UNITED KINGDOM: MORE THAN 1,500 PRODUCTIONS COMPETE FOR AUDIENCES AT THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL AND IT'S FRINGE

Record ID: 391866

  • Title: UNITED KINGDOM: MORE THAN 1,500 PRODUCTIONS COMPETE FOR AUDIENCES AT THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL AND IT'S FRINGE
  • Date: 18th August 2001
  • Summary: CLIP FROM BEGGAR'S OPERA
  • Embargoed: 2nd September 2001 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UNITED KINGDOM
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Topics: Entertainment,General
  • Reuters ID: LVA5M9OCXOATD9VBIWHEGK6HXW06
  • Story Text: The coming weekend is the busiest in Edinburgh's festival month. Thousands of people from every corner of the globe will be flying in to the Scottish capital to sample an intoxicating mix of bagpipes, wedding speeches, Indian street performers, Israeli acrobats, Thai Ladyboys... and that's just a start! Edinburgh's Royal Mile is heaving with performers, struggling to get an audience into their competing shows. From lying asleep on the ground surrounded by fliers to shoving pamphlets into faces... people are getting desperate. Which isn't surprising considering there are almost 1,5000 productions to compete with and this is the time to convince passers-by that yours is the show they need to see.
    Or, in the case of Just Married, not see. The art of Edinburgh is sifting through the amateur attempts at drama or comedy to find the quality, groundbreaking work. Just Married belongs to the former category. Stewart Ferris and Emma Burgess have just got married and decided to spend their honeymoon subjecting their audience to their wedding speech. A unique publicity stunt, a happy moment for the two lovebirds to work at their dream of becoming comic actors.... but much work is needed.
    Zohar Markman and Michal Lehrer are another happy couple who have come to do their thing at Edinburgh, but this Israeli team has talent and lots of it. They call themselves Pyromania and the show they've brought to the festival is Embryonic Dreams. "It tells a story of this man and this woman meeting from when they were meeting as a kind of young and full of sexual energy. And their relationship - getting married, getting older, dying and the whole story is told in a very visual way, just different to a theatre show." Dance, pyrotechnics, flames, laser lights, film ... all fused to an originally composed club soundtrack which leaves the audience transformed into another place. Zohar and Michal left Israel three years ago but plan to return in the future. There is a pattern of youngsters leaving Israel to discover new cultures, places.... and leave behind the growing tension in that part of the world. Zohar has plans to get Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat to Edinburgh. "If we could get everyone in Israel in the conflict, just come to the month for the Edinburgh Festival, then the last thing they'd want to do is fight."
    There's also a big group of performers from Edinburgh.
    Although they have only just become actors. Delhi theatre director Royston Abel found himself in Delhi's notorious slum of Shadipur Depot where he found himself fascinated by the street performers - jugglers, snake performers, drummers... He decided to build a play around and using this motley crew called "At the Fringe: A Beggar's Opera".
    "I auditioned something like five or six hundred people you know and it was a difficult choice of whom, not to select rather than whom to select."
    At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Ladyboys of Bangkok are very, very experienced performers, well used to entertaining an audience. Their cabaret show is not the sort of thing one gets to see in Edinburgh. Not surprisingly these pretty, all-singing, all-dancing men are one of the big attractions of the festival.
    Producer xxx says the Ladyboys offer true theatre. "They've gone so far for their art and their performance, it's probably the most real theatre you'll see anywhere in the world because these people not only perform like this but they actually dedicate and live their whole lives to this performance."
    The Edinburgh madness is about to come to an end... but their are still a good few days left to pack in the performances! --
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