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Friday 5 December 2008

Edinburgh’s cultural jamboree

Lloyd Evans on the esotericism of the Festival and the ragamuffin risk-taking of the Fringe

As for the Fringe, well that’s a different matter. While the International Festival favours multilingual confections that flatter the organisers’ intellectual pretentions and spurn the practical indignities of popular theatre, the Fringe offers a vibrant mix of commercially minded creativity. The secret lies in its openness. Anyone can enter. Pay your money, pitch up and put on a show. And it’s this ragamuffin risk-taking spirit that has made the Fringe the world’s largest arts festival and rendered the International Festival almost an afterthought. The Fringe has 250 venues hosting 2,000 acts. Every year it sells £1.5 million worth of tickets and flutters its merry way through 10 million flyers. Bang goes another rainforest.

Thesps swarm to it like bees to jam. So do journalists, of course, and because an appearance at the Fringe guarantees publicity it offers a highly specialised service to a certain type of celebrity. The Fringe is the Lourdes of the north. A place to heal a sick career, to baptise a new book of memoirs, or simply to remind the world you’re still alive. The list of indestructible has-beens appearing this year is headed by Brit Ekland whose solo show at the Gilded Balloon, imaginatively titled Brit on Brit, promises a mixture of anecdote and shopping tips. Ruby Wax has absented herself from our TV screens for a while. She’s been getting her head examined. Newly armed with a psychiatry degree she’s reinvented herself as an agony aunt and she’ll be discussing mental breakdown at the Assembly Rooms. ‘But,’ she warns, ‘it’ll be funny.’ At the same venue Simon Callow arrives with his highly acclaimed and highly realistic recreation of a Dickens recital. At the Underbelly, A Life in Progress by a Work in Progress is a solo play by Joan Rivers. At £25 this is one of the hottest and costliest tickets on the Fringe. Rivers recently won a whole new tribe of admirers by getting herself kicked off ITV’s daytime chat-show Loose Women for calling Russell Crowe ‘a f***ing piece of s**t’ live on air. She’s fast becoming a national treasure who isn’t safe behind glass. And the promoters of her show are so confident of selling out that they’ve already booked a West End transfer.

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