Kevin Fullerton

Right, I’m three rows back, safe from the audience-participation danger area (even the killer whales at SeaWorld can only splash the first two rows). Courtney Pauroso arrives onstage in a bondage-style bikini performing as Vanessa 5000, a sex robot descending into an existential crisis. After observational material about the life of an erotic automaton and some aggressive twerking, I hear the words ‘Kevin... come and help me’. My untouchable hideout is a failure. I find myself onstage, improvising with Pauroso and spanking her after a ‘technical malfunction’ (‘harder than that’, she insists to cheers from the crowd).

Soon I’m bent over a stool, facing the audience while Pauroso lingers behind me, the threat of a thrashing in the air. Then I’m talking to her while she draws my portrait. The ‘portrait’ turns out to be my penis, not to scale. I’m taken backstage by Pauroso and left in the care of her production team. ‘We need you to scream into this microphone’, they tell me, thrusting one in my face. I bellow and wait for five minutes before being rushed in front of a roar of applause. An audience member later informs me that I was murdered by Vanessa 5000. Fair enough.

Murray Robertson

‘Don’t worry, I’m an expert at not getting picked.’ It was the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe and I was reassuring my nervous friends as we’d just been emphatically seated in the centre front row of Coach Coach by character comedian Adam Riches. Going to see one of his shows is an exhilarating, hilarious and nerve-wracking experience; no one is safe and he preys on the fear of participation. Unexpectedly, this particular show (which featured a cast of other comedians) breezed by without a hint of audience involvement. Until ten minutes before the end. Riches suddenly beckoned me to the stage upon which I had to play a critical part in the preposterous denouement. I was dizzy with excitement (and a little lager) and I failed to hit my marks. It was terrifying. It was wonderful.

And then last year, in The Guys Who... , Riches again coerced me onto the stage. When it does happen, the trick is go along with it; any hint that you’re trying to get it over with and he’ll stretch your suffering to the joy of all around (the longer you’re up on stage, the less likely they’ll be selected). But it won’t happen again. I’m an expert at not getting picked. 

Lucy Ribchester

During the 2003 Edinburgh Festival, I went along with the cast of a student show I’d written to see Stephen K Amos at Teviot House. Drunk on the high of being part of the Fringe (and also probably just drunk), we sat in the front row. Amos, after briefly mounting my friend, petitioned me to steal a man’s glasses on the grounds that ‘god doesn’t want him to see properly’. Ever suggestible (even when sober), I got up and diligently did as I was told, at which point Amos stopped the show to say no one had ever taken that request seriously before. The next day one of my pals told me the incident had made it into Amos’ five-star Scotsman review.

I was wary, then, when years later I began reviewing and my mentor (the wonderful Donald Hutera) advised me to always sit at the front. Nevertheless I have kept this up and come away largely unscathed. Until last year. There are probably worse things than being dragged onstage for a selfie with a person dressed as a cuddly polar bear, making a garbled point about climate change. But I’m not sure I’ll be sitting in the front row any longer to find out.

Brian Donaldson

While I’d rather a venue spontaneously burnt to the ground than be a foil for an act’s onstage whimsy, I’ve been fortunate that most of my audience-participation ‘happenings’ have proved to be mainly brief and largely uneventful. Brandishing my notebook and pen, like a New York City cop waving their badge at a pimp, actually saved me from Adam Riches during his debut hour (he was but a fledgling audience-accoster at that point). But I have been dragged up by magician Ali Cook (delightful man offstage, cruel destroyer of confidences on it) for a trick that involved a small solid dice turning into a massive fluffy one, while I’m pretty sure I messed up a clever illusion by the late Ewen MacIntosh during his spooky/funny midnight show at The Caves. He was very polite. I also became silent, and possibly pretended to not have English as even my second language, when Todd Barry brusquely interrogated me about the laws in Scotland on sex-work.

But the one onstage memory that will stay forever fixed in my head arrived when Luton lyricist and people’s poet John Hegley required every spectacles-wearer in his Assembly Rooms audience to get up and swap glasses with each other. Harmless enough. And then start Morris dancing around his stage. For several minutes. Harm was almost done. Proving that no ill-will lingered, when I bumped into Hegley in the Traverse bar a few nights later, I bought him his favourite snack of salted peanuts. He was very polite.

Marissa Burgess

Most acts avoid contact with the press person in the room if they’re aware of a reviewer’s attendance. Only a minority will be confrontational, and I still haven’t recovered from Nick Sun looming over me while stood on a chair in a daylit room bellowing ‘ah, Marissa Burgess!’ Or in the case of Mrs Barbara Nice, everyone is joining in with the audience participation, reviewer or not! But usually when picking folk from their crowd, an act will steer clear of reviewers.

Candy Gigi, though, is a fearless clown, her shows are weird, shocking and high on audience participation. On this occasion, 2017’s Becky Rimmer’s Bat Mitzvah was criminally underattended so I was bestowed the honour of playing both her somewhat emotional mother and her frenemy Sarah for a story in which Gigi transforms herself into a 13-year-old on the cusp of womanhood. Pretty much all of us took our turn except for the Chortle reviewer who she happened to recognise. But he missed out. At one point I was just hitting my stride when Gigi had to admonish me for hamming my part up.

Kelly Apter

Reviewing kids’ shows at the Fringe is often your unwitting passport to participation and, usually, good-natured humiliation; especially if you’re accompanied by a child young enough to enjoy your moment in the spotlight, rather than a mortified adolescent. Over the years, I’ve been enlisted to walk across the stage on all-fours like a dog (decent), attempt a breakdance windmill (dreadful), stand inside a giant bubble holding a toddler (dreamy), and eat a flame transformed into a chewy sweet by a magician (delicious). All of which were met with warmth and support by fellow parents, clearly relieved I’d taken one for the team.

But perhaps my finest participatory hour at the Fringe so far, was being handed a bag of confectionery by American comedian Rich Hall and asked to supply him with one chocolate bar at a time to feed a saucy improvisatory tale. I like to think my well-timed use of the ‘Turkish Delight’ bought Hall his best laugh of the evening.

Main picture: Jill Petracek.