'The Blackpool of the arts' or the possessor of the true Fringe spirit? Brian Boyd reports from Edinburgh, where the festival is about to shed its name
The Fringe is finished. What began as a tiny affair in 1947 and grew to be the biggest and best arts festival in the world is coming to a close this year. About time too.
It's only a nominal end though. The Fringe Festival is simply looking to change its name. The consensus is that, with over one million tickets sold last year and even bigger numbers expected this year, the term "fringe" - "a marginal, peripheral or secondary part" - has become obsolete if not a vestigial embarrassment to all concerned.
When the Edinburgh International Festival débuted as a post-second World War culturefest with a mission statement of "promoting peace, unity and harmony between people of different countries after the ravages in Europe", some uninvited theatre groups turned up in the city but were unable to be accommodated on the official programme. Staging their shows regardless, these drama groups were described by a local journalist as "being around the fringe of the official festival". The Fringe went on to dwarf the "high art" oriented International Festival and now, with 1,695 shows in 236 venues, it generates most of the headlines, attracts the biggest names and generates formidable box-office activity.
The plan is that next year the Fringe will simply be known as "The Edinburgh Festival" - a triumphal acknowledgement of its dominance. It's an idea whose time has come, particularly because this year there was a "Fringe of the Fringe" and it's all starting to get very complicated, especially for the arts fashion obsessed hordes who descend every August.
The original Fringe is now dominated by the big three venues (Assembly Rooms, Pleasance, Gilded Balloon), boasts star names, big contracts and West End deals. This year a number of smaller venues proclaimed themselves the true possessors of the original Fringe spirit (dingy venues, experimental work, nudity, "is this art?"-style controversy, etc.) and succeeded in attracting some big names - Perrier comedy awards winners past Jenny Éclair and Daniel Kitson among them - to their venues as a form of symbolic protest against the main Fringe.
"It's become the Blackpool of the arts," says Richard Demarco of the city's Traverse Theatre, referring to the main Fringe. "It has lost its dignity, and its reasons for existing. There are ever-increasing amounts of crass entertainment." More Channel 5 than Channel 4, then.
This arts/populism argument has now become an annual sideshow in itself. First it was that the Fringe had turned into a "stand-up comedy" festival, but to this day stand-up accounts for only 23 per cent of activity on the Fringe. It was just that the Perrier PR people did (and continue to do) their job very well. And threw bloody good parties with lashings of free champagne to boot.
Then there was the argument that shows such as Puppetry of the Penis - in which two men twisted their penises and testicles around to make funny shapes of buildings and people (a sort of genital origami) - were more end-of-pier than arts festival. Similarly, are The Lady Boys of Bangkok a cultural happening or just a bunch of transvestites singing karaoke songs? And shouldn't we really be at the post-structuralist Chekhov interpretation instead? Either way, Puppetry of the Penis and The Lady Boys stuff their venues to the rafters year after year while the average audience for a Fringe show remains at 11 people.
Fringe conservatives could have stocked up on new ammunition if they had happened to pass by the Assembly Rooms any night to find an audience standing on the street waving photocopied images of penises as they shouted lewd but funny encouragement to the star of the show on his "shag quest". In his show, Sex Addict, actor Tim Fountain trawls a gay web chat site and gets the audience to select a one-night stand for him.
There is a bit more to the show than this - digressions about sexuality and so on - but essentially the task is to select a suitable "date". The next day's show sees Fountain telling all about last night's "shag".
Fountain obviously thought he could get a month out of this - night in and night out - but after only a few days, the web chat site's owners cancelled his membership, saying that the actor did not have permission to use photographs and content from their site in his show. A trooper though, Fountain is now asking people at his show to vote for which member of the audience they think he should sleep with. The true spirit of the Fringe or a pathetic publicity stunt? You decide.
A good talking point here is that for a festival that has set out to court controversy over the years, isn't it a bit rich to condemn Fountain's show simply because he has upped the ante a bit?
Elsewhere it was all "amateur hour" this year. The Fringe is coming down with confessional/autobiographical shows by non-actors/performers who feel they have something to bring to the already buckling Fringe table. These "me, me, me" shows were inspired by the runaway success of Janet Street-Porter's show last year, All The Rage, in which she spoke wittily and intelligently about her life in media land.
The multi-millionaire founder of the Yo! Sushi food chain, Simon Woodroffe, turned his after-dinner speech into a Fringe show by mixing music and a motivational business talk - the music, incidentally, was provided by Ian Dury's backing band, The Blockheads. Interesting, but only up to a point. There was, however, a lot more to Mark Borkowski's show, Son Of Barnum: A Stunt Too Far. As a real-life publicist of some renown, Borkowski looks at the tradition of great publicity coups in history and outlines how he dreamt up his own more outlandish efforts.
"There's a whole generation of people who don't know anything about these groundbreaking figures in publicity who were years before their time," says Borkowski of his show. "I'm putting these people on record and showing where today's publicists get their tricks from." A true master of his dark art, Son Of Barnum is both interesting and instructive in a "how to get column inches" way. Perhaps Tim Fountain benefitted from his advice.
There was more "let's talk about me" from Colin Hay, who used to be the singer with the popular Australian band, Men At Work. "When the band got dropped in 1991," says Hay, "I just started playing solo acoustic shows and in between the songs used to tell jokes and stories about my time with the band. What's different about me is that when a story isn't working, I just burst into song - the opposite of Billy Connolly who told jokes when the songs weren't working." The show, which details his life in the music industry, doubles (perhaps inadvertently) as a cautionary tale to anyone considering a career in popular music.
On the stand-up front, Dubliner David O'Doherty is making a huge impression with his lo-fi, surrealist monologues. Already being tipped as a Perrier nominee, O'Doherty is keenly aware of how the Fringe has split this year.
"Luckily I'm getting full houses every night," he says, "but I'm playing in a 70-seater room and last night Ricky Gervais was on in a venue that held 3,000 people. I calculated that even if I sell out every night for the whole month, I can still only get, at most, half the audience he had for one sole night. It can make you wonder as to what the Fringe is about - who is it catering for?"
There's a strong Irish flavour to this year's smash hit show - a new production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - with comics Owen O'Neill, Ian Coppinger and Brendan Dempsey all featuring. The show's lead, Christian Slater, came down with chickenpox just as it was due to open, with the result that no press have been allowed in to see it yet, as ticket holders from the first few postponed nights are being given priority.
With all the different categories of shows this year, and all the debates about cultural merit, one small, unassumingshow has smashed through all the preconceptions and blather to arrive as a good old-fashioned Fringe out-of-nowhere discovery.
Dirty Fan Male is rooted in real-life experience - if your real life consists of pretending to be a glamour model replying to fan mail from your drooling admirers, that is. The story began when Jonathan Brenton-Hughes's sister decided to become a pin-up star. Proving very popular, she appeared in many soft porn magazines and developed a devoted following. Unable to cope with all the fan mail sent to her, she asked her brother to manage her career. Part of the brother's job was to reply to the letters in the guise of his sister. Brenton-Hughes did the job so well, his sister's glamour model colleagues began to engage his services.
Intrigued by the nature of the correspondence, Brenton-Hughes held on to some of the letters - "They read like nothing I had ever read before in my life" - and a few years ago showed them to a friend, known only as Wisbey, who convinced him there was an Edinburgh show in the material.
With the help of a theatre director, Brenton-Hughes and Wisbey have dramatised the true-life tale and produced a splendidly odd and poignant piece of work which features the two of them reading aloud from and talking about the letters. The intimate details of the letters provide a fascinating insight into how these fan mail writers related to the glamour models. Particularly enthralling were the letters by the regular besotted writers, such as one man who signed himself "Spunky Arthur" and whose imaginative powers may not have been the best but who sure knew how to convey his "admiration".
Such is the weird, potent power of this show that you feel strangely disappointed when you learn at the end that the Internet has made these types of fan letters a thing of the past. But, given the direction the Fringe has been going in, don't bet against the arrival of a new show next year - Spunky Arthur: My Life As A Glamour Model Fan Mail Writer.
