Forest Fringe Profiles: Action Hero

[The first of the company profiles I mentioned about three seconds ago for the Forest Fringe Blog on the wonderful Action Hero from Bristol]

Action Hero

I first saw Gemma and James from Action Hero at I Am Still Your Worst Nightmare, a weekend-long live art spectacular at the Arnolfini in Bristol. The whole event was great in its openness; with a completely uncurated collection of work things swung from the brilliant to the kind of awfulness that takes you to a very sad place inside. Action Hero (along with Ed Rapley and Emma Bennett from These Horses) were probably the best thing about the whole weekend.

For their short piece they did a recreation of Evel Knievel's 1969 Caesar's Palace jump that left him in a coma for over three weeks. It was a simple and beautiful idea, playing lovingly with the difference in scale between the theirs and the original jump while retaining some really tangible trace of the original's sense of euphoria and fear. Here we all were staring at a guy on pedalling towards a ramp on a little red bicycle and yet, there was real pause, a real breath held, an authentic moment of danger. The really beautiful thing about the piece however was its loving attention to detail; it wasn't just a good idea. It was done so thoughtfully, borrowing text from a number of sources to create something that already at this early stage was already subtly questioning and undermining the collective excitement that it so effortlessly generated.

Anyway, it was a beautiful piece and I was super excited when we agreed to have them come do the next stage of development at Forest Fringe. In the meantime I also got the chance to see a version of possibly their most popular show A Western, which has toured across the country. It's a wonderful little show; a show that demonstrates that the act of playing (because they are always playing at being in a Western, covering themselves in Ketchup, riding on another little bike) can be as meaningful as doing anything for real. What struck me this time however was that both pieces were slightly in love with and slightly nervous of this kind of deeply Midwestern American mythology that seemed so familiar to me.

I grew up listening to my parents record collection, getting lost in the world of a collection of denim-wearing, guitar twanging lovesick bearded men roaming dusty open roads in big American cars and staring out at an ocean I'd never even seen. The Eagles and the Allman Brothers (and everything from Steven Spielgberg to Perry Mason Investigates) were the nearest I came to a cultural heritage. Despite my resolutely, awkward, humdrum Britishness there's part of me that feels in some weird way American. But a kind of imagined, mythic American.

And this is another reason I love the Action Hero - that they seem too to have this strange pull. They wear their Englishness on their sleeves and yet there's a longing for freeway pancake houses and lonely towns called things like Splitwater Falls and the faded yellow colour of any American TV show from the 70s. It's strange and its sad and its familiar and I think they tap into something really meaningful for a whole generation of suburban English kids who's parents were big fans of Christopher Cross or who spent their childhood watching movies like and Capricorn One and Earthquake, a beautiful, bizarre film that coincidentally features its own desperate daredevil hero.

Forests, critics, arts centres, fights and hide and seek

Another breathless burst of thoughts in between other things - sorry if that's become the norm in this town (which seems to have taken on the shape of some Western outpost with one guy left sitting on his porch watching bemusedly as I hustle occasionally across the only street in town from the Saloon to the workhouse) but alas turns out the summer is a busy time of year.

And Summer it definitely now is with Wimbledon bringing out the quaintly middle-class hat wearer in all of us and the Edinburgh Festival drawing mighty close. As you may know I'm co-running a venue this year called Forest Fringe with my delightful Canadian friend Debbie Pearson (and it was Canada Day yesterday so up the cannucks once more).

We've pretty much managed to haul the programme over the finish line now and the whole thing is up on the venue's beautiful new website. We also have a blog which I thought it worth me starting to try and write a bit for so with that in mind I've decided to revive the idea of the company profiles I did for Aurora Nova last year to give people a better idea of who some of the people that will be performing at Forest are. So hopefully I'll start writing those over the course of the next couple of weeks and they'll start appearing here.

For the purpose of trying to focus more on this (and on Exposures in Dublin in September) I've also (rather terrifyingly) finished working for BAC and am now 100% freelance (or 100% unemployed if you wanted to look at things more bleakly). It's been a completely lovely (and relatively life-changing) year working for them and I'm sure I'll probably continue to do things with them so BAC-relate will continue to be kept to a minimum round here for fear of appearing biased.

There's also another article by me up at the Guardian where I'm rather scathing about a night I went to a little while ago at the Southwark playhouse. At the time I was left completely incensed by the entire experience but now (about a week later when the post finally bobbed to the surface at the Guardian) I'm feeling a lot more torn. Is it really necessary to be so vicious about something, especially if it's not a review? Probably not is the answer and its just childish petulance on my part to write such things and the comments have pretty much born this out.

But then other the other hand I did receive an email from a writer saying that he agreed with me and that it was about time that someone blew the whistle on their particular brand of superficial and relatively smug political engagement.

Since I've been writing this quite a few people have said to me that they think its brave/foolhardly/downright stupid and childish and self important (delete as appropriate) to write so much publicly about theatre when at the same time trying to make it. And there is a part of me that every time one of these articles goes up does sink a little thinking that possibly that's another several column inches down in the grave I'm so tirelessly digging for myself. But at a time when people won't stop going on about the importance of peer review, surely we should be able to take a bit of criticism from each other? Of course I guess the difficulty comes in the arena of the internet where those personal criticisms swim dangerously close to what feels like solid statement-of-fact reviewing, especially on the Guardian Blog.

I've seen bloody and fascinating arguments that have flown back and forth between people such as Chris Goode, Simon Kane, David Eldridge, Tassos Stevens and myself and I think that bruised and bemused though we may have been by them we're all probably better for it. But for the most part those conversations have remained in areas that are decidedly more personal than the Guardian Theatre Blog and perhaps that's where I overstepped the mark this time.

Either way, this whole episode combined with Helen Smith's description of me as passionate-to-the-point-of-appearing-angry has left me thinking that perhaps I should try and adopt a somewhat mellower tone from now on. We'll see how that works out.

In the meantime please do go have a read of this utterly lovely review of Checkpoint, the game I created for the Hide + Seek Festival at the South Bank centre. It was a glorious day and I hope there are many more like it soon.

T - 61 Days and counting

So today the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Programme was released. In a break with tradition, this year the powers that be (probably directed by their brand new lord and master) have done without the usual attractive-woman-doing-something-stupid-and-grinning-stupidly cover shot, replaced instead with a few piercingly mediocre computer generated images on a sea green background you could positively drown in.

The largest of these images is interestingly a camera surrounded by stars. What could the designers be trying to tell us? Is this the first inclings of the Fringe's inevitable moment of anagnorisis? A realisation that it has bartered away any sense of integrity in its fame-thirsty scramble for bigger sponsors, bigger stars and higher prices, fostering a fetid atmosphere of hype and self-promotion that values the disposable and the gimmicky over the difficult and delicate, the flash and the glib and the loud over the small and the thoughtful and the quiet? Is this the moment at which the Fringe catches a glimpse of itself in the mirrored face of one its Scotsman sponsored awards and sees in a moment of excruitating sadness (like Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi, like Ricky Gervais in the Christmas special of Extras) what it has truly become?

Probably not:

There are 2,088 shows this year, only slightly higher than last year's 2,050

I also want to just quickly comment on this from the New Director Jon Morgan:

Because it's not programmed and not curated, performers can say what they like. It's democratic and so you get a much better reflection of what's going on in the world and what issues are preoccupying performers. So in that sense, it's a litmus test of what's happening in the world.

There's little that's truly democratic about the fringe.

The fringe is the kind of democracy that you buy into. It's creative freedom available only to those who can afford their place in a venue, a hostel, the venue programme and the fringe programme along with trifling little things like props, costumes, publicity and, well, actors. And while it may avoid what Morgan seems to be suggesting are the dangerous whims of artistic directors or programmers, it doesn't replace them with a Utopia of creative freedom but with the laws of the market; if you can buy your place you're in. And its a rare kind of performer or artist who can ride the crest of this particular late capitalist wave.

It's actually a very narrow band of voices that you'll find at the festival (even narrower following the departure of Aurora Nova). And you can almost guarantee that large percentage of the most exciting will be funded through either by a regional producing house or by the Arts Council or an international equivalent; as important a form of selection as any directorial curation.

And this is all before you take into account that the Edinburgh model is certainly conducive to only a very limited spectrum of theatrical forms and styles. That being crammed into a small sweaty black box space, having to perform for at least a week consistently to get a spot, that being on at 3 in the afternoon and being watched by an audience who are cramming you in between Paul Merton's Impro All Stars and Appalling Acts of Genocide: The Musical, that all of this might inhibit a whole panoply of voices in Morgan's Democracy from wanting to ride this particular train.

And certainly what I've seen in programming for the Forest are the extraordinary number of companies who would never dream of going to Edinburgh, especially those that have been once and been burnt badly.

What the presence of an artistic director allows you to do is to select and support work from a far broader spectrum of potential companies and artists than that dictated by Edinburgh's big fat bottom line. It allows you to give companies the space and circumstances they need to have their voices heard. It's fighting against the survival of the fittest, against he who shouts the loudest wins; because who says that the fittest or the loudest have the most to say?

Curation gives a leg up, and a platform and a microphone to those that need it. And that may not be the kind of morally bankrupt libertarian notion of democracy that we all seem inured to, but I think in the arts at least that's a good thing.

And at their launch the fringe did manage to find two young (you guessed it) women to clad stupidly and make do stupid things, so not much has really changed after all.

The Little Venue that Could.

For eleven months of the year Edinburgh is a quiet place to live – for a capital city its almost suspiciously tranquil (as long as you avoid the half a mile of hen nights and gell-haired, liquored up Ben Shermanators that shuffle and stumble along the Cowgate into the Grassmaket, braying loudly and urinating at will, much as their bovine predecessors did before them). Even in the summer I remember only long days spent lying on the meadows and easy strolls along the bracingly beautiful crags, gazing out over a mess of roof tops, the castle floating off in the distance.

Come August however, things change. Quiet student union rooms accustomed only to well-organised fantasy wargaming and the occasional illicit sex act are suddenly bristling with chairs and wires and staff in gaudy matching t-shirts hastily taping everything to the floor. Churches that are almost conspicuously empty for the rest of the year suddenly find themselves plastered with sponsorship signs and MDF black boards. The royal mile wakes up one morning to find a series of grotesque plastic columns have been grafted to its cobbles, already being bandaged with brightly coloured posters by early-bird students filled with hope and a blind belief in the power of traditional advertising. Birds fly south, Scots fly north. The Festival has begun.

Every year the BBC and the national newspapers, in between shots of the same relentlessly irritating gold-covered man holding his bloody stupid bicycle, trip over each to point out the obvious misnomer in the title Edinburgh Fringe Festival – that 61 years and several thousand productions of John Godber’s Bouncers after it first strutted scruffily into the city there is very little that is fringe about this festival. It is, it grandly declares, the Largest Arts Festival in the world.

However, no one as yet however seems to have demonstrated that this is a good thing, and it feels to me at least that every year the emphasis falls more on the ‘festival’ and less on the ‘arts’.

Walking through the streets of the city during August, you can’t help but wonder if Edinburgh (the city, its festival) has lost its soul – or at least has misplaced it and rather rashly replaced it with a giant upside-down purple cow filled with C-list celebrities and gymnastic routines. And its all just so, well, relentless – a miniature Las Vegas, a month long New Year’s Eve party, a panic-eyed, half-exhausted reveller rasping out into the night ‘everybody, EV’RYBODY! Can’t you see how mega this is? CAN’T YOU SEE HOW MUCH FUN WE’RE HAVING!?!1!’

You just want to sit the whole thing down and give it a blanket and a hot drink.

And almost inevitably such an environment only benefits certain kinds of shows. As Chris Goode has remarked – the shows of his that have proved most successful at Edinburgh have been those that offer some form of immediate clossure – or at least who’s challenge to the audience is to some degree finalised by the time they leave the sweaty little room they’ve just been sharing for an hour. Open-ended, inconclusive, awkward, subtle and delicate rarely do well at the festival – they can be difficult to get excited about at the best of times and Edinburgh is all about people getting excited.

In Edinburgh an hour is all you get – once they’ve stepped blinking into the streets of Edinburgh you’ve lost them; emotionally and physically the audience is on to the next thing. It’s the theatre equivalent of speed dating – breathless and thrilling but littered with awkward pauses, faces already forgotten, opportunities missed and conversations left incomplete.

All too frequently wonderful theatre can and does drown in this turbulent sea, while other more superficially interesting shows are carried along on a wave of hyperbole and spat out like Jonah safely at the other end – tours booked, careers made.

And drowning in Edinburgh can be expensive business. Edinburgh is sustained on the backs of broken artists paying extortionate amounts for everything from accommodation, to transport, to food, to having their meagre 30 words printed in the Biblically huge Fringe Programme. Meanwhile their supermarket venues, with all the morals and integrity of PT Barnum, blackmail them for space in their own brochures, screw them for every minute they spend in their poorly equipped studio space, ignore them for a month and then virtually disappear off the face of the planet when it comes to paying up. Virtually no one I know hasn’t at some stage been burnt by the festival, and many have sworn they would never go back.

And yet, and yet…

There is something there. Just in the almost tangible presence of that much hope and excitement and unashamed enthusiasm – it hangs in the air, chokes the city like a sugary, intoxicating fog. Bars spill over with people talking about shows, about theatre, unselfconsciously and drunkenly talking about what they believe in. The place is full of people genuinely open to experimentation – people positively thrilling at the opportunity to try something new, something different. I love the fact that you can’t walk five metres without finding someone who really wants to tell you all about their show – someone who fiercely, wonderfully believes in what they are doing. I love that the entire city feels like some kind of carnivalesque playground – bracing itself gamely (and with just enough of an undercurrent of cynicism) for anything that might come along.

I love what Edinburgh can do for a good idea. I love that Ian Shuttleworth and Lyn Gardner and a raft of over-excited promoters will just up and see something solely on the basis that it sounds quite good, because why the hell not its just 3 minutes away and I’ve got a break now before 4.48 Psychosis and who actually needs dinner anyway? I know how much this has meant for my fledgling career and I'm sure plenty of others. A few years ago Stewart Lee wrote a wonderful little column on a show he’d happened to see by a guy no one had heard of called Will Adamsdale that was only supposed to be on for 10 days and it ended up winning the Perrier. There’s still something to Edinburgh, something worth treasuring, something worth fighting for.

All of which was already swilling around somewhere in my head when a friend of mine, a playwright called Deborah Pearson, asked me to co-programme the Forest Fringe with her. And for the reasons described above I absolutely leapt at the chance.

The Forest Fringe is an offshoot of a place called The Forest Café, a volunteer-run not-for-profit haven near Bristo Square. The Forest is a scribbly, messy, wonderfully original space, filled with bizarre drawings and earnest flyers, always full of people just relaxing and reading a good book; the whole place smells of organic humus and second hand sofas. It is, frankly, lovely.

Alongside a small stage in the café it has a gallery and upstairs a beautiful old church hall, all old wood and optimism. Last year Deborah was asked to programme this upstairs space during the festival; not as part of it, or even as an official venue as they had no theatre licence, but just to provide a place that was, philosophically and theatrically, an alternative to the Underbelly and the rest. Brilliantly she chose not to charge anyone to perform at the venue but just simply asked them to give some time to help staff for other shows. It was undoubtedly a huge success – Lyn Gardner described it as ‘a magnet for young artists wanting to try things out’ – I had the chance to do Exposures there for all of £40 spent on disposable cameras and brown envelopes – it got me two commissions and a lovely write up on the Guardian website. Now we’re back, with a theatre licence this time, new black out curtains, a full head of steam and renewed confidence that we’re not the only ones seeking somewhere with a slightly different mentality.

To me the place is an incredible chance to create a new model for how an Edinburgh venue can function. One that embraces the things I believe are really good about the festival and tries to avoid those elements that make it faintly unbearable.

We’re not going to be part of the official fringe. We’re not going to charge artists anything to perform. All shows are going to be ‘pay what you can’. We’re going to have to a wonderful mix of established fringe veterans and younger artists who’ve never performed at the venue before. No one is going to have more than a couple of performances. Everyone is going to have ample rehearsal time. Everyone is going to be asked to give some of their time back to the place, either by staffing the bar or Front of House or by mentoring a younger artist – just spending a couple of hours watching their show and then talking to them about it.

We want to create a venue that cherishes the idea that you can go up to Edinburgh with barely more than a good idea. A place that doesn’t bleed you dry; that doesn’t demand three weeks of performances on the off chance that the Guardian will like your show. A place that genuinely encourages risk and play and experimentation. A place surrounded by about the most open, excited and enormous prospective audience you’ll ever have, by national critics and venue directors; a place that realises this and says, if you come up with something good they will come – so why the hell not.

We want to foster a different kind of Edinburgh experience, for audience and performers. The best thing about the Forest is that it’s there all year round, staffed by the same people, still smelling of humus and sofa. The place is like a quiet bubble of calm. We want it to become an island, a retreat from the crowds; a place of reflection and community. We want you to go and see a show upstairs and then come and sit in the café and have a bit of a think. We want to see artists sitting down and talking with each other. We want interested people with nowhere else to go to come and hang out for a bit, for faces to become familiar – for an audience to become a community.

We have a church hall, a café, some black-out curtains and a couple of lanterns and we’re going to change the world. And if you’ve actually managed to make it this far through this post and have agreed with more than about 55% then I want you to join us.

At the moment we’re beginning to confirm our line-up and I want to hear from anyone who might be interested – in performing or just in helping out. If you’re already doing a show at another venue and fancy the chance to try something else out. If you have a beautiful little show and absolutely no money. Anything really.

Let me know.

Just leave a comment or drop me an email to andy (dot) t (dot) field (at) gmail (dot) com. And please do spread the word.