EDINBURGH 2023: Marc Burrows: The Magic of Terry Pratchett Guest Blog

Marc Burrows: The Magic of Terry Pratchett - How I adapted and incorporated a well know, well-loved and specific style of written text to a live format.

I’d always known I was going to turn my book, The Magic of Terry Pratchett, into a live show. It felt like a no-brainer – the book was successful, it won an award, and it had a built-in audience. And of course, Terry Pratchett was a comic author so using my skills as a stand-up and adding some of Pratchett’s jokes felt like a winning formula. I had, after all, already done the hard bit. The book was written.

A biography is, in some ways, a relatively easy thing to write. The research is hard, of course. To do it properly takes months or years of obsessive deep dives and back-breaking expeditions into the archives. People must be interviewed. Places must be visited, and facts ruthlessly checked. But the actual writing part is relatively straightforward – your subject is born in year A. and dies in year Z., and the task is really just joining the dots between those two points, filling in the rest of the alphabet as you go.

Turning that into a live show was surely just a matter of condensing the story? A glorified, much-abridged book-reading? A doddle. Alas, no. That’s not what a live show is at all. That is not how stand-up comedy works. Live comic performances thread ideas invisibly into your subconscious and prime you to laugh when an adjoining thought emerges later in the show. Comic performances confound expectations to generate laughs. Comic performances are contrivances, because the most important goal of the piece is to elicit laughter from the audience. And comic performances are not always honest, and that’s the one thing a biography must be. The two mediums are working at cross purposes. One is about linear truth, the other about non-linear ideas.

I attempted to script a linear version of the show, based on the form of the book, and quite predictably it didn’t work. The material worked against the medium, rather than being of the medium. I scrapped the whole thing and started again. And this time I wrote it like a comedy show. I worked out what the themes of Sir Terry’s work were and then I worked backwards from there, zipping back and forth along his timeline to tell the story. I could skip from Terry’s early career as a journalist to his school days, to his battle to raise awareness for Alzheimer’s disease after his own diagnosis, letting the themes rather than the timeline dictate the flow. Once I had a structure that worked, it meant I could start dropping in the jokes. This is where I was able to bring it back to the way I’d written my book, and indeed the way Sir Terry wrote his. That’s the fun bit – when you know what you have is solid, and you can start picking through and finding the absurdities and the juxtapositions. My show is possibly the only Edinburgh Fringe show with detailed footnotes, and even includes a bonus performance every night titled The Magic of Terry Pratchett - The Footnotes.

Terry called such details “sherbert lemons” in reference to a sweet shop owner from his childhood who would always throw a few extra candies into the bag before handing it over. It’s the sherbert lemons and footnotes that bridge the gap between the two different art forms. It’s a show I’m extremely proud of, something that I think works for a general audience as well as the Pratchett super fans, something that compliments my book but doesn’t repeat it. And crucially something that can stand on its own as a piece of live comedy. It’s been quite the journey.

The Magic of Terry Pratchett will be performed at 5.30pm in Gilded Balloon Teviot (Dining Room) from 2nd – 28th August (Not 14th)

And it wouldn’t be Terry Pratchett without footnotes, would it?  Each performance will be followed by a separate interactive show, ‘The Magic of Terry Pratchett: The Footnotes’, featuring a Q&A, readings from rare Pratchett work and interviews with special guests, including friends and colleagues of Sir Terry and Discworld fans from across the Fringe and beyond.

Booking link for Main Show: https://tickets.gildedballoon.co.uk/event/14:4590/

Booking link for Footnotes: https://tickets.gildedballoon.co.uk/event/14:4631/

Photo credit: -I Was There Photography

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