This summer, third-year English student Lauren Bensted took ‘Kiddy-Fiddler on the Roof’ to the Edinburgh Festival. Bensted first orchestrated the piece, written by Isaksen and Au, two former Oxford students, for the Moser Theatre in her first year. National auditions were held at the beginning of the summer, and Bensted spent the following four weeks rehearsing at the Rag Factory before the month-long run at the Edinburgh Festival. Bensted explained that the script had been significantly altered.
“It became a lot shorter and snappier. There were some new songs, and it was generally made dirtier. One of the most exciting things with a production like this is seeing it constantly evolving,” she said.
The play was unsurprisingly controversial, being a musical satire on the media’s reaction to the threat of pedophilia. Lauren diffidently said that there were mixed reactions to the play in Edinburgh. “It’s a love-hate play. Most people seemed to think it was awesome, but then there were those critics who said that it was the most offensive rubbish they’d ever seen in their life.” General reactions though seemed to agree with ‘What’s On Stage Scotland’, which gave the production four stars, and wrote that “this is one Kiddy-Fiddler everyone will enjoy being touched by.”
As well as arranging Kiddy-Fiddler on the Roof, Bensted was also the co-Musical Director and the conductor of the musical. On the back of the production’s success, Bensted is now planning on taking ‘Swing’ – another musical that she wrote, composed and directed – to the festival in 2010.
Although enjoyable, Bensted confessed that the run did not go altogether smoothly.
“On the first night,” she explained, “the guy who was playing the headmaster had half an hour before the performance to pass a kidney stone – he was whisked to hospital, and with various members of the cast shouting encouragement, he succeeded, and managed to make it back just in time!” It seems, though, that such trials and tribulations are part of the festival experience, and have certainly not succeeded in deterring Bensted, who’s already planning her next play, to be performed in the coming term.
