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.”
