Edinburgh round-up: stab two

Walking through the Assembly Rooms foyer just now it struck me that there are absolutely no original playscripts for sale here this year (the script of the verbatim World War One drama Forgotten Voices is, however, available). For a venue that used to be regarded as one of the more prestigious of the Big Five (Pleasance, Underbelly, Traverse, Gilded Balloon and Assembly) this seems incredible. In the past, the Assembly Rooms has hosted tours of Shopping and Fucking, Disco Pigs, etc. and seen the premieres of plays by Liz Lochhead and etc.

This year it is hard to think which of the shows housed here actually demand publication. Perhaps, in retrospect, the sell-out success of Scarborough will prompt a London transfer – but with its deliberately fringe-friendly standing audience configuration, it is difficult to imagine the venue that will want to stick its neck out. Soho studio, perhaps? Trafalgar Studios Two?

The same scriptlessness is true across other venues (with the obvious exception of the largely published output of the Traverse). Following past Fringes, plays like Peter Morris’s Age of Consent and Guardians, or Adriano Shaplin’s entire oeuvre have been transferred and subsequently published. It is hard to imagine what might receive the same treatment this year*. I would love to read Melanie Wilson’s Simple Girl, and also Hippo World Guest Book. Similarly, I think La Femme est La Morte might profitably unleash an enjoyable rash of student productions if it were published – although given the vast amount of copyright material within the show, which is in part effectively jukebox musical, I foresee problems. But, depressingly, I can’t imagine any publishing house touching them in a month of Sundays.

Overall, this feels like a Fringe during which the written word has been utterly steamrollered by the devised and the performance-based. So many shows, even if written in part, seem to take much of their life from the specific performers involved. Roles have not so much been allocated and assumed as created from scratch. I’m not complaining, or even sounding the alarm just yet – one year’s worth of successes on the Fringe certainly doesn’t represent anything like a trend, but I do find it interesting. Not least because if the Fringe represents artists doing what they most want to be doing, then the way that most theatres are currently run seems to amount to a vast obstruction to this material.

The pervasive management model of a literary department and the requirement of an extant script prior to rehearsal would disallow many of this Fringe’s greatest successes from inclusion. In one respect this is why the Fringe is so valuable – it allows artists to stage the work and potentially achieve entry into theatres without having to submit non-existent scripts or draft exactingly detailed proposals. They can simply do their thing, prove that it has an audience, and wait for the offers of a transfer to roll in. That’s the theory, at any rate. But then a new problem arises: given the way that London theatres have chosen to brand themselves, there don’t seem to be many plausible spaces for these deserving shows to go. There’s the Lyric Studio, The BAC, The Shunt Vaults, possibly the Arcola, and God help us, the Soho, but off the top of my head, those are about the only places in London that I can imagine seeing any of the innovative, non-literary work which I’ve been enjoying on the Fringe. And there are problems with each – the Lyric, and Arcola are already programmed well in advance. The BAC has an almost pathological aversion to a decent length run and the Soho already has a problem with its image as a scattergun receiving house with nothing even faintly resembling an artistic policy.

Okay, there are all the non-producing, non-artistically directed Fringe theatres, but these generally have such appalling hit-and-miss reputations that audiences tend to stay away in droves. Come on. When did someone last go to the Oval House, White Bear, Etcetera or CPT with the same confidence that they go to the National, Royal Court or Almeida, without a friend being involved? Sure, I’ve seen some astonishing work in some of the spaces on the former list and some utterly abysmal work in the latter, but at least with the latter one has a sense that there is some guiding intelligence behind the work rather than an ongoing desperate struggle to pay their rent by filling the space with any company prepared to stump up the exorbitant weekly-rental charges.

So, what to do? The Fringe is dominated by a sort of a work that while prevalent and wonderful for a month in Scotland, seems largely unable to find anything like the same homes in London. A show can sell out Edinburgh for a month, but totally fail to even reach London (or anywhere else) or to make an impression once it has finally snuck in. Perhaps it is something about the rare atmosphere of the Fringe. For one month, people put their prejudices on hold, shelve their preconceptions and simply go to work hoping to be amazed. Do audiences in London behave in the same way? Perhaps it also has something to do with the almost tapas-like way in which theatre is consumed during the Fringe – shows are never even one’s sole daily, let alone weekly or fortnightly theatrical fix – they are one piece of a multiple-show puzzle. So the hour-or-under format rises to the fore. What might feel unforgivably brief in London seems mercifully compact in Edinburgh. Audiences want a brief intense hit, not a feature-length thought-provoker. Attempts to recreate the heady Edinburgh atmosphere in London would ultimately lead to the collapse of all concerned. The Fringe can only be intense because it has parameters, if it was as long as everyday life, it would be approached as sensibly.

I guess the obvious, if boring, answer is that since the Fringe cannot be recreated, we should simply give thanks for its existence, enjoy it when it arrives, and then go back to normal life. However, there are clearly lessons regarding alternative modes of creating work aside from the single-playwright method which need to be learned by producing houses across the country if they are to capitalise on some of today’s brightest young talents.

*Yes, SilverTongue Theatre’s Man Across the Way at the Underbelly is also published, but as a consequence of its pre-arranged post-Edinburgh transfer to Theatre 503, whose chief script reader Will Hammond also works for Oberon.

Edinburgh Hit List

Yesterday I had the surreal experience of being a guest on Matthew Wright’s "Weekender" Show, which goes out tonight at ten on Radio 2. I am talking about Merchant of Venice and Othello at the Globe, Playing God at the Soho and offering an Edinburgh must-see round-up.

To this end, I was finally forced to knock together a (necessarily brutally short) Edinburgh "hit list". What I got an opportunity to mention in the recording was sadly far briefer even than this short list, and I haven’t got the faintest idea at the moment how much of that will get transmitted.

Anyway, here is the full text of my Edinburgh picks (written slightly with a mind to pseudo Radio 2-ese):

One of the most exciting things at the International Festival this year is the chance to see the legendary New York performance artists The Wooster Group in a piece called La Didone - this has the most amazing premise - based on the story of Dido and Aeneas, taken from Gian Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone, a baroque opera written in 1641, this version combines that with Mario Bava’s 1965 sci-fi horror Planet of the Vampires. It is billed as "a 21st century retelling of an ancient Greek myth with opera singers in leather spacesuits battling zombies on a distant planet." Brilliant.

Also from the International Festival is The Bacchae - directed by John Tiffany who had the hit of last year’s Fringe with Black Watch in new translation by the Scottish playwright David Grieg. Grieg has a reputation for being one of the most prolific writers working at the moment. This is borne out by the fact that this year the Traverse is producing the premiere of his new play, Damascus, while TAG’s production of his play Yellow Moon, which has been touring Scotland, is also doing a spell at the Traverse.

It’s also a classic year for writers: Tim Crouch - England; Enda Walsh - Walworth Farce; and Rona Monroe - Long Time Dead, all must-see writers, all on at the Traverse. Meanwhile, the never-less-than-indispensible Mark Ravenhill is doing something called Ravenhill for Breakfast - 17 world premieres in 17 days; short 15 to 20 minute plays about “right now” with titles taken from famous films and songs. These are subsequently going to be mashed into a single play, an early draft of which will be seen briefly at the Hampstead in the autumn.

One of the most exciting theatre makers working in Britain today is Chris Goode. He has two shows up at the festival: there’s revival of his brilliant piece Longwave (19th Underbelly Pasture) - the hour long wordless piece about two scientists in a shed - as part of the British Council Showcase, and a new one-man show called Hippo World Guest Book.

Also well worth checking out is Stoopud Fucken Animals by Joel Horwood - Traverse 3 (drill hall) - a new ‘play with songs’ about life in the flatlands which promises to use “live music, thick dialects and pitch black comedy” to drive the myths of British farming into the wall of the modern economy.

Unlimited Theatre have their play about astrophysics and morality The Ethics of Progress at the Underbelly. Following on from Unlimited, founder member Chris Thorpe also appears in Third Angel’s Presumption, a play in which the characters build the set around themselves in a dry, witty look at modern relationships after the magic dies. This is on at Theatre Workshop, starting on Monday 20 and playing for five days at 11.45 in the morning.

In the innovative uses of space camp, Gemma Brockis and Silvia Mercuriali are doing a version of Pinocchio - A performance-based installation for an audience of 3 set in car driving through the city (Aurora Nova based - 18 - 25 Aug 2007). Also at the Aurora Nova is Rotozaza’s Etiquette - a piece for two in which both participants listen to instructions on a headset and effectively make the show for one another. Meanwhile at the Underbelly, new comedy company The Umbrella Birds (featuring the brilliant actresses Kate Donmal and Emily Watson-Howes) are doing a show called WC in the toilets at the Udderbelly Pasture (I think, check) to an audience of eight with blurb proclaiming “A show that’s prepared to sacrifice the capacity to accommodate more than 8 audience members for the joy of staging a spectacle that none of those eight is likely to forget.”

I’m also keen to catch Stewart Lee’s new thing: Johnson and Boswell - Late but Live! which promises more of this intelligent comedian’s dry wit, this time through the medium of Enlightenment wits.

Also likely to be excellent is Pegabovine’s Coat of Arms. Interesting, not least because they must be the only sketch comedy group in Edinburgh who have got an award winning poet on their team - Luke Kennard who has just become the youngest ever nominee for the Forward Poetry Prize is one of the creators of this new sketch show, from this group who got five stars with their show last year in Edinburgh.

Other comic highlights include William Adamsdale who won the Perrier award in 2005 has a new show called The Human Computer. Josie Long - Trying is Good - If.com Best Newcomer - Pleasance, and in another of his legendary durational stand-up gigs we have Mark Watson Saves the Planet. A 24 hour show being held outside the Fringe ticket office across the 13th and 14th.

From the Telegraph’s highlights, Tony! The Blair Musical (C, I think) sounds interesting, not least because it features one Edward Duncan Smith, the son of the former Tory leader, playing Alastair Campbell. Not to be confused with Tony Blair, the Musical over at Gilded Balloon Teviot.

I’ve never seen Fuerzabruta, by the Argentineans behind De La Guarda, or Leith. Now I can do both (Fuerzabruta - Black Tent, Ocean Terminal, Leith)

I also intend to see a lot of stuff at the Aurora Nova, which I always find impossible to either preview, summarise or review, and a lot of shows by friends (in particular, Dan Bye’s excellent pair of companies Sliver Tongue and Strange Bedfellows).