Ball - Experimental fringe<

Against the naysayers, JAMES BALL argues that the Edinburgh fringe festival is as vibrant as ever

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival faces annual accusations of commercialisation. The trouble is these faceless accusers are at least partly right. The high profile venues – like the Underbelly or Pleasance – are stuffed to the rafters with stand up comedy with a few theatrical acts squeezed in around the edges. Stand up and the Fringe have a long-running connection and that’s all to the good. But what else is on offer?

As it turns out there’s more experimental material than you might expect. There are still a good few fully independent venues working the festival and their output is often much more courageous – not to mention variable. And other festival “big names” make more of an effort to diversify – C Venues is a good example.

Edinburgh’s not to blame, really. Arts always risks becoming stale and theatre is no exception. By now we’ve had thirty years of anguished monologues, farcical comedies and physical montages. And for each and every one of them, the audience sit passively in the stalls and watch events unfold. Wherever else we go, interactivity’s the watchword: just look at YouTube, TV phone-ins, citizen journalism or even reality television. Has the audience had its day?

Now it seems like it might just be theatre’s turn to try out some of the 21st century’s new approaches. Experimental theatre groups – almost universally from mainland Europe – were showing off their stuff at this year’s festival and a lot of it was surprisingly successful.

It’s all too easy to slip into a complacent, passive frame of mind sitting down to a play. There’s a comfortable detachment that being part of an audience induces: whatever goes on onstage, you are safe. Never mind if the lead is being castrated with a knitting needle (this delightful mental image brought to you by “Shackled”), unless the production is incredibly well produced, the detachment remains – even if the play stays with you for days.

Being placed in a wheelchair, blindfolded and tied up engenders no complacency whatsoever, so Ontroerend Gond’s “The Smile off your Face” has a head start on run-of-the-mill productions from the off. Audience members are wheeled alone through the fifteen-minute production and are expected to interact with the cast at every turn. They receive almost no information about what’s involved in the production: it’s a real leap into the dark.

To describe what happens next in any detail is to ruin the uneasy and unsettling few minutes that follow. The production appeals to every sense: unseen hands touch your face, incense is lit somewhere close by, marzipan is teased gently through your lips. The blindfold remains almost throughout. The unfamiliarity of your surroundings and total blindness lead to a strange intimacy, heightened by a strange few minutes of “pillow talk”. Months later the thought of “The Smile off your Face” still evokes a strong emotional response – its immediacy is everything.

This is something new and different – anyone who’s been told about it is immediately intrigued and often spends several minutes trying to reason what it could mean or symbolise. They also offer streams of questions as to every detail of what happened. When was the last time that happened when you mentioned going to a typical night at the theatre? There is an audience eager to try something new – even something as discomfiting as “The Smile off your Face”.

Some productions even dispensed with the theatre companies themselves. “Etiquette”, by Rotozaza, makes the audience its cast members. A table is set out in a café with a vast array of baffling props: a pipette of ‘blood’, plastic men, pins, dice, a rubber stamp and more. To “see” the play, two of you must take your tickets to the bar. You are each handed a short set of instructions and some headphones. You then follow a series of audio instructions, and act out the play yourself. Your every gesture, word, pose and inflection is set out for you. Most of the café’s other patrons are completely unaware that you’re “acting” – occasionally a source of embarrassment, especially when you are at once point instructed to slam your fist onto the table.

“Etiquette” isn’t the unsettling experience that “The Smile on your Face” offers, largely because it is a little full of its own cleverness. You spend half an hour as an academic and a prostitute discussing the nature of language, words and theatre, which is entertaining enough – if a little pretentious – but perhaps a wasted opportunity.

What it does hint at is the possibilities for the future. The company’s real performers needed only perform once and then the act is on all day every day for the duration of the festival and touring. This is a much, much cheaper way to put on a show than the conventional way. Venue costs are much lower, too. This would never work for every type of production, but for some it’s a fantastic opportunity to reach new audiences and try out new ideas. For adventurous theatregoers, it’s a chance to get closer to the material than one ever usually could.

“The Smile off your Face”, while more staff-intensive, can be just as commercial as real theatre, despite its one-on-one nature. The show’s producer assures me that the show can achieve throughput of about 60 people in a 3-hour slot. There are a great many shows at the Fringe which would be ecstatic to pull in 60 people. This kind of material can be as profitable as traditional shows. This is important: it’s called show business for a reason.

We’re being told from all sides that society is now all about the self; media is about interaction, customisation and individualisation. Seeing theatre and the arts begin to follow the trend is no shock – if art doesn’t mirror society, it’s not doing its job. Of course, some art forms were ahead of the curve. Long before the dawn of the internet, geeky teenagers could enjoy “create your own adventure books”, which required the reader to turn to different pages to make different decisions. Those guys will be ecstatic – many of these new-era productions are essentially all-singing all-dancing versions of those retro favourites, albeit with fewer swords, axes and silly names.

Less eager to embrace this new future will be the shy theatregoer who can imagine nothing worse than being forced to perform on crossing the threshold of the local playhouse. Luckily for them, the traditional performance is not on the way out yet – or if it is, “new age” theatre isn’t the main threat – but even here some refinements are happening. This year’s Festival saw an excellent version of Romeo and Juliet in which the audience chose at the beginning of show which thespians played each role. Nightmare for the cast, great fun for the audience and the reviews were full of praise.

So next time someone complains about the Fringe festival – or of theatre generally – being “too commercial” or dull, point them in the direction of these ambitious new productions. Unless your friends are supremely confident, they’ll almost certainly leave their comfort zones and will hopefully enjoy the experience. If nothing else, they’ll have discovered a reason to be tied up and blindfolded that you can mention to the parents. And that can only be a good thing.

James Ball is a postgraduate journalism student at City University. He edited issues four and five of the Oxford Forum. His blog can be found at http://www.jamesrb.co.uk