Edinburgh: home of the Fringe since 1947
I first went to the Edinburgh Fringe six years ago with a company called Aardvark. We'd been hoping to come first in the programme but we hadn't reckoned on AAAARGGGH Theatre. We took the coach up from London, swigging whisky and performing, extempore, the collected works of Dorothy Parker, and found ourselves on the smallest stage at the world's biggest arts festival. One review was so bad that I burned it in an act of catharsis far more powerful than our show-that is, until the set went up in smoke. We made a profit of £50 and spent it on vodka. When we got back home, we called all the producers who had given us their cards and none of them remembered who we were. But I still believe the Edinburgh Fringe is special; the only place in Britain where you can put on a show on a shoestring and make it.
It is this belief that keeps the Fringe going and most of the 619 companies performing there this year would subscribe to it. But a surprising number of people, including many in the London press, think that it is fantasy. They argue that an obsession with getting discovered has turned the once-carnivalesque Fringe into a grabby, grubby place, PR-driven and producer-led. They say it's unwieldy, overblown and no fun anymore.
It is certainly not easy to cope with one-hour slots, 15-minute get-ins, limited storage space and inflexible lighting rigs. But limitations can be a spur to creativity, and theatre on a shoestring is sometimes theatre at its most vital. As technology advances, we are likely to want more, not less, of an entertainment form that relies on real people manifesting their presence in a shared space.
The Fringe is vast. There are 1,491 shows this year, which is testament to the drive and imagination of a lot of people, not to mention the venue managers who requisition unconventional spaces and turn them into theatres. Where else can you see Czech black-light puppetry alongside Australian Puppetry of the Penis? Where else can you see ten shows a day? Quantity does not equal quality, of course, but the risk factor is part of the Fringe's charm. Fringe director Paul Gudgin calls it the "weird Edinburgh osmosis"-word-of-mouth has a real impact, and punters accost each other in bars and queues demanding recommendations. Imagine that in London.
In Edinburgh, audiences wield as much power as critics, who are as dependent on hot tips as anyone else. Some shows become cult hits before the critics get to them. The publicity industry has got bigger in Edinburgh, but the London fringe is equally divided into shows with press representation and shows without. The difference in Edinburgh is access. Every show is listed in the Fringe brochure and critics get a contact list for every company involved. In London, the only way critics will know a show is happening before it opens is if someone sends them a press release.
There are other festivals-notably the spring Brighton Festival, which has now spawned its own fringe, and London's triumvirate of LIMF, Lift and Bite (the London International Mime Festival, the London International Festival of Theatre and Barbican International Theatre Events)-but these are smaller, swankier, more select and governed by the taste of their artistic directors. Edinburgh, which started in 1947 when eight companies calling themselves "Festival Adjuncts" gatecrashed the very first Edinburgh International Festival, is still a wild, unregulated place where anyone can put on a show.
British theatre is healthy enough, despite a rocky six months at the top in which artistic directorships at the Almeida, the Donmar Warehouse, the National Theatre, the Hampstead Theatre, the West Yorkshire Playhouse and the RSC, have all been changing hands. But for a young company hoping to showcase its work and make it, there is nothing to replace Edinburgh. The much-vaunted return of rep theatre might increase outlets for new work, except that, with notable exceptions (Hamish Glen's permanent ensemble at the Dundee Rep and Trevor Nunn's rep company at the National), it has not returned at all.
On the London fringe, around 80 shows play in any one week and, as in Edinburgh, anyone can put on a show. There are some unusual venues, too. Mehmet Ergen has carved the cavernous Arcola Theatre out of a disused Dalston clothing factory and tries to engage local people. The Lion and Unicorn, a pub theatre in Kentish Town, is a centre for physical theatre and puppetry. In Kennington, the White Bear continues to launch new writers in one of the smallest spaces in London. Then there's the Battersea Art Centre, the mother ship of experimental theatre, run by Tom Morris, which has scratch nights where performers can "scratch" snippets of new work in front of a live audience.
In Edinburgh, some say, it is no longer possible to experiment. There is nostalgia for the 1980s-when Deborah Warner's Kick Theatre and Simon McBurney's Complicite would turn up to try things out. It was certainly cheaper then. The cost of rentals continues to rise, as do Fringe office charges (this year it costs £390 for an entry in the Fringe programme). But London prices have risen too. And the economics of the Edinburgh Fringe would not have changed unless a lot more people were willing to gamble on the possibility of a hit.
The comedy takeover at Edinburgh has been exaggerated (40 per cent of shows in 2001 were theatre and only 20 per cent were comedy) but it is the main reason that people gamble on the Fringe. The success of comics like Eddie Izzard and Al Murray has made it a magnet for television executives-Gudgin calls it "the unofficial R&D wing of British comedy." Comedians go to Edinburgh hoping to win one of the many awards (So You Think You're Funny, the Daily Telegraph Open Mic Award, the BBC New Comedy Award, and, best of all, the Perrier), or to get a television deal. Some say that this skews things. But while there's more cash at stake for the comics, there are plenty of opportunities for writers, directors, actors and dancers. Non-comedy awards include the Scotsman Fringe First, the Herald Angel Award and the Total Theatre Award. So many talent scouts go each year that the Fringe office now employs two promoter liaison managers.
Over the last few years, there has also been a rise in independent producers-like Guy Masterson, an actor-producer who first came to the Fringe in 1991 and this year presents ten shows, and Martin Sutherland, who is taking seven shows to the Fringe and believes it is the best place to launch new companies. One of Sutherland's biggest successes to date is Spymonkey, a Brighton-based outfit whose first show, Stiff, became a cult hit at Edinburgh and got picked up by the British Council's showcase, which introduces carefully selected Fringe shows to 200-odd international promoters.
Promoters hang around London too, but they cannot see 30 shows in a weekend. The same goes for audiences. Edinburgh audiences are, in part, holidaymakers looking for a theatrical thrill; London audiences are, by comparison, jaded and tired. Edinburgh is more open to the random and less confined to the cognoscenti. Shows which transfer south often do badly, and critics who have hyped them on the Fringe can end up reviewing them with bemused disappointment when they come to London. Perhaps critics get Fringe fever too, but can't sustain enthusiasm in London.
Transferring to London is still the holy grail for many Fringe shows, and performers often cite the example of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which premiered at the Fringe in 1966, transferred to the National Theatre and became a modern classic. The new writing scene is more fluid than it was, and instead of novice playwrights having to jump through several hoops, putting on plays at successively better Fringe venues, the big theatres (such as Manchester's Royal Exchange, Sheffield's Crucible and London's Royal Court) all have schemes aimed at finding unknowns. But the Edinburgh Fringe still has a role in incubating writers-Abi Morgan, David Harrower, David Greig and Zinnie Harris all broke through on the Fringe and last year Gregory Burke, a dishwasher-turned-playwright, did a Stoppard when his first play, Gagarin Way, was snapped up by the National after appearing at the Traverse Theatre. Another ex-Fringe show, Jesus Hopped the "A" Train, started at the Gilded Balloon and had a run at London's Donmar Warehouse.
The Traverse is one of the Fringe's top venues, while the Gilded Balloon, Pleasance and Assembly Rooms, form a "golden triangle" of venues that promote themselves as a sort of elite festival-within-the-festival. You have to push pretty hard to get into those venues. But in London the hierarchy of venues is immeasurably harder to break.
In Edinburgh, with imagination and hard work, any venue can create a buzz. Last year witnessed the launch of Komedia St Stephens, which produced a determinedly international programme called Aurora Nova. It was the most talked-about venue of 2001, and this year they're back with an even more ambitious programme. Aurora Nova's genesis describes all that is uplifting about Edinburgh. First, the internationalism-Edinburgh has been a magnet for international theatre since the 1960s, when impresario Richard Demarco started bringing over eastern Europeans such as the visionary Polish director, Tadeusz Kantor. Second, the collaborations-Aurora Nova was comprised of the German expressionist ensemble Fabrik Potsdam and Tim Hawkins of Brighton-based Komedia, who met on the Fringe in one of those cross-fertilisations that only such a mongrel festival can throw up.
Theatre companies, particularly those producing devised or physical work, need showcases. In the past few years companies which refuse to compromise on the way they produce their work, such as Frantic Assembly, Ridiculusmus, Unlimited Theatre and Spymonkey have premiered shows on the Fringe and transferred intact.
While researching this year's festival, I have come across people who have told me that I was "optimistic" about the Fringe, as if that was a bad thing to be. But optimism is the point. Edinburgh is still about splashing "world premiere" across your poster, handing out soggy flyers in the rain, sharing a flat with 20 people and living on Pot Noodles. It's about dreaming-not just for the performers but for the venue managers who turn broom cupboards into theatres, and the audience who take a risk on a show by a company of unknowns and who sometimes find it changes them. And that's-to use a phrase that should never have become a cliche-the magic of theatre.
The Edinburgh Fringe runs from 4th-26th August. Tel: 0131 226 0000, or www.edfringe.com/shows
