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| Edinburgh
Festival 2000 Home | Edinburgh
Film Festival 2000
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Understanding
the Edinburgh Festival
FEW cities undergo such a transformation as Scotland's capital, Edinburgh, in the month of August. The normally cosy, historic city suddenly jolts to life as thousands of actors, artists, dancers, comedians, street performers, musicians, magicians, and revellers invade the city for a month-long cultural binge known as the Edinburgh festival. Even with many Edinburghers evacuating the city for the month (renting out their properties for top dollar) it is estimated that the population of the city doubles to around a million people. The city centre is mobbed with performers: monocycling jugglers, fire-eaters, skiffle bands and roaming gangs of thesps thrusting out fliers for their new production. Every available church hall, school gymnasium, and open space with a roof over it is requisitioned, public walls are papier-mached with layers of posters and glue, and "Seen anything good?" is on the top of every festival-goer's tongue. It is chaotic, mad, intoxicating.
Not to be forgotten, is the huge pipes 'n' drums extravaganza of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, which takes place on the dramatic setting of the castle, and which on its 50th anniversary year promises to be a memorable one. The flagship Edinburgh International Festival, a high-brow assembly of some of the world's best opera, theatre, and ballet companies, was launched in 1947 as a stage for peace and unity in Europe after the Second World War. The same year a bunch of film enthusiasts launched Edinburgh's first film festival. A group of eight theatre companies also arrived in town, unexpectedly, to put on their own shows. When more uninvited companies came the next year, a journalist dubbed the unsanctioned performances "the fringe of the official festival drama". The name stuck. Today, the Edinburgh International Festival is one of the world's most prestigious arts gatherings, but the Fringe dwarfs it in terms of size. The millennium Fringe will see 17,000 performances. According to the Guinness book of Records this makes it "the world's biggest arts festival". The Fringe is a myriad of shows, from breakfast with Shakespeare to late-night cabaret where a performer fires flares from his bum and do strange things with their body fluids. The majority of shows are new to Britain; many are having their first performance before a paying audience and, more importantly, before the press. Experimentation is a watchword. Experimentation is also a smoke screen for plain bad and talentless acts. Cutting through the hype is not always easy, particularly in the early days of the festival, when many productions hold their cheap-ticket promotions (from 1-2) to ensure they have good houses for the press nights), but when little is known about them. "Picking winners, I think, is as hard as picking winners at the Grand National. Fortunately, there is no shortage of tipsters," says Fringe Director Paul Gudgin, who took the wheel of the Fringe juggernaut only weeks before its start. One way of scoping the talent is using the online programme. However, nothing beats being there. Word-of-mouth is always a good way of finding shows: natural focal points for Fringe gossip and news are the restaurants, coffee bars, and pubs on the High Street, in the heart of Edinburgh's historic old town. For the duration of the festival, this steep cobbled thoroughfare is closed off to traffic and takes on a carnival atmosphere.  Another
obvious place to head for is the Hub (left) which opened last year in
the converted church building just below the castle. The building interior
has had a stylish make-over with café, information point and bookshop.
The decor is suitably colourful, bright and light inside (lots of banana yellow) while the building's situation at the foot of the castle and top of the high street makes it the perfect spot for sitting out with cappucino and watching life go by. You'll probably also be visiting the Fringe office on the High Street which is usually besieged by performers pulling bizarre publicity stunts and thrusting free tickets for their shows at unsuspecting pedestrians. Serious Fringe-goers need stamina: seeing three of four shows a day is fairly standard. Edinburgh's Fringe is the world's largest, but it is a mixed bag. If you're lucky you might find a real gem of a show, one that will be fixed in your memory for years. If you are unlucky, you will find yourself trapped in a sweat box, with one other person in the audience, watching a tortuous foreign-language polemic, with no sub-titling machine. If you are really unlucky, the other member of the audience will walk out. It happens. |
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