August 25, 2025
“It’s a brigade of old Gits!” Miriam Margolyes, Andy Linden and the older actors stormed Edinburgh

“It’s a brigade of old Gits!” Miriam Margolyes, Andy Linden and the older actors stormed Edinburgh

Miriam Margolyes is framed in the garden room of a chic hotel in Edinburgh, which is framed with a tasteful green and smiling for a fan who wants a selfie. Apple and omnacular, she is gracious with the temporary stranger, although she later warns me: “If someone annoys me, I will say: ‘Now listen to me, I’m 84!'” She will take a break. “But I don’t understand why they should!” She adds with a laugh.

Margolyes returns to Edinburgh for the second time, in which an improved version of her celebrated shop window is based on the characters of Charles Dickens, her favorite author. “The same old cunt, even older,” reads the flyer. “It could be the last time, but not go into it!”

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is world famous for the diversity of its acts, but the attention of industry and the media is slightly distracted, and the appetite for courageous new talents and fresh voices often does the same or in other ways with young people. But this year, some of them offer veterans such as Margolyes, who performed with Cambridge University Footlights there in 1963, a “brigade of old Gits”, as the actor Andy Linden says, and others celebrated in the 70s and 80s, others, in the 1970s and 80s.

“I am very lucky,” says Margolyes, whose legion of fans exaggerates generations and was happy about their appearances in Blackadder, Harry Potter and their performances on the Graham Norton Show. “At my age, relatively few people still work.” And there is “nothing like a live audience,” she adds: “It’s like a kiss, it’s a caress.”

“I just do it so well that it does so much,” she continues, and runs some of the characters that she brings her on stage with “formal flair”, as a review expressed it. “My favorites like Ms. Gamp, Miss Havisham, I think I’m a perfect person to give these amazing creations a voice that there was a lot.

Margolyes describes a “immediate feeling of joy and competence” when she gets out of an audience these days. Does she always have the feeling that she knows what she is doing on stage? “No, it has come with the time. What I am now aware is that people know who I am and that is really new.”

Just like trust with age is associated, the responsibility to use your profile also takes on the name of those who have no such platform. In recent times, Margolyes, who is Jewish, has confronted Gaza because of her strict criticism of the acts of the Israeli government.

“People say:” You are just an actor, for the sake of the fuck, keep the flap. “This is a point of view. She says.

Another flight from Australia, in which she lives part -time with her partner and suffered from the “punishment” of Jetlag together with a recent back injury, Margyes admits that life on the street can be exhausting. “I collect my strength and will deliver, but it’s a fight.”

Linden, an experienced character actor and one of the Harry Potter co-stars of Margolyes, who played Horcrux Thiefus Fletcher, also appear in Edinburgh this year. This year he celebrated in 1985 on the 40th anniversary of his debut in Edinburgh. When Linden recently appeared at the festival in 2022, he suffered a large breath and landed in the Royal Hospital in Edinburgh.

They do not withdraw from the profession, the profession retires them

Andy Linden

After he had said to be without a doubt that “the next time it would not need an ambulance,” Linden begins his first festival with alcohol and cigarette-free, when he returns with Baxter against the bookmakers, a show that he wrote and performed himself and puts on the wealth of a strenuous tipper with the Horse Racing tipper with modern technologies.

“In the past, we have contaminated one or the other way, but over the years in which experience develops, he takes a hand,” he says with a little leniency. “Edinburgh is the Grand National, not a five-furgon sprint and whether they are young or old, they have to measure themselves.”

Linden’s advice for the actors of all ages is to take a few days off during the run: “Edinburgh can be very low in island. So try to do something else, go up the coast.

The festival has changed a lot on the scale since its first appearance and has become “violent competitive”. But Agesmus is no concern for Linden: The “Brigade of the Old Gits”, to which he refers, includes Ivor Dembina, Stephen Frost, Mark Arden and Mark Thomas.

“They don’t withdraw from the profession,” he says, “the job is retiring.” And until this happens, he plans to start working on a new character project via a boxing corner in October.

Others make their debut here. I come to the bar of meeting rooms to meet two women sitting on high stools. The 76 -year -old Vivienne Powell has just been struggling with dementia from the first performance of her solo show Diva over an opera singer to regain her memories through music. Christine Thynne, 82, a retired physiotherapist who burdened her first dance course with 68 begins the first full run of her choreographed performance of these mechanisms.

It is a physically challenging dance piece that includes scaffolding planks and Stepladder. Does Thynne rub against the expectations of how a woman should behave in her age or what she is capable of? She laughs. “At the age of 82, people say: ‘You shouldn’t open jump charder, someone else should change the light bulbs!”

Powell adds: “Our society is quite old in many ways.

Thynne agrees: “If you look back on the programs of the past few years, I don’t know that there were many older women who have made a full show.”

However, the couple remains largely unimpressed by their own travels. “It can happen very often in women,” argues Powell, “who only come within their 40s or 50s. And they discover talents, interests that they did not know. They started a completely new chapter of their lives.” After Powell worked as a teacher when she showed her three children in Sydney, Australia, she gave her first professional opera concert in the early 1940s and later played on stage, on television and in the film in Los Angeles.

Do Powell and Thynne believe more courageously as an actor because of their age and experience? “Definitely,” emphasizes Powell. “You take more creative risks.”

“My piece is completely about creative risks,” says Thynne. “From the beginning, where I lie on a scaffolding and turned its width. This is the essence of creativity, because the audience wonders what will happen next, then you can see: This is not an older person, this is an exciting piece of work.”

The creativity should not give an age limit, says Powell. Her advice to those who are still thinking about their next chapter is uncomplicated: “Follow your heart, do what you love.” She lifts a finger for the focus: “And don’t settle down.”

Thynne says: “Even if you address children and juggle all of these different things and the ups and downs of life, they are still followed by their dream.

The grandchildren of both women will see their shows. Powell reads a George Eliot quote: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

• Margoly and Dickens: Best bits are in the Pentland Theater at Pleasance at EICC until August 24th. Baxter against the bookmakers is located in the gilded balloon pattern until August 25th. The diva is located in the assembly and salon until August 24th. These mechanisms are on the dance base until August 20th

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