Like Edinburgh, with sun (or, shame about the language barrier)

We spent a few nights in Avignon, home of the famous ‘Pont’, (or demi-Pont, as there’s not much left). Turns out it has an Arts Festival every July, with a Fringe that’s almost as big as Edinburgh.

As a result, the town was heaving with tourists, primarily French, as most of the shows were in French. There were lots of groups performing in the streets, and plenty of fliers to be had (and I maintained my rule of ‘always accept fliers from cute boys’). Problem was, their marketing didn’t really work when they tried to explain to me what the show was about, and I just looked blank. My very basic French wasn’t up to explanations of experimental theatre productions. I nodded and smiled a lot, trying not to indicate that I didn’t have a clue what they were saying.

We did want to see something, just to say that we had. We’d probably have been safer going for a physical piece, trouble was it was all a bit clown/Marcel Marceau/mime based, and I’m not really into that. We toyed with the idea of Moliere, as those companies seemed to have the best costumes, and even Shakespeare in French, as at least I’d understand the story, though that seemed rather wrong.

Eventually we decided on a comedy Barbershop Quartet show, as they chatted nicely to us (in English), and J sings barbershop. They also sang a few songs in English.

The performers were slick, and very skilled, and there was quite a bit of physical comedy which I could follow. What I followed, I enjoyed. I guess I didn't realise until this holiday just how rubbish my French is. A few words, and brief sentences doesn't equip you to follow a performance. I could have done with surtitles! What I missed were a lot of the jokes in the French songs, or, if I didn’t miss them, I mis-interpreted the joke.

Afterwards:
J: you know that bit where they were singing about the different musicians you meet on the Tube...
Me: oh, is that what it was, I thought they were just parodying different song styles.

The result was a quite a bit of this, as I had the jokes explained to me!