A minor brouhaha has erupted this year about the dominance of comedy on the Edinburgh Fringe. The author of the newspaper article which set off this kerfuffle, comedian Stewart Lee, can of course be seen this year on the Edinburgh Fringe. Lee is performing at the Assembly Rooms, not to be confused with Assembly, the supervenue empire which used to run the Rooms but had to move elsewhere during their redevelopment. Following their reopening we now have the Assembly Rooms on George Street, one of whose performance spaces is a Spiegeltent, and Assembly in George Square, who have three Spiegeltents. A further spat is running between the two setups over their common name, reminiscent of those between factions of Irish Republicanism; I’ve begun to think of them as Provisional Assembly and Continuity Assembly.
    
Also appearing at Continuity Assembly (i.e. the Rooms) are the Comedians’ Theatre Company, some of whose offerings in the last few yeas have been superb, others dreadful. Alas, The Intervention is markedly below par. Set at an AA-sanctioned family confrontation (hence the title) which goes horribly and supposedly hilariously wrong, it is the worst kind of that American drama which considers itself edgy but is in fact irredeemably mawkish. CTC’s mainstay Phil Nichol gives his customary all in the central role, but when Zach makes an impassioned speech about how booze is not destroying his life but saving it, I couldn’t help wondering whether this was also Nichol talking about acting.
    
The contrast could scarcely be greater between Nichol’s appearance in Dave Florez’ play and American impro comedy legend Mike McShane’s in his own playwriting début Mon Droit (Pleasance Courtyard). McShane has acted in a number of midnight-dark, twisted comedies on the Fringe (even a version of Ubu Roi), but the comedy here is by way of momentary relief in an account of the downward spiral of a paranoid schizophrenic. Loosely inspired by the true story of a body found on the island in St James’s Park in London and discovered to be that of a man obsessed with the Queen, McShane has fashioned his protagonist Robert James Moore, who leaves his Kansas City home, job with a car-hire firm and “protocol” of medications, flies to London and is gradually stripped of his wealth, possessions and the last of his sanity. Fellow comic Suki Webster plays a clutch of roles from Moore’s Kansas shrink to a Belgravia dominatrix. It is a quietly ambitious piece of work, often deliberately overwritten, and it pays off almost without exception. It serves as a heartening recollection of the days when one could see names on the Fringe daring to try something (for them) unorthodox rather than simply exploiting their stock in trade.
    
Indeed, it is possible to refine your style too far. I spent almost all of the Russian Akhe company’s Mr Carmen (Assembly Roxy) trying to decide whether or not I had seen it before. (It transpires I had, in the London International Mime Festival of 2005.) There is a degree beyond which a characteristic aesthetic becomes a stale shtick, and Akhe’s brand of mute, eccentric ritual theatre (imagine if Vivian Stanshall had been Russian, or Heath Robinson an Orthodox priest) can cross that line. Nevertheless, they are fascinating on first viewing and deserve a better midweek house than under 20 people.
    
Each year I find it harder to judge how well the Fringe is doing business-wise. This year feels busy without being crowded, which complicates matters further. The likes of visual comedian The Boy With Tape On His Face will sell out the huge Grand space in the Pleasance Courtyard, whilst on a number of other occasions I have been in audiences in major venues that were barely into double figures. No problems with small houses, though, for Peep at the Pleasance Courtyard: two people constitute a sellout, at least in any one of the several booths in which punters sit, sex-show-style, and watch a 20-minute playlet through a small one-way window. Plays by Kefi Chadwick, Leo Butler and Pamela Carter rotate through the day at the top of each hour; the prurience is all in the arrangement, not the material.
     
Written for the Financial Times.