In any other city, circumstance or context, this would be scandalous. A former Tory MP sports a gold codpiece, purple suspenders, black fishnet stockings and a wide schoolboy grin. But during the 56th Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Gyles Brandreth's, Zipp, a performance of 100 musicals in 90 minutes, seems rather tame. As theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe becomes more and more outrageous, it gets more and more difficult to feel outraged, writes Peter Crawley
This year, the biggest arts festival in the world just got bigger. Created in 1947 to help reunite post-war Europe through culture, the International Festival then hosted only eight fringe companies. Now, the Fringe accommodates 15,000 performers, 2,000 journalists, 500 talent scouts, Lord knows how many real people, and is expected to earn the city between £45 and £50 million sterling. During the festival, Edinburgh's population doubles, promotional flyers gust through the rickety streets and everyone becomes an attention-seeker. By the time the four-week event concludes, there will have been 20,342 performances, spanning every existing genre and several new ones: theatre, dance, comedy, comic-dance-theatre, surreal-physical-stunt-theatre, micro-musicals, trailer-trash opera and, of course, genital origami. At the Fringe, it's easy to be outrageous, but harder to be outraged.
As attention spans shrink to hour-long performance slots and reviews to mere star ratings, reverence is dispensed with, taboos exist only to be exploded and oddity becomes the norm. In an atmosphere of such gleeful iconoclasm you are more likely to see Shakespeare enacted by rappers (The Bomb-ity of Errors) or portrayed by miniature figurines (Tiny Ninja Theatre presents Macbeth). In the inspired Jerry Springer: The Opera, the highest and lowest forms of culture fuse seamlessly together while Matthew Arnold presumably spins in his grave. Here, the show ain't over when the fat lady sings; it only begins when she strips and starts pole-dancing. "Dip me in chocolate," trills the soprano, "and throw me to the lesbians." Indeed.
One can understand the desire among both performers and newspapers to stand out from their competitors - and controversy serves them both. But birthed through the pages of the broadsheets, many such scandals are stillborn. Desperate for some early hullabaloo, newspapers reported on Edinburgh's self-avowed "controversialist", Anthony Neilson, whose new play, Stitching, deals with twisted sexual practices and distressing pornography, while making mention of both the Moors Murders and Auschwitz in the context of sexual fantasy. Following broadly positive reviews, however, only the play's queue now seems truly daunting.
It is difficult to sustain a storm in the eye of a maelstrom. Even the diligent Scottish Bible Society either loses interest in praying for the souls of Stitching's audience or is scared away by Edinburgh's real scandal: the weather. The Royal Mile slopes down from the beautiful Edinburgh Castle to the Holyrood House palace. When it rains, the oldest road in the wettest city in Britain washes away all but the most resilient tourists and street theatre performers. With the cobbles struggling to stay above water, the title of theatre company Paines Plough's new production, The Drowned World, assumes a weary relevance.
Awarded a coveted Fringe First by the Scotsman newspaper, Gary Owen's play envisions a future divided between "citizens" and "radiants" (ugly people and striking lovelies). It is, however, the uglies who rule the world and the gorgeous who are envied, abhorred and subjected to gruesome deaths at the hands of "ministry" goon squads. Paines Plough is committed to new writing, as is the marvellous Traverse Theatre, and Owen's play is more focused on its manner of communication than its content. As two ministry drones with "oozing skin and ruined teeth" covet two radiant refugees, Owen's monologues mesh with transitory dialogue, and inter-penetrating speeches weave in and out of different tenses while action and articulation are deliberately contradictory. At times, Owen seems to be satirising a beauty-obsessed culture (because you're worth it), but Vicky Featherstone's casting adds racial, cultural and economic undertones to a curious and absorbing work.
Another Fringe First winner, also at the Traverse, is David Greig's Outlying Islands, which charts the expedition, in 1939, of two Cambridge ornithologists to a remote Scottish island at the behest of the "ministry" (that thing again!). While the globe hovers on the cusp of the second World War, the governing metaphor of Greig's superior successor to last year's Casanova is that of its title.
The island is an undiscovered sanctuary, capable either of descending into dark chaos (à la William Golding's Lord of the Flies) or of cultivating a new Eden, but with a love triangle in the garden. Greig's use of anthrax plot twists, the moral quandaries of science and stark war metaphors is stunning, projecting future concerns upon a sepia-hued past. The second act is basted with symbolism, but Philip Howard's sumptuous production and his cast's moving portrayals make the play a detached beauty.
Amid such author-centred offerings, a show that parodies theatre's most renowned authoritarian is as perfectly placed as it is ingenious. It is worth remembering that in 1953, following Waiting For Godot's stunning European success, Beckett's masterpiece was marketed in New York as "the laughter sensation of two continents". Nearly 50 years after that spectacular failure, a New York company seems to understand the humour of Beckett better than anyone.
The line between Theatre of the Absurd and ridiculous theatre is sublimely smudged by The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett as Found in an Envelope (Partially Burned) in a Dustbin in Paris Labelled "Never to be Performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I'll Sue! I'LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!!!". Interrupting such retrieved gems as Beckett's first play, Happy Happy Bunny Visits Sad Sad Owl (tracing the six-year-old author's nascent existentialism through the musings of stuffed toys), legal missives hurtle in from the fictitious law firm of Puncher, Wattmann, Testew and Cunard (a neat in-joke). Liberal references, tortuous repetition, academic reverence and the tense power struggle between actor and director all combine to provoke spastic responses, tear-streaming recognition and a laughter sensation of near-incontinence.
Beckett favoured the one-man show (or at least the one-mouth show) and, on the Edinburgh Fringe, where resources, time and purse-strings are all equally tight, the economic form reigns supreme, with words paramount. The formula can be reduced thus: one man, a chair and one accessory (optional).
The Gallant John Joe, for instance, incorporates an antique clothes-wringer; Goering's Defence, a bucket; Kiss of Life, a translucent box; A Slight Tilt to the Left, a gravestone. Multiple role-play is common, and recorded voices are a current trend. There is rarely any set to speak of, and all facets of drama are streamlined to the performer and the text. In essence, these are hardly different from the essentials of the Edinburgh Fringe's main attraction, stand-up comedy (minus the chair, of course).
The Gallant John Joe is elevated by Tom Hickey's energy, intuition and vibrancy of communication. Tested by the expressive hurdles of Tom MacIntyre's devising, the performer enjoys a rare creative equilibrium with the writer in a tale of shifting racial, medical and emotional landscapes.
MEANWHILE, US actor Wayne Carr derives his Tupac Shakur study (and its title), I Wonder If Heaven Gotta Ghetto, from the murdered rapper's back catalogue and infuses it with empathetic rage and sober interpretation.
Irish comic Owen O'Neill's new show, My Son the Footballer, however, leaves uncertain sutures between theatre, comedy and even film. Darting between well-judged accents during his multiple roles, O'Neill fashions something between fantasy and autobiography, a psychodrama with the flexibility of a stand-up routine. While certainly entertaining, the play's "alternative" multi-media ending sacrifices the themes of destructive obsession and vicarious control in favour of an unintentionally smug resolution.
Another conspicuous trend this year has been a preponderance of September 11th- inspired performances. Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon will perform Anne Nelson's The Guys this week (its three-date performance having sold out in half an hour). What began as brave engagement, however, has elsewhere turned to selfish introspection.
"As an artist, I felt a great need to respond to the senseless tragedy," say the director's self-justifying notes to the New York Theater School's group-devised Project 9/11: Portraits in Shock.
Distinguished only by the superficiality of its responses - "I bet that guy over there would bum me a cigarette," goes one of many inner monologue testimonies, "I mean, we're all in this together" - its workshop style holds little interest for an outside audience.
Jumpers, the product of recent Connecticut theatre graduates, extrapolates the US's current military action into a re-introduction of the draft. But the awkward plot fails to conceal the self-regarding nature of its writing. A troubled insomniac has problems with his girlfriend, joins the army - "a whole family of people who can't sleep" - and wincingly tells us: "I stood there and watched two things so permanent in my life crumble and fall."
Such earnest solipsism and conveyor-belt catharsis is alleviated by the wonderful Tina C's Trade Towers Tribute. Tina (rhymes with "henna") is one of British comic Chris Green's alter-egos, pursuing a "world tour/global peace mission" to promote the album, 9/11:24/7, which, she claims, is about "grieving, mass- destruction, America - but most of all, it's about me". Interspersed with the satirical tastelessness of such country-lite ballads as Kleenex to the World ("I bet you can't imagine the pathos of loss/So I wrote this song to ram the point across"), Tina's faux-naivety allows for some good insights.
"A 'smart bomb' is one that we have," she contentedly reminds herself. "A 'dirty bomb' is one that they have". The real success of country singer Toby Keith (whose simultaneous US chart-topper trumpets: "We'll put a boot up your ass/It's the American way") makes such comedy all the more startling.
But the Edinburgh Fringe has no time to be taken aback, raging on ferociously. Deliriously eclectic, wonderfully bizarre, occasionally moving and always different, it is a pick 'n' mix of performances, capable of yielding delicious morsels or sour surprises. All that is missing is any sense of perspective - with everything so offbeat, it is hard to find the beat.
Brian Boyd's Edinburgh Fringe comedy diary appears on Friday Did You Used to Be R.D. Laing? Ex-rock star Mike Maran's one-man performance is based on the case histories of the controversial Scottish psychiatrist. Intelligent, entrancing and deeply moving. Valvona and Crolla until August 24th.
The Frog Prince. David Mamet reworks the fairytale, disseminating his socio-political worldview to kiddies. Cleverly directed, sweetly performed. Assembly Rooms, until August 26th.
Diarmuid and Gráinne. Passion Machine's Fringe production par excellence, updating the myth with inspired stagecraft and playful energy. Assembly Rooms until August 17th.
Dead Landlord. Surreal clowning, mock warfare and giddy musicianship. Gilded Balloon Teviot until August 26th.
Bounce. Its sanitised hip-hop, homogenised break-dancing and collection of youthful talent resemble a Gap advertisement come to life. A Fringe family favourite. Assembly Rooms until August 26th.
Website: edfringe.com
