How you feel about Cringe, presented as part of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, will to a very considerable extent depend on how you feel about Fanfic.
For the lover of fanfic, whether as a reader, writer or both, there is a lot to love here. If you don’t like fanfic, or consider it ‘derivative’, ‘cheating’, and think that “it’s all just bad sex, isn’t it?”, then this is not the show for you.
This production is an earnest attempt to demonstrate why fanfic is valuable, and why it should not be dismissed. In an era where The Organisation for Transformative Works has won a Hugo Award, partially for maintaining the ‘Archive of Our Own’ – the predominant fanfic repository in the western world – this is perhaps all a little ‘Fanfic 101’. However there’s much more here to endear this story to the audience.
We begin with some voice-over commentary – from men, of course, defining what fanfic is, and why we should not take it seriously.
That fanfic is predominantly written by women, has often meant that it has been relegated as a fanac activity. It has been sneered at and derided as ‘a waste of time’ and ‘irrelevant’. Cringe, confronting this belief directly within its title, focuses on some of these women, who in many cases kept the fandom for a show alive for decades until it could be rediscovered by a new generation.
The narrative straddles two timelines. First, it’s 1969 and The Captain and Mr Professor are journeying through time and space in a way that looks and feels like it contains an awfully large amount of queer subtext.
Then, it’s 2012, and we’re in a teenager’s bedroom, as they rediscover that very same subtext in the now fifty year old television show.
The television show: “Fantastical Adventures Reaching Through Time” is supposed to be Star Trek, but could just as easily be Doctor Who, or any sci-fi or genre show with a dedicated fandom.
The Captain and Mr Professor are obviously the top two people in their team. Possibly they’re the only two, it’s never made clear, and we keep on discovering them in various somewhat compromising situations that the writers of the actual ‘canon’ show placed them in.
The 1969 fans analyse these compromising and fleeting moments, trying to determine if the creators of the show are indeed trying to hint at a romance between the two men.
Like Trek, the dedicated fans in 1969 are all women, and some of them housewives. There’s a fair age range on display, from the wife and mother in her forties, to the older teenager soon to be off to college.
What unites them is their love of ‘FARTT’, and the fanfic they write for it. They meet routinely in their fan club, which has by-laws, and strict time limits for any part of their gatherings – restrictions that will appear far too familiar to anyone who has ever attended a Worldcon Business meeting.
The teenagers are much more savvy in their media literacy, and recognise the queer subtext. They understand that anything more than a hint of queerness would have been unacceptable at the time the show was produced.
They’re also lost in a world of Fanfic.net and AO3, and the cliché of writing through their feelings is very apparent very quickly. Here, The Captain and Mr Professor are placed in a range of imagined scenarios, from finding themselves in trouble on a range of alien planets, to the ubiquitous ‘Coffee Shop AU’.
What gives the production much of its humour is that The Captain and The Professor enact their scenes. They also freeze when the action does – and hold their poses. The audience can therefore see what the fans do: the lingering looks; the eyes glancing between eyes and lips; the arrangement of limbs in a manner which looks very suggestive.
As the narrative continues, it becomes obvious that the issues some of these women face haven’t changed in the fifty years between timelines. Regrets around relationships, confusion around sexuality, and the understanding that choices made cannot be unmade, all dominate the minds of the characters.
Cringe is incredibly well done, especially given the obvious budgetary constraints, and the restrictions of staging any production at the Fringe. There’s a lot of heart and warmth, and some serious conversations happening beneath the veil of stories about two time travelling scientists dancing around their feelings. And the last line is an absolute killer.
In summary: we ship it, and if you like fanfic, then you probably will too!
Cringe continues at the Space @ Niddry Street – The Studio (Venue 9), at 9.20pm (21:20), until August 20th
Featured Image: Fringe Society
[…] Cringe #NoBetaWeDieLikeMen at Edinburgh Fringe is a performance that celebrates fanfiction, particularly its role in interpreting and reimagining TV shows. The production features fans of a fictional show, Fantastical Adventures Reaching Through Time, which resembles Star Trek or possibly Doctor Who, in 1969 and in 2012. The other timeline is set in 2012, where teenagers rediscover the show and its subtext, and write fanfic exploring imagined romantic scenarios between the two characters. […]