Driving passion

We're all here at last, in our beautiful Edinburgh house where lamps turn on at a veritable brush of the hand, where the shower is never quite the right temperature for longer than five seconds, and where the conversation sparkles like the extremely cheap and horrific sparkling wine Mr Ormerod treated us to yesterday evening. Cheers!

Our first day was a mixture of frantic extension lead searching, publicising our show on the Royal Mile (including a twenty minute slot on one of the open air stages) and eventually doing our first preview show. It was based on the mind of a young man called Holly (although I do not think this was really his name), and took a very interesting form with some odd narrative twists. In short: boy with driving passion and petrol-guzzling speaking panda meet, exchange godhead, part. Mother shacks up with bus-obsessed "postman".

Andrew O's inspired panda-in-a-wheelie-bin was one highlight of the show, but what pleased me most was the way we managed to unravel at least three seperate plot strands (driving passion/speaking panda/forbidden love) which touched each other but never really combined until very near the end. It was very unpredictable and quite broad in the things it encompassed, without getting incoherent.

We have argued about the ending, in that it could have finished quarter of an hour earlier (salient point #13, it doesn't have to fill an hour) - to my mind, though, we did the right thing in following through every plot line and every character to its logical conclusion. But then, some people thought the last 20 minutes of "A.I." was a mistake, and I maintain they're essential in completing the film's narrative on its broadest scale.

The day ended with the Fringe Launch Party, at which we were given, beer, ice-cream, whisky and glowing things, and I managed to obtain a tiara.