I have yet to encounter any hard
figures, but the impression is that this year’s Edinburgh Fringe has
got off to a flying start. Normally it takes a few days to achieve
cruising speed, but the moment I got off the train last Thursday week –
on the eve of the Fringe’s official start – the Scottish capital seemed
to be as thronging as I would have expected towards today’s end of
Fringe Week 1. Not even several days of downpours (such as would
helpfully deter rioters and looters south of the border) have
significantly thinned the crowds. Possibly this is partly due to the
bite of austerity and increasing numbers remaining in the UK for their
holidays, but Edinburgh in festival season is hardly a cheap option by
anyone’s standards.
There are, though, an increasing number of
free shows on the Fringe. Programmes and venues offering free work have
long been organised by the likes of comedian Peter Buckley Hill, but
much of this work had previously lain outside the mainstream Fringe
programme. This year, however, they seem to be pinging vigorously on
the main radar. Significant venues such as the Voodoo Rooms have now
gone free, making their money from bar revenue; as for the performers,
mostly comedians, the chances of breaking even here, never mind coming
out ahead financially, are so slim that they will do no worse by
passing a hat around at the end of a show than they would with a
box-office split-takings arrangement. And “free” does not mean “work
that folk wouldn’t pay to see”. At the Voodoo Rooms I saw the gifted
actress and comedian Cariad Lloyd offer
Lady Cariad’s Characters.
Lloyd’s character preference is for the offbeat, such as a Welsh
recruiter for a religious cult or a student drafted in as her magician
father’s assistant. She also has a taste for delivering a sombre
paragraph and topping it off with a pitch-black punchline.
The
crowds this year are more geographically concentrated than ever. Apart
from the prestigious Traverse Theatre (whose first tranche of openings
I reviewed on Monday and Tuesday), the Fringe has for a decade or more
been dominated by four main venue “empires”: Assembly, Pleasance,
Underbelly and the Gilded Balloon. For most of that time, three of
these brands have had major presences in and around Edinburgh
University’s buildings in the Bristo Square area. This year, as
Edinburgh City Council begins its controversial work to turn much of
the city’s Georgian Assembly Rooms into a shopping mall, the Assembly
venue concern has moved its base of operations into University premises
in George Square… just behind other multi-venue operations in the
Gilded Balloon, the Pleasance Dome and the Underbelly’s flagship huge
inflatable purple cow-shaped venue (honestly). With several shows
running in each space over the course of a day, I would estimate
conservatively that this makes for some 200 shows each day taking place
within an area roughly the size of London’s Trafalgar Square.
Of
course, that still leaves 2300-odd shows elsewhere around the city. One
venue brand worth investigating is Remarkable Arts, whose main premises
at St George’s West are doing a decent job of filling the gap left by
the withdrawal a few years ago of Wolfgang Hoffman’s Aurora Nova setup.
Hardly surprising, since Hoffman is now on board at Remarkable,
programming a slate of characteristically international, visual and
generally unorthodox work. This includes
White Rabbit, Red Rabbit
by Nassim Soleimanpour; and what could be more international than a
German producer offering a Canadian company’s production of an Iranian
play performed by… Ah, this is the hook: Soleimanpour’s thoughtful
meditation on our responsibility to each other, both as actor/audience
and as fellow citizens and human beings, is performed each day by a
different actor who has had no prior sight of the script before they go
onstage. And speaking of meditations, several sessions of such thought
(or non-thought) form the backbone of
Untitled Love Story,
this year’s presentation from experimental Scottish theatre-maker David
Leddy, also at St George’s West. In between meditations, a quartet of
performers recount separate but converging individual tales set in
Venice in various decades, spiced with allusions to
Krapp’s Last Tape
and other works of Samuel Beckett and staged on, around and sometimes
under a huge, billowing red silk. It is still worth striking out from
the central Fringe campus, whether for artistic reasons or in order to
save quids on ticket prices on the Free Fringe.
Written for the Financial
Times.