We’re wrapping up our month-long UK adventure here in Edinburgh, a city whose name I continued to mispronounce well into my twenties. We’ve spent most of the last three days here immersed in the sensory overload that is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, an arts/comedy/theater/freak show/music festival that takes place every year over the course of four weeks in August, and includes roughly TWO THOUSAND different acts scattered around the city. Think: urban Burning Man… with haggis.
Festival goers take in the spectacle along the Royal MileThere is something kind of awesome about being in a remarkable city like this (truly one of the most beautiful we’ve seen on our trip) in the midst of this month-long cornucopia of the arts. Everywhere you go, someone is trying to give you a flyer for a show or an act, some of which are free and most of which last no more than an hour. Performance venues are literally everywhere around town – pubs, student unions, galleries, and parks are all temporarily converted into performance spaces where everyone from amateurs to established professionals take to the stage and try to briefly capture their audience’s attention in the midst of all the festival noise. There is no committee deciding who gets to perform at Fringe, and as a result, it has become a kind of British Open for experimental arts. If you think you can put on a show, Fringe seems to beckon young performers, go ahead and try… but be prepared to be quickly forgotten if you suck.
Every year a few acts stand out from the rest and, with the help of rapid-fire word-of-mouth, they transform from just another Fringe act into the NEXT BIG THING. Showbiz careers have been born here (Tom Stoppard, Dudley Moore, Derek Jacobi, and Craig Ferguson all got their big breaks at Fringe), and part of the excitement of getting mixed up in all of this insanity is the hope that you’ll witness a little bit of history in the making.
But it’s also just one big crazy party. The historic “Royal Mile” in the old part of town is closed to traffic, and the cobbled streets fill with performance artists and street performers who clamor for the attention of passersby as they demonstrate their particular circus act – tightrope walks, balancing on ladders, fire swallowing, you name it. It feels less like a festival in 2010 and more like something from the Britain of Shakespeare’s day, when artists and performers were banished from London to the south bank of the Thames, where they could safely engage in their various forms of artistic debauchery outside the city walls. Fringe feels a bit like that, or at least how I imagine that era to be (minus the piss pots and bubonic plague of course), and that old-fashioned feel is part of its charm. There is no Dolby Surround Sound or CG here – no giant Hollywood budgets and jaded, overpaid actors – not even any paparazzi. Just thousands of artists trying to make their audiences laugh or cry or think or be moved. Some of them fail miserably, but others – and this is true of all of the shows we’ve seen here – manage to create a little bit of magic on the stage. For me, that’s been worth the trip alone.
