Performers spend thousands to get their shows to Edinburgh in a bid for fame, resulting in the biggest arts festival in the world. Deirdre Falvey, Arts Editor, tastes a sample
Occasionally the masks slips. A couple of drunken squaddies in the front row of Canadian comic Craig Campbell's gig had been incoherently interrupting for a while.
Eventually Campbell - amiable, powerfully-built, with long hair and shorts, bounding around the place to inhabit his stories, almost too big for the intimate space - turned to them: "If you don't shut up I'll put you out. This may just be a gig to you, but it's my life and it's costing me thousands of pounds to be here," he said, breaking through the walls of artifice.
They quietened and he continued; it took a few minutes to get back from the explosion, but he managed it, and went on with his amusing routine, mostly about the cultural differences between Canada and the UK. But it pointed up the cost, and the huge gamble, taken by performers at the Edinburgh Fringe. There are several festivals running simultaneously in the Scottish capital during August, when the population of the city doubles; the Fringe is the only one that's almost a free-for-all, a mostly uncurated blitz of 1,850 shows (it would take five years and 53 days to see every performance back-to-back), and where you take pot luck in going to a show.
So the Fringe, the largest and most variable of the festivals in quality, is basically funded by the performers, although it brings in tons of money to the city and its businesses (the Fringe generated £75 million (€110.5m) of the £135m (€200m) that all the Edinburgh festivals brought into the local economy last year). And the reason so many choose to spend many thousands each to hire a venue, produce a show and market it is a drive for fame - the chance that their show will be this year's hit, that they will be snapped up for future stardom - (there are more than 1,000 talent scouts, promoters and producers at the Fringe).
Hence the pressure lurking between the lines at many performances. Craig Campbell was performing at the Pleasance, one of the bigger venues in the Fringe. Along with the Assembly Rooms, the Gilded Balloon, the Traverse theatre, it is a programmed venue rather than a free-for-all. This makes them a better bet for audiences, and for performers, but even so, it still cost Campbell thousands to be there at all.
Hot tickets in Fringe comedy this year included Stewart Lee, whose sell-out show was sweet and intelligent revenge on those who targeted his Jerry Springer the Opera, and Daniel Kitson. A good review is a great boost. On the night that the Guardian had given Wil Hodgson five stars the small room in the Holyrood Tavern was full. His is an intriguing and oddly alluring stage persona - a slightly pudgy skinhead with tattoos, a pink mohican, pink nail varnish and a Care Bear keyring hanging from his belt.
His act, more rapid monologue than standup, relates how he's not a real man and doesn't want to be one, despite flirting with wrestling, skinheads and a sea cadet band in the Wiltshire town of Chippenham. Delicious character.
Although they're multi-accented, the Pajama Men comprises a couple of American guys in pyjamas who describe themselves as the Marx Brothers on speed; slick, surreal and quick-witted, they riff in and out of a range of characters - a woman in love with an alien, a couple of hard-ass cowboys and incoherent teens, in a breakneck complication of physical comedy and cleverness. The characters eventually start to weave in and out of each other's stories. The show is perhaps a bit too long - a regular difficulty with Fringe shows stretched to an hour when 40 minutes would be the optimum.
While lots of shows in Edinburgh this year attempt to deal with war and international politics, a lighter recurring theme is showbiz. Vega$m is a spoof of tasteless Las Vegas entertainment, including nifty mob and Frank Sinatra string puppets. Good enough idea, great attention to costumes, but the whole doesn't gel sufficiently.
Altogether more successful is Nuts Coconuts, part of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF); perhaps more fringey in tone than other EIF shows (among which a stylish Swan Lake is making quite a splash; and DruidSynge starts its festival run on Saturday), this is, however, a big budget musical production.
The story about the Gibraltar Follies' touring troupe is set during the EIF, and their tacky and befeathered variety show is apparently mid-way through when the audience arrives - a change to an earlier start-time hasn't been passed on, for which festival director Brian McMaster is roundly blamed from the stage. The bulk of Nuts Coconuts takes place after the audience has declined to leave and instead watches - and assists - the demolition of the plush set amid the griping, gossiping and bitching of the troupe of has-beens and wash-outs. Directed by Jordi Milan, whose Blinded by Love was a hit at the International festival in 1997, this is slick, great fun, nostalgic and ironic at the same time.
Back at the Fringe, the Traverse shows include Cois Ceim's Chamber Made (which takes place in Room 206 of the Caledonian Hilton Hotel) and Corn Exchange's Dublin by Lamplight, both of which are doing very well. The Traverse theatre flooring must be almost worn out during the Fringe every year. The Edinburgh theatre specialising in new writing has 13 productions running throughout the festival in its two performance spaces, and it manages this by having shows running pretty well back-to-back from 10.30am. Pity the get-in crew. What it means is a substantial amount of quality theatre, usually winning a sprinkling of awards.
One of the Scotsman Fringe First winners at the Traverse is Martin J Taylor's East Coast Chicken Supper, directed by Richard Wilson (the One Foot in the Grave star); set in a cottage in Fife with three friends in their 20s who set up in business together - as unfriendly local drug dealers - and one of whom has just returned after an unexplained absence to his pals, who have become sort of domesticated druggies. The promising script is amusing and snappy, with good interplay between the trio, and hints of menace beneath, though it doesn't ultimately lead anywhere much deeper.
Two of three Spiegeltents in Edinburgh this month are part of the Fringe, at George Square, with several acts every night in the mirrored cabaret tents, and surrounded by a bar tent, tables and unending crowds hanging out. I caught Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen: accomplished and great fun, this Kabaret Noir act including accordion, double bass, fiddle, guitar and the sharp eponymous frontman, was ideal fare for a Spiegeltent.
The third Spiegeltent is part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival - one of the most prestigious of the several co-exisiting festivals. It forms part of the upmarket tent city, a large complex of tents-turned-theatres: signing tents, bookshop tents, loos in tents (well, Portakabins), and outdoor chillout areas, that are the home of the festival in Charlotte Square gardens, and al haven of peace in the middle of the riotous, swirling city. Among all the other big names - from Dario Fo to John Irving to Salman Rushdie, to Michael Cunningham - I went to a talk by critic and literary biographer (Virginia Woolf; Edith Wharton) Hermione Lee. She wore her undoubted learning lightly and this was a smart, amusing and thought-provoking discussion about that writing which hovers between fiction, literature and history. She spoke entertainingly about the aims of biography (answering the question: what was she like?), how to deal with gaps in evidence and secondhand stories, biographers who're jealous of their subject, the perils of diaries as sources, when and if it's okay to write a biography of someone who didn't want one written (complicated: but basically a decent interval after the deaths of their close family). And the most important thing: get anecdotes.
Other quiet moments came at the Nicholas and Alexandra exhibition put together by the Royal Museum and including artefacts and documents relating to the ill-fated family of Russia's last tsar (it doesn't linger on the lurid Rasputin episodes, or the possibility of Anastasia's survival). The exhibition, which includes many loans from the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, apparently won't be seen in this configuration again. The displays include the ornate costumes worn to a masquerade ball in 1903, even as the winds of change were gathering to usher in a new world with violent beginnings.
Over in Dean Gallery, the travelling exhibition of the work of the late Henri Cartier-Bresson (who died last year), as well as a massive collection of his iconic photojournalism, also includes some personal photographs, mementoes, paintings and sketches, offering an insight into the man behind the staggering photographic record of the 20th century and his quest to capture what he called "the decisive moment".
Wah-Wah, the oddly titled directing debut of actor Richard E Grant, opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival. It's an intensely personal story of his coming of age as the only son of an alcoholic diplomat in Swaziland; his parents' split-ups; and his father's relationship with a sassy American.
The film has generated some controversy for playing fast and loose with the facts (Grant altered the date of Swaziland's independence to be able to work in a sequence about sneaking in underage to see A Clockwork Orange), but in fact it doesn't engage deeply with its historic setting, other than in its depiction of colonial rule. What saves it from the question - why write and make a full feature film about one person's admittedly unusual and often horrifying youth - are the excellent performances from Gabriel Byrne, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson and Nicholas Hoult (who played the lad in About a Boy).
Bill Bailey is a cerebral comic, an artist who draws magical connections; he's in one of the hot tickets of the Fringe, The Odd Couple, in which he plays the grumpy untidy Oscar, with Alan Davies as uptight Felix. Despite so-so reviews, you can't get a seat for love nor money (lots of pre-publicity from the team that brought Twelve Angry Men and Cuckoo's Nest to the Fringe in recent years).
Never thought you'd see Bill Bailey talking from the altar? Well, he also cropped up at another Edinburgh festival - that of Spirituality and Peace, talking in a church about reincarnation, the transformative qualities of comedy, his dabbles in philosophy; moments of reflection, and the subversive nature of comedy as a force for change because of the freedom it grants to say things.
Thought-provoking stuff. Far sillier was Tim Vine at the Pleasance, who at the start of his act told the audience: "I don't do jokes about the wooden step in the middle of someone else's field. That's not my stile."
Trad a winner
After garnering five five-star reviews in Fringe coverage, Trad, the Galway Arts Festival production of Mark Doherty's first play, at the Assembly Rooms, yesterday won the the Writers' Guild Award for New Writing. The award was presented by comedian Arthur Smith and playwright Mark Ravenhill, to actor Peter Gowen (who's in Trad) on behalf of Doherty.
Nominees for this year's Perrier comedy award are: Jimmy Carr, Omid Djalili, Noel Fielding, Adam Hills, Daniel Kitson and Phil Nichol. There's not an Irish act among them (although Tommy Tiernan is on the front cover of the Edinburgh's List magazine, Jason Byrne is plastered all over taxis - his image; he's not drunk - and Andrew Maxwell is all over the place in local interviews).The winner is announced on Saturday.
