I’ve never been to Edinburgh. Been to big arts festivals in Europe, but never been to THE big arts festival. Don’t really enjoy being overwhelmed, but of course wish I could be there, and can’t resist slavishly reading the news coverage and reviews.
In a future post I hope to list some of the more interesting Edinburgh Fringe events I’ve read about. For now, while it’s still happening, here’s how I personally choose to vicariously indulge in that far-away festival:
On my iPhone:
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe app has detailed blurbs for all known performances, and also gives a sense of the venues involved.
On my Kindle:
The Edinburgh Reporter. A hyperlocal news blog which picks a handful of Fringe shows to review every day. (I prefer reading blogs on Kindle. I simply read them more often and more comfortably in that format.) The selections tend to be more random and more community-centered than all the national news outlets which are chasing the celebrities or the next big things. In any case, it’s nice to get a sense of what Edinburgh is like outside the Fringe.
On my internet radio:
BBC Radio 3 has a series called Edinburgh Comedy Fest Live while the new BBC Radio 4 Extra (an online channel largely concerned with reruns of theater and comedy programs) has MacAulay and Company, daily interviews with comedians at the Fringe. Both shows, and most of the radio coverage I’ve encountered, are centered around the festival’s comedy offerings and don’t pretend to have a way of covering the more dramatic, conceptual or multi-media offerings at the Edinburgh Fringe. For many people Edinburgh is now a comedy festival foremost.
Online newspaper:
The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) has a pretty good sense of who the up-and-comers are and which shows are getting the buzz. Solid longform reviews.
Old books:
Scottish writer/artist Alasdair Gray’s extraordinary novel 1982, Janine partly takes place in Edinburgh during a time when the festival was already huge, but when the fringe was still largely owned by college students with fanciful conceptual projects. The book chronicles a long tortured time spent in a hotel room by a downtrodded middle-aged man who’s carefully weaving a masturbatory fantasy out of pivotal incidents and images in his life. One important relationship transpires during a fringe theater production in Edinburgh.
1982, Janine is wildly romantic, self-loathing, pornographic and vomitous in turns, but I’ve found that the Edinburgh Fringe bits have stuck with me more than its celebrated depressive musings and redemptive regurgitation. Gray uses Edinburgh as a playground for young idealists the same way Sondheim & Furth use Sputnik as a metaphor for sky-high dreams in their Merrily We Roll Along.
Old recordings:
Beyond the Fringe. The original soundtrack to the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore/Alan Bennett/Jonathan Miller stage show holds up better than most of the Fringe revues which came in its wake. One of the most influential stage shows of the 20th century, it virtually defined what a fringe show could and should be: relevant, intelligent, immediate, charismatic and adaptable to other climes once those first hardy audiences “get it.”