Boy Done Good

For the punter, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe should be about taking a punt – meeting the people who are truly on the fringe, the unknowns who have followed their hearts to Edinburgh, often at great expense.

I made such a discovery last year in Richard Fry's play Bully. When a Gilded Balloon act cancelled their fixture late in the day, a friend pushed Fry—an Edinburgh virgin with only a handful of acting odd jobs behind him—to seize the moment and book himself in. Four weeks later I stepped cautiously into this oubliette of a venue, aptly called the Turret, only to be shocked into a trance of admiration moments later.

Fry's debut was a home-brewed, loosely autobiographical monologue about the indomitable cycle of violence that lingers like a curse on a man’s bloodline. It had all the qualities of a Greek tragedy, and what’s more (I realised 15 minutes into the performance), it was written in verse. It hit me like an epiphany and I was hooked for every subsequent second of the show. Fry deservedly left the Fringe with a catalogue of praise, which he’s since used to leverage a national tour of the play.

Bully, which returns to the Turret this year, is the first thing Fry’s written; it’s his first shot on stage; his first time in Edinburgh; and his first real glimmer of fulfilled potential. Now in his mid-thirties, Fry's CV had been unexceptional until last year. He played a TV detective alongside a Spice Girl, a man in funny underpants in a Bollywood reincarnation of the 40-year-old Virgin, and a couple of skinhead racists in two borderline B-movies that he laughingly boasts have become cult classics in his Somerset home town.

A start-up thesp who turns up solo at the Fringe is in for a hard time. Monologues are cost-effective, and many writers sadly can’t afford to create a second character, especially with the rising cost of accommodation and venues. Fringe monologues often reek of limitation, and reviewers have become allergic.

But that’s not Fry’s only handicap. In the same time it takes to watch a monologue and assess one performer, talent scouts could just as easily attend a fuller-bodied play and assess five, ten, or twenty performers all at once. So why wouldn’t they?

It’s in these conditions that Fry took a leap of faith. The footfall was predictably quiet to begin with, and even when the Turret started filling to its full capacity of a terrifyingly tight 50 in the second half of August, Fry knew he was facing a loss. But on the back of positive reviews and word-of-mouth, he made the impression he needed to subsequently turn drama into a full-time profession. He's since performed Bully 30 to 40 times in front of paying audiences, with another 100 fixtures in the pipeline.

I wrongly wrote in my review of Bully last year that Fry earned his bread as a carpenter before getting into drama. “Christ’s father was a carpenter,” he corrects me, “I collected bins.” At age 15, ritual bullying from his classmates and a busy single mother gave Fry both a reason and an opportunity to skip the hell out of school. Failing his exams, he escaped the West Country to begin combing the streets of London for rubbish. Some years later his sister bought a pub in Somerset and invited him to come and help her run it. There he stayed until the age of 30, when his life took a dramatic turn.

“I was watching EastEnders on the telly, watching Ross Kemp behind the bar,” he recounts. “I thought, ‘He’s just pretending to do something I do for real and getting a damn lot more money for it.’ So I took myself up for an audition in a drama school in London. There were 20 people in there. They made me get up and do my speech in front of everyone. I royally fucked up!” he laughs.

“Afterwards, they called me through, asked me about my experience. I said I had none and knew nothing about classical theatre. And then I said these words: 'I want to be in EastEnders.'” The judges took a surprise liking to the philistine, telling him that his was a very realistic approach. He was in.

Later that evening reality hit him like a comet. The £6,000 he’d saved up wasn’t going to be enough to cover his course fees. He needed double that. “I was gutted,” he remembers. But when he called the drama school to tell them he couldn’t afford the tuition, he was advised to attend the upcoming scholarship auditions. “So I did it again,” says Fry, “and once again I royally fucked up; I forgot my lines and everything!” He was in.

“Where I come from people don’t become actors, they become electricians and builders. After doing these shitty jobs for ten years, I suddenly had a future. I felt really proud.” It was in this way that in August 2003 Fry went into Ealing’s Drama Studio of London, having never read or seen Shakespeare, and discovered theatre.

This summer Fry, addicted now to the Fringe, is back with two plays. Bully is in its home in the Turret again, and down some steps in a livelier area of the Gilded Balloon will be Killing Me Softly, a two-hander “about domestic violence and karaoke” that has rather thematically turned into a monologue in the time I’ve taken to write this (counterpart Lizzie Roper has just been offered a major television part, filming in August – “it was that phone call all actors wait for”). So there we have it, my 2008 champion. Come and meet the underdog prodigy.

Bully Gilded Balloon 9-31 Aug, 12.45pm, £9 Killing Me Softly 7-31 Aug, 2.45pm, £9