August 2005 Archives

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe that ended on Monday – though the official International fest continues to this weekend – has reported ticket sales that for the 3rd year in a row have exceeded the million ticket mark: this year’s figure of 1,335,000 is a 7% increase on last year, with 82,000 more tickets sold.

But with this astonishing growth that has seen the fringe almost double in terms of ticket sales in the last five years, levels of funding for it and the Fringe Society that administers it have remained the same. Comments Fringe Director Paul Gudgin, “This is an annual event of Olympian proportions and we’re struggling to find the resources to keep up with the scale of it. Looking at the wider context, we’re at a crucial point for the Fringe.”

Earlier in the festival it was already suggested that this year’s Fringe Sunday was going to be the last, in order to save money; and various commentators have even suggested that since it is the Fringe that dominates Edinburgh and not the heavily subsidised International Festival, it’s time to merge them.

But if the Fringe is doing so well, and it is, then the Fringe Society needs to find a way to extract its own pound(s) of flesh from the millions that are being taken here with higher entry fees to appear in the fringe programme, but without penalising the smaller companies who struggle to come here and don’t make a penny.

A reminder that critics, simply because they are invited to give their opinions, are not immune from the laws of libel when they do so comes from Edinburgh, where opera composer Keith Burstein is reported to be attempting to bring a legal action against the Evening Standard following the Standard’s Edinburgh critic Veronica Lee’s damning assessment of his show Manifest Destiny.

Lee called it “a trite affair”, referred to the tone as “depressingly anti-American”, called Dic Edwards’ libretto “horribly leaden and unmusical”, and the music “uninspiring, save for the odd duet”, before adding, “full marks to the talented cast of four for carrying it off.” But it was the last line that stung: “The idea that there is anything heroic about suicide bombers is, frankly, a grievous insult.”

According to a spokesman for Burstein, “He feels it’s libellous to say that he glorifies suicide bombers in the opera”.

This is not the first time, of course, that critics or columnists have faced off libel actions for their words. In the case of Daily Mirror writer Matthew Wright, a “review” of David Soul in his 1998 West End show The Dead Monkey that Wright had not even seen cost the paper £20,000 in damages, plus legal costs (estimated at £150,000 at the time).

Wright had claimed that only 45 people were at the performance on a Monday evening and that he had never seen a worse play in the West End. But it was shown that not only had he not attended it himself but rather that a freelancer had been there on his behalf, but also that it was factually incorrect: the performance in question had been seen by approximately 130.

As Soul commented at the time, “I stand really strong on the side of fair comment and opinion about the theatre. I think it’s a cornerstone of the theatre, but you have to see the play, you have to be there, you have to have the facts.”

The Times reported yesterday that in their survey of 12 comedians on the Edinburgh Fringe who were asked to sit a formal IQ test that they were “overwhelmingly smarter than average”.

Half of the comedians surveyed were in the top 3% of the brainiest people in Britain, and one — Natalie Haynes — was in the top 1%, with an IQ score of 134. The Times report stated that of the 12, “Four were automatically invited to join Mensa and three were told that they were borderline candidates who would probably gain membership after a second test”.

According to the brainy Haynes, it’s both a help and a hindrance to be so bright. “It would be difficult to do a show without coming from a clever base point,” she said, “but when I started out people would say ‘You’re too clever’.

“One of the only places you can be clever and funny is Edinburgh. It’s not true that I’m too clever to play a club, but I’ve been told so often, I’ve given up trying to argue against it.”

Borderline Mensa member Stewart Lee — keen to re-take the test to establish his membership — comented that IQ questions tested only one aspect of comedy. “Another fantastic kind of comedy is farting and falling over,” he said. “There is no part of the Mensa test that determines when would be a good time to fart.”

Lee, like former Perrier winner Al Murray, is an Oxford graduate. So is this year’s Perrier Award winner (announced last night), 26-year-old Laura Solon, who is also only the second woman ever to win the award (the other winner was Jenny Eclair in 1995). She started writing and performing at Oxford (where she read English), and was spotted while appearing on stages in north London pubs.

The West End has only recently entered the 21st-century by admitting local black artists — writers and directors — to tell their own indigenous stories, as was witnessed by the arrival earlier this year of Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen at the Garrick and the musical The Big Life at the Apollo (which has just announced an October 1 closure there, though associate producer Philip Hedley, who nutured it through two Stratford East runs, says this is only the beginning for the show that he now intends to tour).

But across on Broadway, August Wilson has long blazed a trail for African-American playwrights, and he has just completed the tenth (and final) play in his cycle of plays that have chronciled the black American experience set in each of the decades of the last century with Radio Golf, set in 1997, and taking place, like all but one of the other nine, in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. It premiered at New Haven’s Yale Repertory Theatre in April and is currently having its second production at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum.

However, with the completion of the cycle comes the sad news, too, that Wilson is dying. “It’s not like poker, you can’t throw your hand in,” he has said philosopically. “I’ve lived a blesed life. I’m ready.” He has been diagnosed with cancer that is too advanced to respond to treatment. He has been told that he has a life expectancy of three to five months. “I’m glad I finished the cycle,” he added.

In Britain, his work has been nurtured at the National (which offered Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Jitney in an imported US production) and particularly at the Tricycle in Kilburn, who have previously offered The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Runnin’ and King Hedley II, and will in January offer Wilson’s most recent Broadway play, Gem of the Ocean.

As the Edinburgh Fringe hurtles towards its conclusion with a final (English) bank holiday flourish to bring proceedings to a close on Monday, it’s time at last for the final rounds of recognition. Tomorrow at midnight sees the latest comic(s) to be officially annointed with a bottle of bubbly (water, not champagne) when the winner(s) of this year’s 25th annual Perrier Award is announced. As well as the prize money, all the nominees get to appear in the annual October Sunday evening showcase season in the West End.

And on Sunday, The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2005 will reward not the plays or productions that The Scotsman’s Fringe First or Herald’s Herald Angels embrace but individual and ensemble performers. And it’s heartening to notice that, outside of the places where you expect to see good performances like the Traverse, Assembly Rooms and Pleasance, the nominees also herald from further afield like C Electric and Southside, too.

Today also sees three more awards being presented: Amnesty International will present the U Win Tin Freedom of Expression Award today to a fringe production that contributes to the public’s awareness and understanding of human rights; as well as the Carol Tambor and Jack Tinter Spirit of the Fringe awards.

Exactly fifty years ago, a then 24-year-old director called Peter Hall, fresh from Cambridge and already running the Arts Theatre, found a play on his desk. Donald Albery, the West End producer, had sent it to him – “he informed me,” said Hall, “that he could persuade no actor to be in it. Many luminaries – John Gielgud and Alec Guinness among them – had refused. No director would direct it. The play was still running in a tiny theatre in Paris and Samuel Beckett had now re-written it in English. Albery wondered if I (and I was clearly his last resort) would like to do the English-language world premiere.”

Hall did, and the rest has become theatrical history. The play was Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, one of the iconic plays of the last century. Not that it was initially welcomed: “a really remarkable piece of twaddle”, was critic Bernard Levin’s overnight verdict. But the play overcame that hostility, and became that rare thing: a talking point.

For Hall, “The play changed my life. It brought me the friendship of Tennessee Williams and the right to direct his plays in London. It brought me in the post a new play by an unknown author who thought that I might like to direct him. The play was Pinter’s The Birthday Party.”

Today, Hall directs the play for the 4th time – at the Bath Theatre Royal, where he now has an annual residency, and will also be opening a new production of Shaw’s You Never Can Tell in rep with it tonight. But while the Shaw play – starring Edward Fox and Diana Quick – already has a future life pencilled in with a national tour scheduled, Godot can go no further than Bath.

Comments Hall, “It is bitterly disappointing that we will not be able to celebrate the anniversary of the play with some performances at the Arts Theatre in London, where it started. But from September 1 this year the rights of the play — and indeed most of the Beckett canon — will be owned jointly by the Barbican Arts Centre in London and the Gate Theatre in Dublin. Sadly, these two organisations, with the blessing of the Beckett Estate, have prevented us from performing Godot in London after our season in Bath.”

Apparently, he explains, “there are plans for a Centenary Festival of Beckett’s work to be staged at the Barbican in April 2006. We simply wanted our production to run for a celebratory two weeks in London in a 300-seat theatre, but that, the Barbican believes, will damage the takings for its production. The Royal Court, home to Sam for so long, is, it appears, also penalised by this situation and not allowed to present any of his plays either. I wonder what Sam would have said …”

But Hall’s ambitions may have also been thwarted by another, equally upsetting fact: that the Arts is now boarded up. The landlords have even expressed their wish to tear it down.

Two different kinds of commercial realities are at play here: real estate and theatrical estates. And money, sadly, still talks louder than art. But art will survive longer than money that has a nasty habit of running out. Hall may be understandably bitter; but his legacy of having given this play its first start in life will live forever.

The news today that the Donmar Warehouse’s current hit production of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, directed by Phyllida Lloyd and featuring Janet McTeer in the title role and Harriet Walter as her English adversary Queen Elizabeth, will transfer to Shaftesbury Avenue’s Apollo Theatre from October 7 means that the 19th-century romanticist German playwright will have had two plays side-by-side there in less than six months: the year began with the transfer to the Gielgud next door of Don Carlos from Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre.

While the West End is often accused of dumbing down, it’s interesting that some producers are wising up to the fact that there is a West End audience for serious drama, like the Almeida’s transfer of Festen that played at the Lyric to three cast changes; but perhaps, too, it needs to be tried out at places like the Donmar, Almeida or Sheffield first, where it can begin to build a momentum with the kind of rave reviews that ensure it becomes an event.

It seems that not a week goes by in the summer without some list or other appearing that names the nation’s favourites in various categories, and the last few weeks have seen polls published on favourite musicals, comediennes and actors. Of course, one always takes such things with a pinch of salt – who exactly is being surveyed in each case, and just how long are their collective memories?

But they do provide some kind of litmus test about current popularity, and starts to give credence, for instance, to the claims that Les Miserables has long made to being the world’s favourite musical – it can certainly now claim legitimately to the nation’s favourite, at least as voted by Radio 2 listeners who gave it a mammoth 41.2% vote in the survey conducted by Elaine Paige’s Sunday programme to establish the UK’s “essential musicals”.

Intriguingly, half of the top ten list were of shows that Paige herself once or originally starred in – from Evita that she created the title role in (at position six) and Chess (that was written for her, at position seven) to Sunset Boulevard (that she took over in, and took her to Broadway for the first time, at number five), The King and I (that she starred in the most recent revival of, at number four) and Hair (that she made her West End debut in at the end of the sixties, at number ten).

In another poll of Readers Digest subscribers to name Britain’s funniest females, it was Victoria Wood who came out on top, with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, named separately at positions two and four respectively, and Jo Brand coming between them (so to speak) in third position. Also on the list: Julie Walters (five), Joanna Lumley (eight), Maureen Lipman (nine) and Kathy Burke (ten), while the late Joyce Grenfell and Hattie Jacques complete it at numbers six and seven respectively.

And in a poll commissioned by the Old Vic and wine-makers Mouton Cadet that polled 6,000 people, Anthony Hopkins was named the top British actor, beating Sir Laurence Olivier into 2nd place, Sean Connery into 3rd, Alec Guinness into 4th and Michael Caine into 5th, while Judi Dench came out as top British actress, with Julie Walters 2nd, Elizabeth Taylor 3rd, Maggie Smith 4th and Julie Andrews 5th.

Two stories in the Evening Standard today highlight the discrepancies and challenges of putting a new play on in the West End versus the subsidised sector. On the one hand, it is reported that a new play – as yet even untitled and its subject matter entirely unknown to all but its cast and director – that opens in less than a month’s time at the National Theatre is already a complete sell-out. Over 16,000 tickets have been sold to what’s being only billed as “A New Play by Mike Leigh”, but the expectation and following that Leigh now has, in the wake of such Oscar-nominated films as Vera Drake and Life is Sweet, is sufficient to pre-sell it’s Cottesloe run, even though Leigh hasn’t actually had a major new theatrical success since Goosepimples transferred from Hampstead Theatre to the Garrick in 1981. (His next two original plays, Smelling a Rat at Hampstead in 1989 and It’s a Great Big Shame at Stratford East in 1993 didn’t have a life beyond their original runs there).

On the other hand, actor-turned-playwright Nick Moran, whose first play Telstar is now running at the New Ambassadors, reports how difficult it is proving to attract audiences to the play, despite receiving (mostly) favourable reviews. Asked after a charity gala last week if he was going to write another play, he reports that he replied no – and when asked why not, answered: “Because it’s been a f*ing nightmare”.

His amplifies the situation thus: “Getting a new play on in the West End and, more to the point, trying to keep it there, is a nightmare. Or perhaps more like an impossible computer game: virtual producer.” After an eight-year journey to bring the story of the late record producer Joe Meek to the stage, it finally reached the New Ambassadors in June. “And we got some great reviews – not all, of course, but a couple of definite raves – and the audiences seem to enjoy it: nine weeks into our 12-week run, we still get standing ovations.”

But there are lots of strikes against it ever getting as far as it has: “It was hard enough raising the money to get the play into a West End theatre, following our regional tour. We had Con O’Neill, who is the youngest-ever Olivier Award-winner and, everyone agrees, outstanding in the role of Meek, but not a Hollywood star name; no one knew the play, and there were no songs in it.” It was eventually backed by a football club chairman, Simon Jordan of Crystal Palace, who “took the leap of faith and helped us to make it happen.”

But now that it is there, he’s finding a perennial truth: that the commercial theatre lives – and dies – by its box office. “Here’s the source of my frustration,” he writes: “To be blunt, it’s ticket sales. It’s getting the audience in. It’s getting to a potential audience. It’s telling them we’re here and we’ve got something they might like… Getting the hip crowd into the West End to see a new play is difficult. And I have tried.”

While Moran is acting as his own town crier for the piece in his Standard feature, it’s true that – without a USP for his show, whether it be a “name” actor or something else – there simply isn’t a West End audience anymore, in the way that there is a National, Donmar, Almeida or Royal Court audience who will buy those trusted ‘brands’, sight (and in the case of the National, even title) unseen, to pay the kind of prices that it demands. Moran is discovering the hard way that it’s no longer good enough, alas, to write a good play, and even not good enough to get good reviews for it; the West End, like Broadway, is more to do with an “event” before it will be supported.

Lazy producers — and the lazy audiences they serve — have long relied on the ultimate standby: stick with what you already know and like. Hence the plethora of musical revivals on Broadway and in the West End over the last decade or so. In a five year period between 1994 and 1999, there were a staggering 25+ revivals of old musicals on Broadway; but that constant stream now looks like becoming a trickle. Partly, it´s a question of product — they´re literally running out of things to revive.

When Big River (the 1985 Tony Award winning Best Musical) was revived in 2003 in a Theatre for the Deaf staging from a company called Deaf West Theater that used sign-language, some wags commmented that this was the rare case for a musical that actually benefited from being experienced without being able to hear its score. But they´ve even more or less run out of another reliable Broadway revival standy, the Rodgers and Hammerstein back catalogue to revive, and with Flower Drum Song (revived there in 2002), surely the only place left is to look at their “flops” now, like Me and Juliet or Allegro.

Partly, too, it’s a question of economics, changing tastes and the availability of star quality: when even acknowledged masterpieces of the American musical theatre like Gypsy (revived in 2003 with Bernadette Peters, Broadway´s biggest indigenous female lead) or R&H´s Oklahoma! (revived in 2002 in a reproduction of Trevor Nunn´s Royal National Theatre production, but without Hugh Jackman who by then was already a movie star) can´t turn a profit, what hope is there for more minor musicals like Bells are Ringing (revived in 2001) or cult shows like Little Shop of Horrors (finally promoted to Broadway in a 2003 revival, though it was originally created off-Broadway) or The Rocky Horror Show (revived in 2000)?

But then, too, who needs old shows when new ones look (and sound) like old ones, anyway? The two biggest Broadway hits of the last few years are of the self-referential species like The Producers (taken from a 1968 film to the Broadway stage in 2001) or Spamalot (taken from the 1975 British comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail to the Broadway stage this year) that specifically pastiche and lampoon Broadway musicals themselves.

But there´s also, on both sides of the Atlantic, a renewed confidence in new musicals, too, which is exremely healthy — without new shows today, there won´t be anything to revive tomorrow. Broadway filled its roster of Tony nominees for Best Musical this year with four new shows, all of them still running successfully — as well as the winner Spamalot, there´s also Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The 25th Annual Putnum County Spelling Bee, and The Light in the Piazza. New jukebox compilation shows — whether putting a new story around Elvis songs in All Shook Up or those of the Beach Boys in Good Vibrations — weren´t even needed to complete the category.

In London, the Big Three of last autumn´s roster — with new musicals by Lloyd Webber (The Woman in White) and producer Cameron Mackintosh (a stage version of a 40-year-old film, Mary Poppins, with an augmented score) plus the import of The Producers — has been followed this year by Billy Elliot (that has eclipsed them all in terms of popularity) and The Big Life (We´ll pass a discreet veil over Behind the Iron Mask). So producers haven´t had to rely on revivals to keep them busy or theatres occupied.

Of course, there´s still always the exception that can prove the rule, like the current London production of Guys and Dolls, a show that has intriguingly had more London revivals in the last 25 years than on the home territory of Times Square it so gloriously celebrates. As well as the National Theatre´s 1982 staging, which ran continuously at either the National or Prince of Wales for the next few years and then returned to the National in 1997 to mark Richard Eyre´s departure as artistic director there, is now being given a brand-new look courtesy of Michael Grandage, the Donmar´s artistic director who, like Sam Mendes before him, seems to have a particular affinity for classic musicals. Next up he´s reported to be giving a new look to another iconic staging, when Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice´s final collaboration Evita will be wrestled free of Hal Prince´s original conception.

But Broadway, after years of relying on revivals to prop up their seasons, has few planned on the horizon now: between now and Christmas, there is precisely one scheduled, when the most recent London production of Sweeney Todd (that began at Newbury´s Watermill Theatre) makes the crossing to the Eugene O´Neill. When Sondheim´s 1979 masterpiece was last revived on Broadway at the Circle in the Square with a three-person electronic orchestra that saw it redubbed “Teeny Todd”, what will they now make of a staging that dispenses with an orchestra entirely, and gets the actors to play the instruments instead?

While Trevor Nunn did several classic musicals during his regime at the National, including Oklahoma!, South Pacific and Anything Goes, his successor Nicholas Hytner declared the pool more or less exhausted when he took over, though it didn´t stop him last summer from programming a revival of Sondheim´s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum as part of the Travelex ten pound season. But if Hytner played it safe with that, he had begun his regime the year before with something altogether braver and more important: offering a home to Jerry Springer — the Opera to complete the developmental work that had been begun with it on the fringe.

Just a few days ago I was lamenting a weak theatre programme to this year´s Ednburgh Fringe in this blog. Now three of this year´s ten Perrier Award judges have broken rank (in a news story reported in today´s Sunday Telegraph) ahead of today´s announcement of the shortlist for the Oscars of the Comedy scene to say that it´s been a bad year for comedy, too. According to John Pidgeon, head of enteratinment at BBC Radio and Chairman of the Perrier panel, “No one show has leapt out as head and shoulders above the rest. I would describe it as an open year.”

Fellow judge Graham Smith, commissioning editor for comedy for Channel 5, has called this year´s comedy “a bit flat”, and compared the situation to when he was last a Perrier judge two years ago. “You could say there was a surfeit of rich comedy that year. The winner was Daniel Kitson and — just to illustrate how strong it was — Jimmy Carr came second. Any other year, the runners-up would have been winners.”

And Ruby Kurachie, editor of factual entertainment at Channel 4, while admitting “As I´m one of the last to arrive in Edinburgh, I haven´t seen any of the really low stuff, so it could be a lot worse,” added, “That said, I´ve seen a couple of things that are really crap and a lot that is very in the middle. I´ve yet to see anything outstanding. I have also seen some soul-destroying shows — shows where you think, I will never get those hours of my life back.”

Pizza on the Park has, like the Pizza Express menu it serves, long donated a sum of money from each Veneziana pizza sold to the sinking fund (in every sense) for Venice, but perhaps it´s time to invent a pizza to help prop up the sinking world of London cabaret, where this venue on the south side of Hyde Park has long kept the flame of cabaret alive in London all on its own.

But now, as reported in The Stage this week, Pizza on the Park, too, has changed hands and is now in the hands of Pizza Express itself, not Peter Boizot who for so many years has presided over it even after he disposed of the rest of the original chain that he founded.

And in one of those typically cavalier acts for which global (or at least national) companies are famous for, it has immediately overruled the local traditions that have long sustained a particular venue, and closed it “for refurbishment” with immediate effect, letting down some 40 artists who had already been booked to appear there, including Fascinating Aida´s Adele Anderson (with her solo cabaret show) and New Yorkers KT Sullivan and Mark Nadler, in the next couple of weeks.

Whether or not it returns to hosting cabaret in the future is something we will have to wait and see. It would be both a great pity and a great relief if it abandoned cabaret; that seemingly paradoxical statement is because I have an inexorably love-hate relationship with this venue.

On the one hand, it was here that I first discovered the joys of cabaret in the mid to late 80s, when a succession of headline acts, from Maureen McGovern to Margaret Whiting, Julie Wilson, Andrea Marcovicci, Mary Cleere Haran, Annie Ross and the late Marion Montgomery and Hildegarde (who has also recently died) brought the best of New York cabaret to London. Here, too, I first saw someone whom I´m regard as a contemporary cabaret goddess, Ann Hampton Callaway, and she has regularly appeared here in the years since; but her relationship with the venue also reveals the many pitfalls of its management. Even as her star rose Stateside, Pizza on the Park was always so abysmal at publicising its riches that I once saw her play here to just 12 people. She has never returned since.

Yet also in its heydey, I saw Billy Stritch (a New York pianist-singer) who was then dating Liza Minnelli, and Liza was sat, chain-smoking throughout, at the next table to me. Stritch invited her onto the stage, and she dueted with him for a couple of numbers. I also saw Minnelli´s sister Lorna Luft appear here, and in one of the most singularly memorable cabaret experiences of my life there, they had neglected to tell her that, though there are two performances a night, the same audience stays for both, unlike in New York where each show is played to different audiences. So, as she launched into her second set, she began with the identical number that had opened her first show; then she went into the patter, that was the same again. We all sat and listened in respectful and mounting horror as she gave the same show twice over.

Pizza on the Park has also been important in promoting local artists, such as Barb Jungr who was the last artist I saw to appear there under the old regime last month. The expat Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, who now makes his home in New York, also regularly played here and I once heard him describe it as one of the best cabaret rooms he knew anywhere in the world. Yet he also lamented, as I constantly did, the behaviour of the audience there, too — and even wrote a song about it.

The trouble is that for many of the audience, the cabaret was — they seemed to think — a background accompaniment to their conversations. The venue never made any attempt to correct this misapprehension, and indeed I remember hushing talking waiters as frequently as patrons. The waiters, too, would make a habit of noisily clearing cutlery throughout the show.

Yet for all of these problems, I shall miss it if it´s gone. I shall even miss venue host and fixture, Simon Becker, who played more or less the identical repertoire as a warm up act in all the nearly 20 years I have been going there.

A week and a half into the fringe, and already there are murmurings that this is a far from vintage fringe; even though it’s bigger than ever – the mind-boggling statistics from the fringe office are that there are 1,799 shows in almost 300 venues – quantity doesn’t seem to indicate quality, let alone innovation and surprise.

Predictably, it was the more predictable things that were the first things to sell out, such as The Odd Couple – a 1965 Neil Simon Broadway comedy that is really the antithesis of the fringe, with a top price of £20 in the fringe’s biggest venue, the 800-seater Assembly Hall, former temporary home of the Scottish Parliament. But as that extreme price indicates, the relentless onward march of pricing in Edinburgh (with many shows now routinely costing over £10), will also mean that audiences become far more risk-averse. Who’s going to take a flyer on an act you’ve never heard of before and may not even enjoy at that kind of price? Not that £10 is, in itself, necessarily a high price to pay; but in Edinburgh that usually translates into only an hour’s worth of entertainment, and it’s invariably one of several shows a day that audiences will try to see.

It’s all inextricably linked, of course, to rising costs elsewhere: tickets at the Assembly Rooms are higher than anywhere else, because rents there are so much higher. One producer, who has three shows there and nine at the Pleasance, told me that the minimum rental he was committed to meeting at Assembly was more than the combined total of his Pleasance commitment. No wonder he has to charge more. Another performer, who has appeared at Assembly regularly over the years, tells me that her minimum rental has almost doubled in the two years since she last appeared there, from £2,800 to £4,600. (Both Assembly and the Pleasance set minimum rentals, or once those are met, retain 40% of the box office receipts).

No wonder, then, that the Assembly has the highest prices now – and also the hardest job attracting audiences. Whereas it used to be one of the buzziest, busiest venues around, few shows are marked as sold out now.

Meanwhile, at the chaotic Pleasance – where every available broom cupboard, it seems, is now a venue – the attempts at running so many shows, on very tight turn-arounds, means that the usual pleasure of passing the time in the courtyard is now an obstacle course of queues (and queue jumpers who are de rigueur there now, since the whole thing is so inadequately policed by a hopeless front-of-house squad). Even the press office for the Pleasance (which moved a couple of years ago to the Pleasance Dome up the road in Bristo Square, so that the space it used to occupy in the courtyard could become yet another venue) is not immune to the chaos: yesterday, it didn’t open for business till noon, because the person who had the keys hadn’t turned up.

But Assembly and the Pleasance are both purely commercial venues, and the way they do business (or not) is entirely up to them. There’s a more worrying sense of crisis around the subsidised Traverse, traditional first port of call for anyone interested in serious theatre, whose own in-house productions typically provide the anchor for the rest of the fringe to operate around. This year neither of their own plays has attracted the kind of reviews that make them a must-see destination; and few of the visiting productions have managed to correct the imbalance, either.

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Though it sometimes seems that all artistic life outside Edinburgh is suspended for the duration of the Festival, life does actually go on elsewhere. Though no London first nights were scheduled at all over last week or this, it’s business as usual at Stratford-upon-Avon (where As You Like It premieres to the press tonight) and at Chichester (where 5/11 opens tomorrow). And next week Ray Cooney’s new play, Tom Dick and Harry, opens at the West End’s Duke of York’s Theatre on Tuesday. So first-string critics who have already shown a remarkable reluctance to be here at all have a perfect excuse to leave as soon as they’ve arrived. Both The Guardian’s Michael Billington and the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer have been sighted in Edinburgh this week covering the openings of the International Festival, but they’ll both be departing today.

It’s true that it’s easy to become both jaded and overwhelmed by the prospect of the Fringe, and most if not all of what’s good will find a life later in London. But there’s still a lot of pleasure of discovery to be had along with the pain, and critics are a vital part of the process of that. It’s a pity that most of the London critics don’t engage in it more fully.

But with other more manageable competing distractions like those at Stratford and Chichester, there’s even less incentive to try to do so.

The “official” international festival has now kicked off with two shows in the theatre programme that could just as easily be Fringe shows: Nuts CocoNuts, at a converted Drill Hall half way down Leith Walk on the way out of town, is just the kind of thing that could be at the far more centrally located Music Hall of the Assembly Rooms (it would fit there perfectly too, being a show about music hall) — even the seats are unreserved, and as for the (intentionally) chaotic front-of-house arrangements, it reminded me of nothing so much as a busy night at the Pleasance (where the attempts at imposing queues in the midst of the forecourt drinkers are funnier than many of the comedians appearing there).

Meanwhile, The Exonerated — being promoted by Assembly at the Queen’s Hall — paradoxically is the first fringe show I’ve ever been to with reserved seating. Then there’s David Harrower’s new play, Blackbird, which is really a Traverse studio play for two actors (plus one child), yet it’s being premiered at the King’s Theatre as part of the International Theatre (and therefore seems to compel the director, legendary Peter Stein, to add an altogether over-elaborate coda to the play).

Then again, the fringe Assembly has a Polish, 16-strong production of Faust which The Scotsman’s Joyce McMillan has labelled “a production full of the kind of brilliant world-class engagement with a classic text that only rarely appears on the official Edinburgh Festival, far less on the Fringe.”

In other words, things have got decidedly topsy-turvy here, with boundaries between the two festivals being more blurred than ever. And veteran actor Timothy West — who started his own stint on the fringe today with a show, National Hero, at the Pleasance — has just said exactly that. “The line between the official festival and the Fringe is now very much blurred. There was a time when the Fringe was made up of student companies, who just hired a mini-van and hoped that somebody would turn up for their show. Now there are so many well established professionals on the Fringe that it seems really silly to draw a distinction.”

Bill Burdett-Coutts — who has run Assembly for the last 25 years — kicked off the annual war of the wor(l)ds apart between the Fringe and the International Festival last week by asserting that though the official festival was originally the train drawing the carriages of the fringe it was now more like the other way around, and suggesting a possible merger of the two events (see the blog entry below).

Now Brian McMaster — who has run the International Festival for the last fourteen years and will be retiring next year after his 15th festival — has kicked off this year’s International Festival (which began last night) by rejecting claims that the festivals could amalgamate — “No way at all”, he said — but pointing out that there’s already a lot more colloboration rather than antagonism between them. “We work together already, more and more,” he said, and added, “In the past we used to fight, but we now work together.” Not according to Burdett-Coutts, who many commentators are naming as a possible successor to McMaster.

Who else could be in the running? Jude Kelly, who spearheaded the Olympics arts bid, might have been a contender, but she’s just been conscripted to run the South Bank Centre; Graham Sheffield, currently artistic director at the multi-purpose Barbican Centre where he has established the BITE festival as a year-round celebration of visiting and home produced plays, dance and opera; or perhaps one of the directors, like Steven Pimlott (who has just announced that he will not be returning to Chichester next year), who conveniently straddle the theatrical and operatic worlds. Or they could look abroad — someone like Robyn Archer, an Australian who is already co-ordinating events for the Liverpool City of Culture festivities, has previously run the Adelaide Festival.

Meanwhile, on the fringe, yesterday saw the dark skies part for a lovely sunny afternoon in the Meadows for what could be the last Fringe Sunday. The Fringe Society who administer the fringe reported their first loss in eight years, of just over £15,000, for last year’s festival, and with costs to stage Fringe Sunday — a free public event where fringe groups can show their wares (and hand out a ton of flyers) — doubling in the past six years from £32,000 in 1998 to £65,000 now, it’s becoming too high a price to pay. Which is a pity, since this is a genuine community event that attracts locals and families to share a little bit of the fringe spirit. Whether or not it actually translates into ticket sales, however, is another question.

At The Odd Couple on Friday, the venue’s press representative told me he had, so far, accommodated over 60 reviewers to see the show. It’s the kind of saturation coverage that a show could only dream of; but is almost totally unncessary, since the entire run is all but sold out. But it’s the one obligatory show that everyone seems to have to review: it has two telly-friendly names Alan Davies and Bill Bailey in it; it’s a popular classic comedy; and it’s in the fringe’s biggest venue, the Assembly Hall (former temporary home of the Scottish Parliament).

But who, exactly, are these reviewers? It’s interesting to note that, of the London national dailies, only two first-string critics have been up in Edinburgh over the last week — Benedict Nightingale of The Times and Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail. Both have duly covered The Odd Couple (and much else; Letts has shown himself particularly conscientious with a double-page spread of reviews on Friday from the fringe, and a few featured ‘overnights’ during the week on the news pages, too).

Of the other daily nationals, Lyn Gardner, deputy critic on The Guardian, has been doing her usual sterling work as Queen of the Edinburgh Fringe who makes more discoveries than anyone else; Dominic Cavendish, second-string on the Telegraph, has been up and about (while Charlie Spencer has avoided the world’s biggest theatre festival and reviewed a show on at the Mill at Sonning instead this week); while The Independent has mainly used their Scottish stringer Lynn Walker and the Evening Standard have posted Veronica Lee here (who only ever seems to write for them at Festival time, but has done double duty by also covering comedy for the Sunday Telegraph).

Of the Sundays, two number ones have been here: Kate Bassett for the Independent on Sunday and Susannah Clapp for The Observer; of the rest, the Sunday Times has employed a local stringer, Adrian Turpin, to cover theatre, and the Sunday Telegraph has posted Susan Irvine to cover theatre in Rebecca Tyrrell’s absence. I’m here for the Sunday Express, of course, but haven’t filed a column for today’s paper on Edinburgh but will do so for next Sunday.

So Edinburgh at festival time may be full of critics, but few of the usual London lot are doing their usual jobs. Instead, it may be healthy that we are getting other voices; but the only trouble in the cacaphony of voices that are being heard is that we don’t always recognise them. And when there’s a plethora of opinion about, it only means anything if you start to recognise voice and tone. That’s why Lyn Gardner is so invaluable. And ditto, on the local Scotsman, Joyce McMillan and comedy critic Kate Copstick: you can stick with them, for good or ill, because you recognise where they are coming from.

There’s often a simmering rage between comedians and their audiences on the fringe. but this year there are reports that in some cases it has spilled over into real violence. At the Smirnoff Underbelly, no doubt aided by the venue’s sponsor drink or other beverages, there has been not one but two occasions when stand-up comedians have challenged hecklers to put (‘em) up or shut up….

At the (perhaps appropriately titled) Free Beer Show, the MC Ray Peacock got the better of his assailant.

Says Peacock, “There was a young lad at the front and he went a step too far. Sometimes you have someone who wants to be part of the show.” Evidently the young man had already gone too far by admitting to being a Conservative Party agent, and after exchanging words about the 1984 Miners’ Strike, Peackock invited him onto the stage, and pulled his shirt off. “I panicked because he was quite a muscly lad. I’ve got a six-pack as well, but it’s more hidden. I like to keep it warm. He charged at me, but I am very quick for a man of my size and I was able to dodge him. As he went past I clipped him on the back of the head. He was more surprised than anything. He fell over and he was beginning to get up, so I put my foot on his head… He lay there for quite a while…. Once he realised he was beat, he was beat. There was a degree of humiliation.”

Meanwhile another comedian at the same venue, Andrew Lawrence, had to be rescued by three members of the venue’s staff on the same night when he was knocked to the ground by one of his heckers. Apparently, he had issued a direct challenge to the vociferous audience. According the venue’s marketing manager Penny Sims, “he was being heckled and said, ‘if you don’t like what I’m doing here come up and fight me’.” And someone took him up on the challenge: “His shirt was ripped open, but it looked worse than it was because the shirt had poppers rather than buttons.”

Though Edinburgh is an artistic free-for-all, where everyone who can pay the rent (and have the money to lose) can come to the party, some shows are more equal than others; and there’s still a huge competitive angle to the festivities. For comedians, of course, it’s the Perrier that counts above all – and provides a short-hand way for all the lazy television executives who arrive for their own TV festival in the third week to search out this year’s “hot” acts. On the theatre front, there are a myriad of awards and accolades on offer, including those of The Stage, of course; but the longest-established of the fringe equivalent of the Oliviers are The Scotsman’s Fringe Firsts, which for more than 30 years now have recognised and acknowledged specifically new work on the fringe.

The best bit about them is that they’re not presented in one go, but once a week for every week of the festival; so there’s a constant buzz around about them. Today the first list of winners has just been announced, and I’m glad to say that of the five shows that have won, I’m already scheduled to see three when I go up later today; which either suggests I’ve chosen wisely, or they’ve given them to predictable shows! These are:

• East Coast Chicken Supper, a new Scottish play at the Traverse;
• Switch Tripytch, the latest show from the Riot Group, an American company who can’t seem to perform in Edinburgh without winning a Fringe First; and
• Grid Iron’s latest site-specific work, The Devil’s Larder, performed in Debenham’s department store.

But I’ve not actually hitherto even heard of the other two winners — Give Up! Start Over! (In the Darkest of Times I Look to Richard Nixon for Hope) at C venue, and Children of the Sea at the Royal Botanic Gardens — and that’s where Awards like this can have a purpose: to reward pieces that might otherwise get lost in the fringe melee.

Before I head off to Edinburgh myself tomorrow, I caught Stomp again in the West End this week – a show launched on its journey towards becoming a global phenomenon at the Assembly Rooms 14 years ago (and turning its former street performer creators Luke Creswell and Steve McNicholas into multi-millionaires, proving once again the old adage, “You can’t make a living in the theatre, but you can make a killing”).

This is probably the most profitable of all the “franchise shows” born in Edinburgh that, like Cats and Les Mis, are then endlessly replicated around the world. Of course, it hasn’t stopped numerous imitators from trying their luck to create the same kind of show, from break-dancing spectacles like Bounce to the hip Ozzie tap-dance show, Tap Dogs that all did their Edinburgh showcases. It doesn’t always work – the Spanish-born percussion show Life is Rhythm a couple of years ago was an Edinburgh hit, but when Bill Kenwright transferred it to Shaftesbury Avenue’s Lyric Theatre, it looked awfully exposed.

But Edinburgh’s place as a giant trade show for producers from around the world to come and cherry pick from is exemplified by the biennial British Council Edinburgh Showcase, which has selected some 28 British theatre shows as potential candidates for foreign touring – and as well as endorsing them with an official stamp of approval, have also helped to pay the travel expenses for some 212 overseas producers to come and see them, including delegates from as far afield as China, Vietnam, Thailand and Mexico, as well as Germany, the Netherlands and Russia.

Among the work they will be exposed to are site-specific works like Scottish company Grid Iron’s The Devil’s Larder (being performed at Debenham’s Department Store) and dreamthinkspeak’s Don’t Look Back (being performed at Edinburgh’s General Register House and previously seen at Somerset House in London; when I did so last summer, I got stuck in a lift for half an hour, so didn’t complete the strange tour that the show takes you on – let’s hope the same thing doesn’t happen to anyone, least of all the foreign producers, in Edinburgh). According to the British Council’s head of drama Sally Cowling, the growth in site-specific work was “reflecting and responding to the fact that, as so many experiences today are virtual, people increasingly want a very intense, very local experience in theatre”.

Cowling estimates that the last showcase in 2003 brought in an additional £1.5-£2m in fees to the companies promoted in it. The council initiated the bi-annual showcases, she says, because “theatre was looking thin” and “it was getting a bit pointless encouraging theatre promoters to come to Edinburgh” because of the dominance of stand-up comedy.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s director Paul Gudgin acknowledges that it has had an effect: “This year is a really good year for theatre, and it’s partly to do with the impact of the showcase.” But the corollary of that is that in, non-showcase years, theatre duly drops. “We are more and more concerned,” says Gudgin. “People felt last year the theatre programme wasn’t the strongest. That’s a problem for us to solve, an area of our work we have to develop.”

Apparently in showcase years, even companies not officially part of the British Council’s package were keener to perform in case they were spotted by a roving producer. Gudgin comments, “The showcase demonstrates that performers are coming to the Fringe because they want to be picked up and we have to make these opportunities every year.”

Few, of course, will turn into Stomp; but there are quieter ways to make an impact – and a living – too.

Edinburgh is a constantly evolving organism – with a beast this big, it’s an inevitable fact that it will change from day to day, let alone festival to festival; and it’s a brave commentator who picks out trends and discerns patterns in the chaos. But certainly, as in all evolutionary processes, a law of natural selection does seem to evolve; how else to explain how, in the midst of 1,500 shows, the same set of shows seem to be reviewed again and again in every outlet from The Stage to The Scotsman and the London-based nationals?

Of course, some shows, like The Odd Couple with its star comics at the helm (a play being revived on Broadway this October, incidentally, with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick — the original stars of The Producers there — being reunited for the occasion), attracts massive media interest, even if it doesn’t really need it. The show is all but sold out already in an 800-seater venue, with top prices of £20, two facts alone that don’t really make it much of a fringe show in the first place, even before taking into the reckoning the comedy of (dis)comfort zone that this classic play exists in.

But what is interesting, too, is that outside the thumbs-up, thumbs-down culture of the pernicious star ratings system many of us now subscribe to (though not, interestingly, in the pages, online or printed, of The Stage), there’s also room for a wider debate, and the rules about the Edinburgh Festival – where the biggest one is that, of course, that there are no rules – are constantly being re-written.

This year, the Fringe’s most famous comedy award, the Perrier, has come under the spotlight for possible change. Nica Burns, their founder and administrator, says, “The comedy industry is a completely different one to the one I started in as a starry-eyed girl. Next year I need to go back and look at the award with a blank sheet.” What’s worrying her is that the way it is run now puts British comedians on an uneven playing field against those from abroad. The rules prevent local “star names” from being considered, but highly experienced foreign comedians who have a low profile here are eligible.

In the past two years, for instance, only three of the ten nominees were British. Though last year’s winner — Will Adamsdale, who came from nowhere (he didn’t even have an entry in the fringe programme) to sweep the award – was British, he was one of only two on the shortlist. And in 2003, there was only one British nominee amongst two Ameircans, an Australian and a New Zealand double act.

So Burns is considering possible changes, including the introduction of an “international award”. As last year’s Perrier judging panel chairman Evening Standard comedy critic Bruce Dessau puts it, “It is an uneven playing field if American comedians come here who are eligible for the Perrier and quite often have a lot of experience.”

But not everyone is convinced. Irish comic Andrew Maxwell replies, “Why should Brits be culturally mollycoddled? It is unnecessary. And besides, being a clown is international. I don’t think it’s a good policy, and I have never heard a comedian suggest it, even when drunk.”

Not content with seeking to re-write her own rules, however, Nica Burns has also now weighed in on the matter of the selection process for Brian McMaster’s successor as director of the International Festival, as he retires after the next festival. Burns has pointed out that the festival’s board, who are charged with looking for and appointing the festival’s director, boasts several members of the Edinburgh city council, but not one “senior arts person.” Burns says, “I worry that the people who are going to make the call don’t have the skills to do so. Who is going to be in on the search?”

The search committee is being chaired by the city council’s Lord Provost, Lesley Hinds. Burns suggests that there should, perhaps, be “an advisory body of extremely talented, working practitioners in the arts” – like Cameron Mackintosh, Sadler’s Wells artistic director Alistair Spalding, American choreographer and regular Festival visitor Mark Morris, NT chief Nicholas Hytner, and newly appointed South Bank artistic director Jude Kelly. But Hinds has rejected the claim, saying that the selection board already “represents people with expertise in the arts world as well as local government”, and adds, “Obviously, we also take advice from the international arts world in our selection. The reputation of the festival sells itself and does encourage those of the highest calibre to apply.”

Last week Behind the Iron Mask opened in London to the kind of devastating notices that have made headlines of the show for all the wrong reasons.

In Edinburgh, however, the hall of shame – those shows that get a one-star review in The Scotsman – are usually buried out of sight; even their reviews are consigned not to full appraisal but a brief paragraph.

In case you missed them, here are today’s priceless samples:

Crimes of Passion (at the Roman Eagle Lodge, reviewed by Andrew Burnet): “If you want a lesson in Fringe failure, try this. Start with over-ambitious material - in this case, Ken Russell’s typically lurid sex satire about a priest stalking a prostitute. Adapt it woefully for the stage. Add an incompetent director, wobbly scenery and a host of unnecessary props. Employ a technical crew who couldn’t light a match, miss most of the cues and talk more audibly than some of the cast. Sell tickets, admit press and stand back. The crime is that some of the acting isn’t bad.”

Mudfinger (at the Smirnoff Underbelly, reviewed by Jane Ellis): “There is a lack of Scottish talent on the Fringe. Sadly, Mudfinger is not the answer. He is a tragically poor performer with an incomprehensible script and a pile of shoddy props. As my eight-year-old companion put it: “This is the worst show ever. It has no story and terrible acting, just one person doing absolutely nothing.” A damning verdict.”

Bill Burdett-Coutts – who has turned the Assembly Rooms into a kind of National Theatre of the Edinburgh Fringe (that is to say, its flagship and a focus for the rest of the fringe to aspire to and be inspired by) for the last quarter century — has fired the opening salvo in the annual battle to capture the news agenda; and being rude about one’s rivals is always a good place to start.

“While the fringe keeps growing and goes from strength to strength,” he says, “the international festival seems stuck on a backward-looking formula which doesn’t embrace the entirety of what Edinburgh is about.” He goes on to assert that the fringe is where it’s at: “In simple terms, 25 years ago the international festival was the train pulling the carriages of all the other festivals. Now the train has been overtaken by the carriages.”

An International Festival spokeswoman tactfully replied that a report has been commissioned on the future of the various festivals, and that this is an issue that is being looked actively looked at. But, she added, “William seems unaware of the work that goes on year-round in Edinburgh where he’s not here.”

Ouch!

He could be in danger of winning the initial publicity battle but losing the long-term war. He is, after all, only a guest in the city – he’s based in London at Riverside Studios that he also runs during the rest of the year — and Edinburgh can be intensely protective of its own.

Edinburgh’s near-saturation press coverage may have already begun in earnest, but it starts officially today, with both the publication of The Stage’s Edinburgh preview and the first review by a national paper of an Edinburgh Fringe show.

The Stage’s preview edition includes — shameless plug — interviews by me with both Brian McMaster – soon-to-retire director of the Edinburgh International Festival, now on his penultimate festival before he departs at the end of the next fest after 16 years at the helm – and the indefatigable Bill Burdett-Coutts, who has been running the Assembly Rooms for a quarter of a century now, and is most likely to continue doing so for another quarter of a century at least!

Meanwhile, in The Times, Robert Dawson Scott reviews the first of this year’s Traverse plays, The Found Man, and already finds it lacking: “It is going to feel like a long festival,” he wearily concludes, after admitting at the start, “the Edinburgh Festival Fringe does not officially start until Sunday but already the first gaudy skirts are being trailed. Getting a step ahead of the opposition can pay dividends in the dog-review-dog hurly-burly of the Fringe, so the theory goes.” But, he goes on, “it does all rather depend, though, on having a halfway decent play to trail, which Ricardo Galgani’s opener simply is not.”