Like the soft rain, the ever present chance of seeing someone ‘off the telly’ and Silent Disco, Trevor Lock, in his lair of laughter down in Bannerman’s Pub, is an integral part of the Fringe.
Trevor is not really a stand up comic. He sits down quite a lot. Plus he is way too philosophically bent.
“From one point of view philosophy is all there is and so we’re all philosophers to varying degrees. Twice in my social experiment shows people have met each other for the first time and then gone on to marry each other.
An NHS therapist came to another show and said it was the best group therapy she’d ever witnessed and urged me to train and go into practice. Another time my agent came and urged me to try comedy. “
Comedically Trev plays with the big boys : Kitson, Lee, and Russell Brand, with whom he did some crazily fun-sounding shows’
“Fun??? Dark times, my mother had just died, my marriage had ended, my best friend’s marriage had just started, I was in a religious cult, those shows were many things and yes one of the things was fun. They destroyed me and I suppose maybe in a sense helped make me what I am today. People and things are never just one thing and whatever your attitude towards Russell Brand and whatever you’d like to say about him, it would be dishonest to deny that one of the many things he is, is fun.”
Trevor is very (rightly) loyal to PBH, the man and the ethos. I am right there with him. And I am devastated that each year the commercial monster that the Fringe has become is eating him up and soon will spit him out … so why does Trevor stay ?
“I like to do two shows on the fringe, one in a paid venue for people who like to plan and one on the free fringe for people who like to wander around aimlessly and meet their future life partners in haunted caves, but recently no paid venues have offered anything affordable so I’m so very grateful to be with PBH for both shows again. Bannermans transcends the fringe – magical, mysterious, haunting and haunted. The future is total domination by the fringe office administration who will strangle the fringe with lanyards.”
Trevor has garnered stars by the bucketload for his interactive /improvised / audience-centred shows …
“The thing that always surprised me about stand up after I started doing it was how it imitated theatre with each performance being the same and the comedian being more like an actor than a real person chatting in the room. When I first started going to gigs I assumed comedians were being spontaneously funny on stage. When I realised they were basically repeating the same things night after night I eventually learned to do this too and became a full time stand up. Then years later in 2014 I discovered I could do what I’d originally imagined stand up was all those years before – and make it an exciting unpredictable spontaneous event. So now I suppose I do stand up comedy back to front – the audience is the act and they have actually come to watch themselves as much as me.“
I ponder aloud that it might just be about feeling disinclined to write an hour of comedy ?
He confesses almost immediately. “Yes that’s it! No! I write about an hour of material a year, I also teach comedy writing writing twice a week – I love writing comedy. But people don’t pay to see me perform it, they pay to see the tried and tested magic of making it up on the spot! So the written stuff rarely gets an outing but this year I’m doing You Are An Elephant And All Your Friends Are Blind in The Voodoo Rooms at 16.30 after my improvised show SHARE at 14.45 in Bannermans”
Do go. Just don’t offer him fudge. IYKYK
Trevor Lock – SHARE
14:45
Bannermans – Back Cave 2.45pm
August 5-27
