17 September, 2010

Edinburgh Festival 2010


Edinburgh Festival 2010: The greatest show on legs:
  
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe isn’t just another arts festival, it’s an invaluable part of our national life, argues Dominic Cavendish. 

Keep telling yourself it’s just a festival – it doesn’t matter all that much, really.” Always at this time of year, as I’m preparing to pack my bags to trek north to cover the Edinburgh Fringe for The Daily Telegraph, I’m guaranteed to get that quick word-to-the-wise from friends, family and even colleagues bidding me adieu for the month.

The subtext is clear enough: “For pity’s sake, don’t get too caught up in that round-the-clock show-guzzling, booze-swilling frenzy and end up gibbering in a gutter.” I always duly thank everyone for their advice while saying to myself: “They don’t get it, poor things.” 

To bracket the Fringe as “just” another festival is like saying 1066 had its moments. The Fringe is a visceral roller-coaster ride that can take a whole 11 months to recover from. If you go up for the duration and don’t end up wandering the streets at 2am, in an inebriated or sleep-deprived state, accosting strangers with the news that you’ve just seen the future of theatre in a converted phone-box, then you probably need your head examining. 


Since its inception in 1947, when eight theatre companies showed up uninvited to perform during the inaugural Edinburgh International Festival, the Fringe has grown to become one of the wonders of the Western world. An unwieldy monster of a wonder, to be sure: in this, the 64th year, there are more shows than ever (2,453) featuring in excess of 21,000 performers – more than twice the number of British troops serving in Afghanistan. 

It’s easy to sneer that the Athens of the North is being besieged by a barmy army of grubby student hopefuls, naive nobodies, pretentious luvvies and fame-hungry comedians, most of whom will return home with whopping hangovers and credit-card bills to match. 

I can understand why, for those who’ve never been or are giving it a miss, the slavering media coverage that attends this three-week mid-hols jamboree can appear at once irritating and irrelevant. I can also see why, to those with a macroeconomic cast of mind, the hive of arty activity that overtakes every nook and cranny of the city might well resemble a monument to unsustainable vanity: a debt-fuelled bubble that epitomises the age. 

And yet, consider this: unless you have an aversion to the performing arts in all their forms, the chances are you will have been entertained very recently by someone who earned their spurs at Edinburgh. Only a few years ago, the likes of John Bishop, Russell Brand, Alan Carr and Michael McIntyre could be found sweating their guts out in stuffy, cramped black-box spaces there. The ubiquitous Mitchell and Webb are products, too, of Auld Reekie’s annual school of hard knocks. You like Al Murray, “The Pub Landlord”? He’s back this year, partly in honour of the fact that the Fringe was the making of him. 

To those who adore those national treasures Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, I say: remember they won the first Perrier Comedy Award from the Fringe in 1981. And those who’ve flocked to see Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art shouldn’t forget it all began for him here, too, with Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe (first seen in 1959) – a watershed moment for British satire that helped usher in the subversive Sixties. 

I could go on, and on. It’s true that in terms of the discovery of major playwrights, there’s been nothing quite to match the phenomenal success of Tom Stoppard, whose Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) swept from a rough-and-ready hall on the Royal Mile straight to the Old Vic. But every year, really, whether it’s at one of the major venues – the Traverse, Assembly Rooms or Pleasance – or in more off-piste locales, something is bound to show up that’s not only destined for a longer life but also catches the imagination and causes a wider stir. 

A few years ago it was the National Theatre of Scotland’s acclaimed Black Watch. Last year it was Bob Golding’s tour de force tribute to Eric Morecambe. This year, who knows? But I’ll be keeping a close eye on Forest Fringe, a newish venue which, harking back to the Fringe’s more affordable, experimental days, is operating on a pay-what-you-can basis and fostering an anything-goes attitude among its resident artists. Here it’s quite possible you’ll get the first glimpse of the next War Horse trotting into being. 

In cold, clear, sober terms of national self-interest, then, we shouldn’t look upon the Fringe as a riotous extravagance but as something we could ill afford to do without. The cost to the public purse in terms of subsidy is minimal, the dividends handsome – both in terms of the boost to the Scottish economy (an estimated £75 million) and Britain’s overall take from the earnings of those who go on to achieve success. And yet what really counts for me – and why I urge anyone who’s ever despaired at our country’s future to pay it a visit – are all the benefits that can’t quite be measured. 

This year, I’ve landed the privilege of chairing the judging panel that decides the Edinburgh Comedy Awards (formerly the Perrier). I wish I could tell you right now what this year’s stand-up trends are, or who’s likely to make it big, but the plain answer is I don’t know. Until as late as the final Wednesday, when the shortlist is announced, it’s always a box of surprises. Last year, when Tim Key won the gong for his killingly funny line in deadpan poetry The Slutcracker, it looked as if cabaret, already seen at the festival with the hit burlesque show La Clique, was creeping back into stand-up. 

And yet, who can say? Maybe this year the award will go to a retired milkman from Aberystwyth. One of the wonderful things about the Fringe is that it’s so remarkably non-ageist. As much as it’s a hormonally charged initiation ceremony for the young it’s also a cross-generational get-together. I love the fact that people are getting excited about 19-year-old comedian Daniel Sloss but also that others are rushing to book to see Henry Blofeld, “the voice of cricket and Test Match Special”, who’s appearing alongside The Antiques Roadshow’s John Bly. Around them swirl countless acts who may be brilliant or hopeless, may get noticed or utterly ignored, but all of whom are united by a strange, foolish, admirable desire to entertain complete strangers. 

After 10 years of covering the Edinburgh Fringe for this paper, I’ve learnt to admit defeat before I arrive: the world’s biggest arts festival is beyond easy categorisation or even any reliable form of comprehensive coverage. It’s as rich and complex, as peculiar and miraculous, as life itself. Like a gruelling marathon it leaves some hobbling, some clutching medals, others finding muscles they never knew they had. 

Put bluntly, nothing like it happens anywhere else. Every year stay-at-home critics queue up to write it off, but the chances of it dying out any time soon, are, I’d wager, non-existent. Just a festival? No, an invaluable pillar of our national life, more like.   

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