Mike Maran, dressed in a Native American feather bonnet and buckskin, invites us to mark the closure of Indian Peter’s Coffee House.
Taking us on a journey that leads from Peter Williamson’s childhood in rural Aberdeenshire, his kidnap and transportation to colonial America, where his fortunes slowly repair, before capture by natives and escape, only to be captured again (by the French this time) when he volunteers for that extensive side-show of the Seven Years War known in the U.S. as the French and Indian Wars.
A prisoner exchange brought Williamson back to these islands, where the publication of his adventures prompted the Town Council of Aberdeen (who may have colluded in the practice of kidnaping children for service in the colonies) to sue Peter Williamson. The damages he won enabled him to establish a tavern cum coffee house in Edinburgh’s Parliament Close, along with the first postal service in the British Isles and to become a small scale publisher.
Much to pack in to an hour‘s performance then, and Maran picks up the baton nobly, his pace scarcely faltering as we follow him from Aberdeen to America and back again, then on through the days of the Enlightenment in Scotland.
Williamson’s life is rich in incident and his times those in which it was, as one Englishman put it, possible to walk along the recently built North Bridge and ‘take fifty men of genius by the hand’.
It’s here that Maran’s script stumbles, falling into the tempting trap of listing the geniuses and using Peter Williamson as a means of making contemporary comment on them; for the second time this Fringe, this reviewer found himself wanting to yell ‘Adam Smith’s reference to an Invisible Hand appears once in ‘The Wealth of Nations’ and not in connection to free markets!’
Pedantry aside, this good-hearted show shines a small light on a neglected aspect of Edinburgh’s ‘Golden Age’, and offers something perhaps more in keeping with the spirit of the Fringe than what is found in the larger venues.
Show times
3-5, 7, 9-11, 14, 16, 18-19, 23-36 August , 1pm
6, 8, 12-13, 15 August, 3pm