Finding fame on the Fringe

By PENNY ASHTON

Take live fellatio, Pam Ayres, Bart Simpson and a bout of the pox. Mix them together, cook them up in a sheep's stomach with a dash of oatmeal and bagpipes - and voila, you have the madness that is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2004.

Edinburgh becomes a town possessed during the month of August as culture leaks from every converted loft, underground vault and transformed lecture theatre. Space is a premium commodity, and performances are held anywhere from container trucks to lifts to just about any street corner you can shake a diabolo at.

Edinburgh's impressive Royal Mile is the heart of all things Fringe. It is the oldest stretch of road in the city, dating back to the 11th century, and leads up to the imposing Edinburgh Castle.

The Mile is made up of four different streets, and during the festival its hub is completely closed off to vehicles, teeming instead with human traffic.

Grown men dress as chickens in underpants, unicyclists whiz by, and a toothy, all-smiling chorus line of American teenagers sing Luck be a Lady Tonight. The main focus of their attention is the dazed punter constantly bombarded with flyers, free tickets and promises of a wonderful show if only they'd come and see.

It's not surprising that the festival can be overwhelming for tourists. The Fringe Programme is a phone book-sized booklet of 224 pages featuring roughly 1700 shows. Add to this the Edinburgh Festival, the Book Festival, the Film Festival, the TV Festival, the Jazz Festival and a new Art Festival, and it's little wonder that the average audience size for a fringe show is [unofficially] 10.

As daunting as this is for the audience to sift through, it is even more so for the 15,000 performers attempting to attract the tourist pound. With venues charging up to 40 per cent of the door take, along with what seems like a million charges on the side, getting those kilts on seats becomes a fierce competition of survival of the luvviest.

I am performing Hot Pink with Penny Ashton for the first time offshore, and I have to admit, rewarding as it can be, this is one of the hardest experiences of my life.

I have no marketing budget so every day this month I've been hitting the streets and handing out my hot pink flyers in an effort to get people to see my show. It's exhausting work before I've even performed, and sometimes 200 flyers will result in only 19 audience members.

I had Edinburgh described to me as The Agony and the Ecstasy before I left New Zealand, and this makes perfect sense. I have had five-star reviews then faced an audience who refused to laugh.

I've even had Pam Ayres come to my show, only to watch her be dripped on by my leaking venue. Still, as hard as it all is, I'm having the time of my life.

In reality, though, this is hardly a Fringe Festival. Edinburgh is essentially a huge trade fair, with comedians looking for "that" sitcom, producers looking for "that" West End transfer and everyone looking to get laid. There are hundreds of promoters in town and they're all looking for those diamonds in the roughage.

To ensure they are not overlooked, many big-name productions invest thousands of pounds in mega-marketing machines, making it even harder for the little independent shows. The darling of this year's New Zealand Comedy Festival, Scottish comic Danny Bhoy, has his face plastered on the side of Black Cabs and every spare inch of space in town is swathed in posters.

There is even top Hollywood totty in town, with Christian Slater taking the lead role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and helping that run completely sell out before it even opened (although a nasty case of chicken pox for Slater almost closed the production down).

To be fair, though, these acts have worked hard to achieve box office figures, and now that Slater is well his performances have been touted as brilliant.

This isn't always the case. This year's major disappointment has come from Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson, with her show My Life as a Ten Year Old Boy. It has been slated by the critics, and this punter can confirm it was quite dreadful. Despite this, she is packing an audience in every night because Bart Simpson is a bankable star. Unfortunately for her, she can't make them stay, with many exiting in the middle of her performance.

The other popular tactic is good old-fashioned shock tactics. The most notorious show at the Fringe this year is XXX, a Spanish dramatisation of a Marquis de Sade piece. It has scenes of simulated anal rape, projections of breast augmentation surgery and the performing of fellatio on planted audience members. It has received mixed reviews but, of course, has not struggled to attract an audience.

But having said all of that it is still possible to make it big here in Edinburgh if you have the talent and the stamina to keep pushing. New Zealand's Flight of the Conchords have proved this over the past three years. They first played here in 2002 and were a self-produced cult hit. Three festivals later they are virtually selling out a 300-seat venue every night and are a hot favourite for comedy's top prize, the Perrier Award.

If you chose to see every single show at the Fringe it would take over four years with no time to eat, sleep or visit the little girl's room. There's music in the air, theatre in the water and comedy in the toilet.

Mad as it all is, a celebration of the arts on a scale such as this can only be a good thing. Wish me luck.