Edinburgh’s cultural jamboree
Lloyd Evans on the esotericism of the Festival and the ragamuffin risk-taking of the Fringe
Here we go again. Like some vast, hairy, attention-seeking arachnid, the Edinburgh Festival has settled its gross and gorgeous shape in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat. Ever since its inception in 1947 the Festival has grown steadily and spawned a rowdy litter of symbiotic events. Comedy, literature, classical music, film, ballet, modern dance, jazz and blues and even ‘spirituality and peace’. All are represented. But the Festival’s heart, its alpha and omega, is the theatre.
Whenever I flip through the International Festival brochure I’m staggered and slightly alarmed by its strenuously esoteric contents. Daring. That’s the word. It’s daring you to pack it all in. To admit you’re not high-minded enough for high art. It offers Homer in Lithuanian, Shakespeare in Catalan, Goethe in Javanese, Mozart in Martian. There’s Tasmanian melodrama, glove-puppet Chekhov, Strindberg with Esperanto subtitles, Gilbert and Sullivan sung in Old Norse by Argentinian torture victims. It stretches you in ways you never wanted to be stretched. Hamlet performed by stilt-walking nuns. Hokey-cokey dancers from Vancouver yodelling Beowulf in Croatian. Masked Guyanese polymaths with their egg-and-spoon-race version of Beyond Good and Evil. Tempted? Probably not. But the faithful Edinburghers turn out every year to support their city’s cultural jamboree. They buy tickets, they watch the shows in bemused silence, and they applaud at the end in relief and dismay, politely ignoring the fact that the International Festival has become less like an arts event and more like a holiday camp for delusional narcissists.
As for the Fringe, well that’s a different matter. While the International Festival favours multilingual confections that flatter the organisers’ intellectual pretentions and spurn the practical indignities of popular theatre, the Fringe offers a vibrant mix of commercially minded creativity. The secret lies in its openness. Anyone can enter. Pay your money, pitch up and put on a show. And it’s this ragamuffin risk-taking spirit that has made the Fringe the world’s largest arts festival and rendered the International Festival almost an afterthought. The Fringe has 250 venues hosting 2,000 acts. Every year it sells £1.5 million worth of tickets and flutters its merry way through 10 million flyers. Bang goes another rainforest. Thesps swarm to it like bees to jam. So do journalists, of course, and because an appearance at the Fringe guarantees publicity it offers a highly specialised service to a certain type of celebrity. The Fringe is the Lourdes of the north. A place to heal a sick career, to baptise a new book of memoirs, or simply to remind the world you’re still alive. The list of indestructible has-beens appearing this year is headed by Brit Ekland whose solo show at the Gilded Balloon, imaginatively titled Brit on Brit, promises a mixture of anecdote and shopping tips. Ruby Wax has absented herself from our TV screens for a while. She’s been getting her head examined. Newly armed with a psychiatry degree she’s reinvented herself as an agony aunt and she’ll be discussing mental breakdown at the Assembly Rooms. ‘But,’ she warns, ‘it’ll be funny.’ At the same venue Simon Callow arrives with his highly acclaimed and highly realistic recreation of a Dickens recital. At the Underbelly, A Life in Progress by a Work in Progress is a solo play by Joan Rivers. At £25 this is one of the hottest and costliest tickets on the Fringe. Rivers recently won a whole new tribe of admirers by getting herself kicked off ITV’s daytime chat-show Loose Women for calling Russell Crowe ‘a f***ing piece of s**t’ live on air. She’s fast becoming a national treasure who isn’t safe behind glass. And the promoters of her show are so confident of selling out that they’ve already booked a West End transfer.
Michael Barrymore, another pilgrim in search of spiritual renewal, is appearing in Surviving Spike, a life of Spike Milligan at the Assembly Rooms. At first sight this looks like a hopeless case. A finished comedian playing an immortal one. But you’d be rash to write off Barrymore entirely, and if he should pull off a triumph he’s chosen the ideal place to do it. If nothing else the Fringe is a festival of hope. It has a special atmosphere, a reckless studenty spirit of optimism and frivolity that infects everyone who performs. The past vanishes. Your age is irrelevant. Everyone is 19 and all that matters is your future and your fame.
For that reason there’s a growing animosity between the handful of celebrity gatecrashers and the great mass of unknown Fringe performers. Cushioned by their notoriety and their well-heeled backers, the celebs tend to forget that when Johnny Wannabe arrives at the Fringe he’s investing a sizeable chunk of his income in the venture. Take a rock bottom example, a oneman show at a smallish venue of 100 seats. Include transport, marketing, theatre-hire and a quarter-page advert in the brochure (without which you’re stuffed), add a rented bedsit and two tins of baked beans a day and you’re looking at 5,000 quid. Quite a chunk of money and yet it’s a fraction of what you’d pay to hire a pub theatre in London for three weeks. When you ask Fringe veterans how much they expect to make, they shrug and laugh. Recoup half your investment and you’re doing well. Break even and you’re a roaring success. Turn a profit and you’re the next Binkie Beaumont.
It’s not about making cash. It’s about entering a lottery. The glory of the Fringe is that it’s a gamble, a blind-date, a Klondike full of mapless nugget-hunters stumbling through its stony gulleys at random. No one has a clue where to look but the gold is always there. Every year an unexpected show-from-nowhere takes the city by storm, delights audiences and critics alike, and sells out. And you can bet that every last one of the Fringe’s greasepaint warriors secretly believes that this will be their year. In their hearts they feel certain that come September they’ll be fielding calls from Bill Kenwright and Cameron Mackintosh begging them to ‘come into town’. Shows that win ovations at Edinburgh must face a final cruel hurdle. The curse of the A1. For reasons no one can fathom, Fringe hits don’t always succeed in the West End. Many die of neglect. Audiences shun them and even reviewers who have bear-hugged a particular production ‘up there’ lose faith when it arrives in London. One critic explains these tragic abandonments as follows: ‘I suppose we all live in London whereas in Edinburgh we’re on holiday. There’s a euphoria that wears off when we come home.’ Famehunters beware. Still, there’s always next year.
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