ‘proper’ theatre all year round, whereas most Festival Fringe venues are university buildings or churches or bookshops, draped with blacks and hung with fresnels for one month only, Traverse productions have an unfair advantage over productions staged elsewhere.

A decent technical setup, proper dressing rooms and an auditorium that actually feels like a theatre can do wonders for a production, it’s true, but all that is just the shine on its shoes and the bow in its hair. The surroundings of the Traverse can’t make a poor production more engaging, any more than shiny shoes and a bow could make one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters a desirable date.

The underlying accusation is that the Traverse isn’t really a fringe theatre venue, and by extension the plays staged there aren’t really fringe theatre, and so it’s unfair to include them in explicitly Festival Fringe-only awards like the Scotsman’s Fringe Firsts. But that accusation contains a damaging implication that fringe theatre is on a different plane of quality to mainstream theatre; that when lumped together in the same field, mainstream productions will naturally trump lower-budget, experimental fringe material.

Now that might well be true if all you’re looking at is box office figures. Give a representative cross-section of society twenty quid each and a choice between Dennis Kelly’s Orphans at the Traverse and Sarah Kane’s Crave at C Soco and the Traverse will probably end up richer.

But we’re talking about awards that reward “outstanding new writing premiered at the festival” (Fringe Firsts) or “venues and backstage crew who have managed to impress The Herald’s distinguished panel of arts critics” (Herald Angels). They’re awarded for quality, not for fringe-ness. If the Traverse picks up more awards than anywhere else, that should be a rallying call for companies performing elsewhere to up their game, and prove that you don’t need fancy lights and folding seats to impress the awards establishment.

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15 August, 2009

Rap Guide star Baba Brinkman rekindles an old debate

Written for The Collective Review, 13 August 2009

Congratulations on writing the first four star review in history without a single positive adjective! Utterly unquotable, but I do appreciate the stars : )

Baba Brinkman, commenting on MattBoothman.com

So Baba Brinkman isn’t satisfied with four stars, or with the accompanying review – which was, by the way, 50 per cent longer than my editor at the British Theatre Guide recommends for a Festival Fringe review, because I didn’t feel I could do The Rap Guide to Evolution justice in a smaller space, and thankfully online journalism is flexible like that.  No, Baba Brinkman wants some positive adjectives to paste over his posters and flyers.

If this is starting to sound petulant (already), well, that’s kind of how I feel; now, anyway.  When I first picked up Brinkman’s comment on my blog, my (very British) first instinct was to apologise.  I genuinely enjoyed The Rap Guide, and I felt sorry that Brinkman didn’t feel my positive notice – which praised his showmanship and moral/social objectives, though unfortunately not in easily digestible soundbyte form – had done enough to help him out.  After an afternoon and an evening to stew on it, I’m now oscillating instead between deflated and plain old pissed.  After all, it’s not my job to market his show for him.

Or is it?

Yes, this incident seems like as good an excuse as any to open the ancient, slightly rusted and diseased can of worms that is the what-is-the-point-of-critics-and-criticism debate.  Because if it were up to me I wouldn’t have awarded the show a star rating at all (star ratings excuse lazy reading, which facilitates lazy journalism, which encourages lazy reading etc. etc.) and that’s the only bit of the review that Brinkman had no problem with.  So does that make me one of those twisted, bitter critics people talk about, who are so far removed from the art they supposedly serve that once the notice is published the show can crash and burn for all they care?

No.  I’m not British enough to do myself down quite that much.  No, I think the crux of the issue isn’t that different parties have different concepts of the purpose of criticism; it’s more that different parties need criticism to serve different functions, which is a crucial distinction.

Performers need reviews to publicise their show.  Sometimes it doesn’t matter whether the review is good or bad, as long as it increases the show’s visibility; other times, a rave is essential to put bums on seats.

Critics like to think that performers need reviews to revise their show, because this makes us feel like part of the creative process, rather than its terminus.  In practice, the audience’s response on the night has a far greater impact on future iterations of the show than a reviewer’s opinion.

We also like to think that readers need reviews to understand the show (the ‘critic as decoder’ argument), or to stand in for the experience of shows they missed (the ‘reviews are letters to posterity’ argument).  Whereas readers will mostly scan the reviews section either to get an indication of what they might enjoy (‘critic as consumer guide’) or to read entertaining slams; a one star review draws the eye more strongly than a five star, which is just one more reason the arbitrary shortcircuiting little buggers ought to be abolished.

And when we aren’t too busy enjoying thinking about what performers and readers need our reviews to be, critics need reviews to be challenging and fulfilling to write, to exercise our creative and analytical muscles.  In an ideal world, a review that fulfils these, the writer’s needs, will naturally fulfil the readers’ and performers’ needs at the same time.  But clearly this isn’t always the case; and the bald truth is, if a review doesn’t serve an editor’s needs – to sell papers, or generate web traffic, whilst remaining true to the publication’s stated ethics – it’ll never see the light of day, and then it can’t do anyone any good at all.

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7 August, 2009

Who to follow at Fringe 09

Written for The Collective Review, 7 August 2009

If you can’t make it to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year, because a banker vaporised your life savings, or because National Express couldn’t be bothered to drive you up the East Coast, or because you usually live in Edinburgh and have gone on holiday to Inverness for the month, never fear!

You can recreate the experience of battling your way along the Royal Mile, accosted every other step by acts and PRs waggling flyers or props or parts of their anatomy in an effort to get your attention, without even leaving your desk.

Everyone who’s anyone at the Fringe this year is on Twitter, so add this little lot, feed the TweetDeck updates through your screen, smart phone or VirtuSpecs* and enjoy the onslaught in the comforting knowledge that, unlike those of us who actually need to get from one end of the actual Royal Mile to the other in a hurry, you can de-inconvenience yourself at the touch of a button.

Venues
Will incessantly plug their own shows, often providing the Twitter usernames of their acts for you to add to your Fringe Friend Frenzy.
Traverse Theatre – @traversetheatre
Assembly Venues – @Assembly09
Pleasance Courtyard/Dome (comedy programme only) – @PleasanceComedy
Underbelly – @UNDERBELLY09
Gilded Balloon Teviot – @Gildedballoon
Bedlam Theatre – @bedlamfringe
The Hive – @TheHiveFringe09

Reviews

They’re already calling it Twitticism – reviewing shows in 140 characters or less.  I’ve tried it.  It’s very difficult to do the show justice unless the … tweview … is backed up by a full length piece elsewhere in print on online.

@EdTwinge is, as far as I can tell, endorsed and possibly set up by the Fringe Society (Professor Ed Hegg of @TheFringeThing has certainly been plugging it for a few days now), and promises a “Realtime, Twitter-based, crowd-sourced Edinburgh Fringe review service”.  Hashtag your tweets #edtwinge to become part of the crowd they’re sourcing from.  Could prove interesting, if only as an experiment; watch this space.

The List (a print listings and reviews magazine, Edinburgh and Glasgow’s equivalent of Time Out, and first to coin the hashtag #twitreview) – @thelistmagazine

Fest (A5 print magazine, festival-only, affiliated with the University of Edinburgh) – @festmag

ThreeWeeks and Broadway Baby (daily or thereabouts A3 freesheets; ThreeWeeks is staffed by students, who are given professional journalism training, then unleashed on the Fringe) – @ThreeWeeks, @broadwaybabycom

FringeGuru (a guide to the festival, and progenitors of the iFringe iPhone app) – @FringeGuru

Official Bodies
Edinburgh Festival itself tweets as @edinburghfest – mostly it just aggregates news about the festivals.
From within the Festival as a whole, the Festival Fringe also tweets at @EdinburghFringe, providing gossip, news and dates for your diary.
And within that, the self-explanatory Five Pound Fringe strand tweets at @fivepoundfringe.
Finally, Professor Ed Hegg tweets all things Fringe along with his attempts to crack the mysterious oviform Fringe Thing, at @TheFringeThing.

*Reference to future technology included to increase article’s long-term relevance, writer’s perceived foresightedness.

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