Jokes, guffaws and hardy perennials: Shedinburgh mows down the fringe

There are precedents when it comes to memorable Edinburgh fringe shows in sheds. Nutshell Theatre performed their show Allotment on, er, an allotment a few years back, shed firmly centre stage. Toby Jones’s journey to movie megastardom detoured via Edinburgh 20 years ago with Wanted Man, a very funny garden-shed fantasia. In both shows, sheds represented – as they tend to do – narrow horizons, cosiness bordering on claustrophobia. Who, in those days, would ever have imagined a whole Edinburgh fringe – or at least, the online substitute for one – unfolding between a garden shed’s four walls?

Actually, make that three walls. The Shedinburgh venue is open on one side to its audience – watching on screens at home, mainly, although at the comedy shows I attended, there were usually a handful of people watching live at Soho theatre, on whose stage the shed stood (there is also a shed based at Edinburgh’s Traverse theatre). That must have been a blessed relief to the performers, for whom gigging in front of a 100% empty auditorium could only be a thoroughly unnerving experience.

But it did create a slightly alienating effect. For whom were these comedians performing? For each other, in the case of Helen Bauer and Rosie Jones, who took turns playing guffawing onlooker to each other’s solo sets. And for the smattering of a live crowd, in Sara Pascoe and Steen Raskopoulos’s show. Fair enough: it was an improvised performance, and improv craves a present audience more even than standup. But it was dislocating for the home viewer – a dislocation I registered only when Raskopoulos suddenly trained his eye on the camera, and delivered a whole scene for our benefit. Out of the blue, a connection! It made me feel what I’d been missing.

And what I’d been missing was the real Edinburgh fringe – and eye contact, and physical proximity, and energy transfer between comic and crowd. And shows that matter, that have been lovingly crafted for a month’s workout in the world. That’s not what I got at Shedinburgh. Rosie Jones reprised material from her 2019 show. Jayde Adams chronicled her nine years on the fringe, from impetuous debut, via hubristic sophomore year (150-seat venue, no audience), to 2019 apotheosis with a show that took her to Amazon Prime. Pascoe and Raskopoulos (a real-life couple) cherry-picked titles of Edinburgh shows from yesteryear, then improvised them – tongue prominently in cheek – back to life.

The joke, with which Pascoe enjoyed teasing Raskopoulos, was that improv is the runt of the comedy litter, and “Why don’t you just write a show?” That felt awkwardly close to the bone here, as several of the duo’s off-the-cuff sketches failed to ignite. Which is no worse, of course, than the hit rate of most improv shows. But usually improv happens in dialogue with an audience. So-so jokes are redeemed by laughter. Audience response can breathe life into an idea, and steer it in fruitful directions. Improv in an empty room is like one hand clapping.

But this room wasn’t quite empty, and Pascoe and Raskopoulos’s show had its charms – not least that of seeing two fine performers going out on a limb, and trying something different for the sheer fun of it. (Very much in the spirit of the fringe.) The concept was endearingly Edinburgh-centric too, as one title after another summoned memories of bygone fringe classics – or embarrassment at how strenuously wacky the festival can be.

Jayde Adams’s show was enjoyable for the same reason: it was tailored to the feelings of an audience bereft of this year’s fringe. Of course Shedinburgh’s audience were tuning in for a good time. But there was also – for me at least – an element of support group to it. Shedinburgh was where we could congregate to remember what Edinburgh means to us. That’s what Adams was doing there, at any rate, with an elegiac hour about her festival ups and downs.

I enjoyed this toned-down Adams, whose comedy isn’t usually delivered in a minor key. But there was no missing the plangent tone to her narrative, as a decade’s worth of adventures in fringe-going culminated in … well, this. Alone in a shed, unable to gig in front a live audience, and missing it terribly. “I’m basically a YouTuber now,” she lamented – and I lamented with her, that all these prodigiously talented entertainers – Adams and Jones and Pascoe and more – have been cordoned off from their crowds.

Props to the Shedinburgh team, for staking out this space to celebrate the absent fringe. I mean no ingratitude when I say: I hope never to visit it again. My shed experience was fine – but a shared experience is better.

• Shedinburgh runs to Saturday 10 September.