Seeing the Future

It’s a sideways time of year. I’m currently in the midst of locking down rooms and deciding on strategies for the Edinburgh Fringe, which is in August.

Looking at spreadsheets that describe break-even points on different percentages of tickets sold is a disconcerting feeling. It’s a gamble that relies on a certain number of people deciding one day in August that they will pay money to sit in a room with you.

ETHOS is still being written, so I have to bring myself to confidently bet on a horse that hasn’t been born yet; looking at its pedigree; assuming that I will write a show I’m going to be proud of, and that it will be favourably reviewed, or that people who have seen my work before will want to see the next thing I do. And on that bet, I risk abject failure. An empty room, a show that doesn’t fly, if I can’t write it right.

It’s a strange thing, given that the future cannot exist in the now, to put an X mark on exactly where I’ll stand on a blue-print of a stage. To know precisely where I’ll be standing at what hour of a day that is MONTHS in the future. It’s not a feeling most people ever experience.

Do you know with great certainty where you’ll be standing at 6.40 on any day in August? How bright the light will be in your eyes? I do. I can almost feel the heat of the stage, adjust my illusory sense of how hot it will be with 40% of the seats full, with 70% of the seats full. I can see the future. It’s a very strange sort of time travel.

I’m also planning on doing all three of my previous shows in a one-off-three-part-show on the one day of the month people normally take off, during the Fringe. That’s less of a risk in one way. I know Savage, and The Resistance, and Empire. I love those shows. I know the jokes and how they land. I know the story that threads through them because it’s deep in my bones. I believe I can make it work well. I can’t wait to bring an audience along with me. If they come.

If they come. That’s the risk there, really. I’ve never asked people for that much of their time, and it’s a big ask, in the middle of a festival that’s full of 55 minute bites of the best comedy and theatre in the world.

But I desperately want to try it. It could be glorious. It could be a glorious failure. That’s a risk I feel compelled to take, even though failure would really fucking hurt. It’s not really in my hands, either, beyond deciding to do the thing. It relies on people I don’t know deciding they want to know me, see me, hear me. It relies on my management and producers selling the idea of me in a way that’s appealing.

How can I possibly have confidence in that? But I have to, if I want to make these bets. And I do want to make these bets.

See you in the future.