If the place of women on stage and behind the scenes in Edinburgh is a perennial talking point in the city's festival season, they were to the fore in the first week of the nineteenth year of The Herald Angel Awards.
However, our guest presenter John Lloyd, writer, programme-maker and the man behind shows from the News Quiz to QI, and comedian Sean Hughes made the case for the men at an occasion dominated by female talent.
After a glowing review from the opening weekend of the Fringe in the Sunday Herald from Alan Morrison, Hughes received an Angel from Lloyd for his new show, Penguins, which is appropriately concerned with the world of life, love, and relationships for a young man, drawing hiliariously on his own experiences with the help of an eccentric collection of props.
As Hughes packs them in at the Gilded Balloon, Lloyd's own show, the Liff Of QI, has sold out at Underbelly, with an extra performance now scheduled for 11.50am on Saturday, August 24. He also presented an award to actor Blythe Duff and director Orla O'Loughlin for one of the hits of this year's Traverse programme, Ciara, a one-woman play written especially for Duff by David Harrower, but the first of the week's Angels to be specifically identified by its female creative team.
That is also true of Spitfire Company and Damuza Theatre's One Step Before The Fall at Zoo, which combines the talents of dancer Marketa Vacovska and musician Lenka Dusilova in a visceral physical show that takes its cue from Mohammed Ali's battle with Parkinson's. Vacovska said they were particularly happy to receive an Angel while the awards were still in their teens.
Nathanie Wain is the writer of both a remarkable verse script and the songs in Boneyard Theatre's Sandpits Avenue, as well as being one of the company of five in a superb piece of ensemble theatre by new graduates of London's East 15 Acting School, where Wain was mentored by April de Angelis. Their show, directed by Dominic Garfield, deals with the effect of the death with the army in Afghanistan of one of a small group of friends in a town in England's rural south-west.
The company performed a set of songs from the show at the end of our presentations, following music from Nirbhaya, a response to the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey on a Delhi bus at the end of last year,which is at the Assembly Hall as part of the Assembly theatre programme.
In it director Yael Farber has combined that news story with the testimony of performers who are themselves the victims of attacks and abuse. Farber paid tribute to Assembly's Bill Burdett-Coutts for his support in bringing her work so swiftly to the stage, but it was the presence of the members of her company and the voice for change in India and across the world they embody that spoke most eloquently at our first Angels awards of 2013.
l www.herald-events.com/heraldangels
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