Kayla Walsh
Staff Writer
The Edinburgh Fringe is the world’s largest performing arts festival, with this year’s event featuring 2, 695 shows from 47 countries. During the festival, the city’s population doubles, the streets buzz with enthusiastic members of the public looking to be entertained, and hundreds of venues are taken over by performers of all types. Since its establishment in 1947, it has taken place annually in the month of August, and this year I was lucky enough to be part of it.
The Fringe attracts an intriguing array of acts, including (but not limited to) theatre, sketch comedy, stand-up, clowning, dance, physical theatre, musical theatre, cabaret, opera, improvisation and children’s shows. Recently, comedy has become more and more dominant, and the competition within the genre can be fierce, with fresh-faced newbies competing with big names like Des Bishop and Dylan Moran. Many companies ritually return to the festival, but it is also a showcase for thousands of emerging performers: this year witnessed the world premiere of 1, 418 shows. The acts range from the classic to the contemporary, and there really is something for everyone.
One of the best – and worst – things about the festival is the fact that it is “open access”: there is no panel or jury deciding who is allowed to participate, so pretty much anyone with enough money and determination can bring their show before an audience. This system is admirable in that it paves the way for experimentation and gives a large body of people an exciting performance opportunity which they may not otherwise have received. However, I feel that the lack of censorship leads to some acts being needlessly and exaggeratedly controversial or provocative. And of course, there is no quality control…
Over the duration of the festival, I managed to cram in about 30 shows, which ranged from incredible to incredibly bad. I was brought to tears by the beauty of a play called Translunar Paradise, which explored an elderly man’s struggle to let go of his deceased soulmate through the use of masks and physical theatre. On a more low-brow level, another particularly memorable show was Fifty Shades: The Musical!, a hilarious staging of E. L. James’s erotic novel, starring a pudgy blonde in the role of Anastacia, with a middle-aged, mankini-clad Asian man playing Christian. I was thoroughly impressed by the amount of Irish talent I saw, especially from Trinity College: the sketch group No Pants Thursday made me cry with laughter, and I was deeply moved by The Life (and Sort of Death) of Eric Argyle, a superb piece of writing by Ross Dungan, former chair of DU Players. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the Fringe, most festival-goers are bound to witness at least one nightmarish performance. My friend Kate cajoled me into going to see a show called Truth, in which a half-delirious guy hurled a huge sparkly fish at my face, took off all of his clothes and ran around screaming. The most hellish of all, though, was something called Tenderpits: a nonsensical hour of alleged theatre, featuring a Canadian man sporting a dirty nappy, making Cancer jokes, loudly claiming that he “farted glitter” and masturbating on stage. How that managed to get stellar reviews, I will never know…(Never trust reviews, even this one.)
Apart from going to see shows, the main reason I came to Edinburgh was to play a part in a post- apocalyptic version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a theatre company called Drunk Tank Productions, a group of current and ex Trinity students. I was thrilled to be able to call myself a professional actress (for I was getting paid!).We did the show at 4.30pm every day, in a renovated church called Paradise St. Augustine’s. It was already rehearsed to perfection, but now we
had to get people to come to see it! So, a few hours before each performance, we joined the rest of the aspiring stars of the festival at one of the busiest spots in the city, a pedestrianised street known as The Royal Mile. Here, we would bombard the public with flyers, try to convince weary passers- by that our play was an unmissable “Shakespearience” and sing songs in order to draw a crowd. This all wouldn’t have been too bad except for the fact that I was made to wear an embarrassingly slutty fairy costume, complete with stockings and suspenders. It attracted only the wrong kind of attention: I was surrounded by dirty old men with intimidatingly large cameras, who told me I would be able to find their photos “on thee fleeker”. All in all, though, A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself went well. With perhaps the exception of our last performance, when we took the (ill-advised, considering we had a pretty full house) decision to play pranks on each other, and I was cruelly tricked into showing the perplexed and presumably displeased audience a magazine clipping of a man’s bare bum…To the children in the front row: I’m so very sorry.
Living in Edinburgh during the festival is seriously expensive, as landlords hike up their prices in response to the huge influx of people. Many performers and workers can end up in Trainspotting- esque conditions. I was sharing an apartment with 15 people and a mouse (affectionately dubbed “Minerva”), and the profits from our play didn’t even cover the rent. In order to survive, I got an evening job flyering for an Irish sketch group called Foil, Arms and Hog (a very funny bunch of lads, look them up). Though I only worked for two hours at a time, the job wasn’t easy – having to be constantly chirpy and approaching stranger after stranger is exhausting. The responses I got from the public varied immensely- from angry locals telling me to f**k off, to drunken revellers trying to kiss me. Sometimes, what we came to call “flyering delirium” would set in, and Kate and I would find ourselves sticking flyers to our bodies, dancing down the Royal Mile, and jokingly offering random people “free sex” just so they would stop ignoring us. On the plus side, I did get a pass to one of the bigger venues, so I saved a lot of money on shows. Also, you don’t necessarily need to have theatre experience to get a job in the festival, which means that it’s an option for anyone looking to do something different with their summer. However, several of my friends were working extremely long hours in theatres or box offices for meagre wages, or just in exchange for accommodation and passes.
Taking into account accommodation, registration fees, insurance, venue hire, travel to and from Edinburgh, and various other expenses, it’s difficult for performers to make money or even break even from their run in the Fringe. It’s a lot of work to even get as far as the festival: A Midsummer Night’s Dream only made it thanks to fundraising and the support of generous and/or rich family and friends of the cast and crew. The fest should be seen not as a lucrative business opportunity but as a chance to gain exposure and experience in the theatre world, test out new material, challenge oneself, and hopefully pick up some glowing reviews for future reference. It’s also a way to make valuable contacts and schmooze with celebrities and semi-celebrities, if that’s your thing. We met The Rubberbandits on a night out, had a quick chat with David O’Doherty on the street, and shook hands with Anthony Rapp from Rent. I even got a photo with Simon Amstell (and came across as a gormless idiot in the process…to say I was starstruck is a gross understatement). If nothing else, it’s an amazing experience, and I don’t regret a minute of it. The city itself is stunning, full of charming old buildings and overlooked by rolling hills. The atmosphere there during the Fringe is unbeatable: there is an undeniable feeling of excitement in the air, and everywhere you go, people are enjoying themselves. I got to know and love every member of my cast, and to end on an incredibly cringey note: I made friends and memories that will last a lifetime.
