War of the Festivals Rages On in Edinburgh
Date: 7 August 2000
The “world's largest arts festival” opened at the weekend. Though many productions started their runs last week, the 53rd annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe officially began yesterday, Sunday 6 August, and continues to 28 August 2000. For the third year running, the Fringe has started a week earlier than its more austere parent, the Edinburgh International Festival, which runs this year from 13 August to 2 September 2000.
The 2000 Fringe features more world premieres than ever before - some 275 of the 1,350 productions mounted will be debuting in Edinburgh. Fringe acts fall into eight categories - children's shows, comedy and revue, dance and physical, musicals and opera, talks and events, theatre and visual arts. In total, nearly 17,000 performances will be staged at 177 venues across the city over twenty-three days.
Theatre comprises the largest category with 479 productions, including 135 world premieres, with an additional 51 musical and operatic productions also being staged. Premieres include a double-bill of monologues from Weir author Conor McPherson at the Assembly Rooms. The young Irish writer penned Rum and Vodka and The Good Thief while studying at Trinity College Dublin in the early 1990s - long before the Olivier Award-winning Weir became an international hit.
Other theatre highlights include: Steven Berkoff's Messiah, 'a controversial retelling of Jesus Christ's life and death', also at the Assembly Rooms; Bed, a comedy about seven elderly people and one enormous bed, by Jim Cartwright, author of The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, at the Pleasance; Decky Does a Bronco a new site-specific work, this year staged in a children's playground, from local company, Grid Iron; and at Dynamic Earth, a multi-media production of Sam Shepard's Fool for Love, directed by David Soul (of TV's Starsky and Hutch fame and seen most recently in Alan Ayckbourn's Comic Potential in the West End) and starring Soul with Stefan Dennis (from Aussie TV soap Neighbours).
The International Festival isn't short of drama attractions either. The New York-based Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI) will bring The War of the Worlds – a play about the life of Orson Welles and his most famous character, Charles Foster Kane, from the classic film Citizen Kane, which Welles directed at the tender age of just 25 – to the Royal Lyceum Theatre from 24 to 27 August. Before Citizen Kane, Welles made his name in radio. In 1938, his adaptation of HG Wells novel The War of the Worlds caused panic across the country. The broadcast reported – and many listeners believed – that Martians had landed in a New Jersey village and were preparing to invade. As part of the festival, the infamous radio play will also be staged, for one performance only, at the Lyceum.
More than half a million people plan their August holidays each year around a trip to Edinburgh. Though commonly seen as one single festival, the event is in reality six different festivals - the original Edinburgh International Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe, the Military Tattoo, the Jazz Festival, the Film Festival and the Book Festival - of which the Fringe is, by far, the largest.
For further information, contact the Fringe box office on +44-131-226-5138 or the International Festival box office on +44-131-473-2000.
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