Edinburgh (1)

Beyond and after the fringe

Miles Kington

There was a German student sitting next to me on the train, also travelling up to the Edinburgh Festival. Round about Grantham she asked me, 'But was ist der Fringe?' By the time we had reached Newcastle I had given her a rough idea. She didn't really seem to understand and dug out her dictionary in which to look up the German for 'fringe'. That didn't seem to help her much either.

Well, what is the Fringe? The only thing You can say with certainty about it is that it is unique—no other festival in the world has anything remotely like it. (Alistair Moffat, the full-time director, has been invited by several continental festivals to explain to them how to set up their own fringe.)What it isn't, contrary to myth, is a nursery garden of genius to come; once you have said Beyond the Fringe, Tom Stoppard and just possibly Hinge and Bracket, you have exhausted the list of modern figures made famous by Edinburgh. Nor is it a Proliferating tailpiece to the official Festival, because it has quite separate organisation, ethos and geography. It may not earn as much as the official Festival, but it is reckoned to attract more paying spectators. It is, in fact, virtually an independent festival of its own, an egalitarian, free-wheeling, co-operative version of the traditional, somewhat hidebound Festival proper. And there's the paradox: establishment though the Festival may be, it is heavily statesupported (half a million in subsidies out of a budget of £.650,000), while the Fringe lets everyone take his own risk of profit or loss in what is really a series of highly capitalist enterprises. (The Fringe Society itself has a budget of £.16,000 and always Makes a profit.) That's the view from a distance, at least. From the inside—and I've been performing In.a Fringe group for the first two weeks this year—you can't see far beyond the compressed lifetime which a season on the Fringe comprises, right from the first Sunday when the groups meet the press and Cajole them into reviewing their show, through the first nail-biting performances and desperately awaited notices, to the Moment when it becomes clear that you have on your hands a smash, a disaster or "Ply a fifty-fifty chance of clearing expenses.

The first pace-setter to con-le along the '4'0rd-of-mouth grapevine, in operation late every night in the beery convivial Fringe kilub, was undoubtedly the brilliantly titled arndale Avenue Housing Estate/Townsdens Guild Dramatic Society's Pro tictIon of 'Macbeth', which was more talked about than the rival Festival version

by Verdi. Not a real women's guild, of course, but an inspired presentation of an amateur production in which everything that could go wrong did. (For the first ten minutes the scenery is built back to front, so that the witches can be dimly seen performing to the br.ckcloth, while all we can hear is the backstage gossiping and bitching. Then Lady Macbeth fails to show up and is played at short notice by Henry, a stage-hand, resulting in a female Macbeth with a male wife. . .) Somehow, though, the play peaked too soon; looked at severely it seemed a great idea only adequately done, with too many echoes of Hinge and Bracket not to mention Edna Everage, and by the end of the first week it had begun to look overpraised.

Coming up fast on the outside were two shows at the same theatre. Tea with Dick and Jerry is a fast knockabout hour put on by Presidents Nixon and Ford, or at least by two Americans looking extraordinarily like them. Some superb moments, as when Nixon perfects his short resignation speech and an aide objects: 'But sir, you don't mention your resignation anywhere. You'll have to put that in.' 'What ! And ruin a perfect speech ?'

'Well, why don't you just tag it on the end, then ?'

'Oh sure, that'd be great. "Good night, fellow Americans. God bless you all. And by the way, I'm resigning".'

But for my money, Chris Langham's One Man Show was the hit, the kind of show of which you say, not 'I'm glad I saw that', but 'I wouldn't have missed that for the world.' He is a superb actor and writer, and has enough confidence as both to use in ten seconds ideas that others would build into five minute sketches. Or productions of Macbeth. It's unfair to quote anything, but one line which he had dropped by the second time I saw him gives a faint idea of the flavour. 'It's mostly quite fun being a one man show. The cast party, though Then lo and behold, these two were being taken for granted and great things were being heard about the Belton School's production (in a Young Vic spin-off) of The Ballad of Salomon Pavey and a show called The Show Must Go On by Andrew Dallmeyer with—yet again—Chris Langham, and the Parisian Mime Arnie! and a group called Shared Experience and Billy Connolly's play And Me WI A Bad Leg Tae (a quite good play beautifully acted) and so on and so on ...

Because the trouble is there's just too damn much. Although Edinburgh has a plague of church halls, there still aren't enough centrally for everyone and a remote venue is almost certainly the kiss of death unless there is some local connection. There was a one man show by Peter Kelly on Harry Lauder way down at Leith Theatre, said to be very good. Houses were so bad it closed after a week. Lol Coxhill, a superb saxophonist in duo with guitarist G. F. Fitz gerald, was getting thirty people on a good night in the Easter Road. Conversely, some fairly mediocre shows get full houses simply through being in the Royal Mile, while the name of Oxford or Cambridge still earns good crowds quite automatically. Apart from that, nobody still knows quite why some shows take off and others don't.

'One show, with good crits and a Scotsman award, came to me saying they had poor houses and were running short of money,' says Moffat. 'I told him the forty things he had to do to get publicity, judging from my own experience, and he went away and did them all.' Sigh. •Didn't work, though.' Nothing is ever certain. Our own

group, Instant Sunshine, thought we had a

dead cert review in a national paper. Last year their star reviewer came to see us on the last night of the Festival—not reviewing, just having a night off. 'Liked the show, lads,' he said. 'Next time I get a chance definitely do you.' So we sent him a ticket this year and leant back, waiting for the piece. His wife came to see the show. By herself.

Still, we've all had a good time and even made a profit. We've shared the strange sort of cameraderie enjoyed even by those who are struggling for audiences. We've seen more good shows in a fortnight than we see in London in a year, and the citizens of Edinburgh, kept at home by the sick pound, have had a bonanza show-going time.

Despite which we don't think we'll come back next year, as we probably won't have caught up on lost sleep by then. Come to think, though, we said we weren't going to come back this year. •