On a winter’s day, you can go up to Edinburgh’s city centre from World’s End Close, perhaps so named as it was perceived to be the end of the world in bygone days. From this spot, it is possible to sense the true essence of Edinburgh: beautiful, gothic and rather lonesome. A few adventurers walk in front of a pub, trying to cross the streets covered in snow to go to the university, or an hotel.
Not so on the seventh of August, when it is chaos.
From Edinburgh University to the Summer Hall building, the city is in artistic turmoil due to the Edinburgh Festival, the greatest arts festival in the world.
Under the banner heading of Edinburgh Festival, there are, however, several different layers of events all taking place in the Scottish capital in August. Of these, The Fringe has become the major platform: in 2015, it hosted 50,459 performances, 3,314 shows on 313 different stages. All in three weeks. An extraordinary result, especially considering that, at the beginning, the Fringe was no more than an independent event, composed of just eight almost unknown theatre companies that had not been officially invited. They were what the Scottish journalist Robert Kemp, called the periphery, the edges of the official Festival. Indeed, the fringe.
In all of this, Italians have always played a significant role. One of three founders of the Traverse Theatre in 1963, Scots Italian Richard Demarco has been highly influential in elevating the artistic status of the Fringe to a truly international level. And today, after English speakers, Italians are the second largest group of participating artists, often rewarded with prestigious prizes. In 2012 The Fringe First Award went to La merda, for writing excellence, and in 2015, the So You Think You’re Funny award was presented to Luca Cupani. In that year, Italians staged almost thirty shows, and many were there from the first to the last day.
Why do they come from afar to take part in the Fringe? For an Italian actor, and often for all the others as well, the Fringe Festival is a perilous challenge, not a source of earnings. The artists have to guarantee a certain number of spectators, or they themselves will have to pay for the missing income. The majority are not even able to cover their expenses. Reviews are worth a fortune, and it is often the first week of a show that establishes the success of the following two. The actors have to queue for hours to enter the Meet the Media event on the second day where, squeezed in between ventriloquists and Shakespearian actors, they have around three minutes to convince the journalists that their show is unmissable. Language can be a barrier; albeit international, the Festival is nevertheless strongly Anglophone and often concentrates on genres British people adore but that Italians hardly know, such as the musical and the stand-up comedy act.
Nonetheless, the Fringe is an open door to the global stage. It is followed daily by British and American newspapers, such as the Guardian and the New York Times, and is often a fundamental step to landing on-stage in London’s theatre land or the world outside Europe. It is exciting, because beyond the theatre where the actors are playing with its audience of two hundred people, there is a community of half a million people, all gathered there for that month only.
— Photo: The acrobats of the Italian company “Liberi di…”, stretching before their show “Something” during the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe.
