Strange brew

tauringhuang.

Aug 19th 2008
From Economist.com

The weirdest week in Scotland


Monday | Tuesday


Monday
I WAKE up, eat a quick breakfast and leave my flat to go to the gas chamber: just another day at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, the biggest live-arts festival in the world.

The Fringe is famous for plays that attempt (sometimes strain) to shock. The menu this year includes titles like “Gentlemen and Strippers” and “Shitty Deal Puppet Theater Company’s Complete History of Oppressed People Everywhere!” But the show getting the most attention for pushing the boundaries of good taste pulls off an impressive feat: it finds a new way to exploit the Holocaust.


"The Factory” asks you to interact “The Factory,” mounted by the Badac Theater Company, a producer of plays “based around human rights issues,” turns the death camps of Auschwitz into interactive theatre. “Tony N’ Tina’s Wedding” meets “Schindler’s List.”

The papers have been full of preview stories, and the critics have generally praised it, raving about the intensity of the experience. The Guardian even promoted the piece with a flattering profile only one page after a review that lambasted the moral purpose of “Charlie Victor Romeo,” a skilfully produced docudrama based on black-box transcripts from real plane crashes.

“The Factory” has only one commercial problem: there’s another show called “The Factory,” an avant-garde multimedia dance piece, playing a few blocks away, leading to some unfortunate misunderstandings. When I attended the dance-theater version of “The Factory,” last week, a bespectacled hipster, standing in front of me in line, shouted jokingly “To the gas chamber!” before entering the theatre, making him, I would guess, the first person to ever be disappointed that he didn’t wind up at Auschwitz.

Anyhow, there’s no dancing at the other “Factory,” but the audience seemed equally enthusiastic. My wife decided to stay at home, so I stood next to a cheerful Scottish tour guide who told me, “I fancy seeing the reality of it.” Before entering the dank basement, where we were to meet our end, an usher broke the mood by asking gently if any of us were claustrophobic. No, we’re fine, but thanks for asking, said a very game middle-aged woman. These Nazis were very polite.

Inside the dark, cool basement was the kind of stylish industrial lighting that you might find at a New York coffee bar. Banging on metal plates like members of “Stomp,” several angry, scowling Nazis, repeating a few obscenities in a stylised shout, herded us into rows. We were yelled at and pushed around a little, sent into increasingly smaller rooms of this cavernous brick underworld. But the actors playing Jews got the worst of it, dragged several feet, bullied and forced to strip. One actress, dressed in dusty stripes, looked around at the audience, imploring us: “We must do something. What do we do—walk to our death?”

Minutes later, the guard took her down the stairs and into another room. She continued to wail, talking to herself about the need to “die with dignity.” One audience member teared up and for some, it was clearly a gruesome, ugly sight, but I couldn’t help but notice that behind her on the wall there was a white sign that read “No smoking.”

After being gassed by the Nazis, I thought it would be uplifting to then be entertained by some Israelis, so I walked a few hundred feet away to a different theater in the same complex, The Pleasance Courtyard, to see “The Aluminium Show,” a spectacle so mindless and insubstantial that it could have only been created by a people secure in their future. Following in the footsteps of “Blue Man Group” and other such international wordless entertainments, this show features a team of athletic puppeteers who manipulate a variety of shiny wormlike tubes which flop, dance, fall from the rafters and pop out into the audience.

The aluminium is also put to use as couture clothes in a fashion show and turns into a cannon that fires sheets of foil into the audience. Pillow-shaped and round aluminum balls levitate on stage and join together to form a giant puppet monster.

The makers of the show ran out of good ideas about thirty minutes in (how many clever things can you do with aluminium, for god’s sake?) but judging by the reactions of the kids in the audience, chances are the show will transfer to London, then Off Broadway and keep running to the delight of tourists—Jew and gentile, black and white, child and childish—until the end of time.



Tuesday

UNLIKE every other theatre festival in the world, the Edinburgh Fringe completely takes over its host city. In an age when theatre has been pushed to the periphery of the culture, it’s jarring to see actors rehearsing Brecht in line for morning coffee, flocks of school-age drama students singing Stephen Sondheim in a back alley and most strikingly, marketing departments—usually comprised of actors in the shows being marketed—absolutely everywhere.

Blanketing the city like beggars in Calcutta, this army of promoters, fresh-faced and smiling, pass out fliers, chat you up and exude a very familiar brand of desperation. That may be part of the reason that not one of them has ever, as far as I can tell, convinced a single person to see a show.

PA

Yes, it's artStill, they plod on. They get in your way, mumble incoherently and generally seem unable to articulate what makes their show different from the other 2,087. The Scotsman, bible of all things Fringe, even tried to help these aspiring stars this week by offering a tongue-in-cheek column of advice which including instructions such as “Wear as little as possible” and “If someone refuses to take a flyer speak an obscenity loudly as they pass—they may look back. You want that.”

Founded as a small, scrappy alternative to the more establishment International Festival, the Fringe began as a loose confederation of eight companies in 1947. It took a decade before they set up a collective box office and another one before they hired a full-time administrator.

In its original constitution, a radical document for its time, the Fringe announced that it “did not come together so that groups could be vetted, or invited.” The Edinburgh experiment has become one of the greatest success stories in theatres, spawning festivals all over the world, some of which depart from its defiantly democratic spirit. When the founders of the New York Fringe announced that they would curate (God forbid!) they were immediately branded sell-outs, spawning another short-lived festival that stayed true to the roots of Edinburgh.

The Fringe remains open to anyone who has enough money to mount a production, but its idealistic early days are long gone; it has become a big business. In my first two days this year, I saw major West End and Broadway producers and an Off Broadway artistic director searching for the next big thing. And this is the first year in history that comedy events outnumber drama, the heart and soul of the festival that has been gradually overtaken by the much more reliable ticket-selling entertainment of stand-up jokers.

Drama just wasn’t selling. On my first night, I saw a one-man show that received a good write-up in the Scotsman. It had an audience of three, one of whom (alright, it was me) walked out. Avoiding artistic vetting can have its drawbacks.

About an hour after I left my flat to dive into the chaos of the festival, I was confronted by two awkward girls wielding glossy brochures and the wild-eyed expressions of true believers. They started pitching immediately, telling me about the fantastic piece of physical theatre that they were starring in only a few blocks away. I took their literature and asked what it was all about. They looked momentarily stumped, before one piped up, “Commercialism and consumerism.” They didn’t laugh when I told them those were my two favourite things.