The media has been saturated with coverage of the 51st Edinburgh Festival, which wound up on Aug. 31. Americans at the main Festival included the Twyla Tharp Company, the San Francisco Ballet, and Mark Morris, whose production of Rameau's comic opera Platƒe was highly acclaimed. As always the British press were captivated by the outlandishness of the Fringe, which confounds the prophets of doom by continuing to grow in size. This year the three-and-a-half week bonanza boasted a record-breaking 1,278 shows involving 9,644 performers. Curbs are unlikely while the biggest arts festival in the world makes money. Last year the local economy was boosted by £122 million.
Among 605 companies appearing on this year's Fringe were 40 from the U.S. and Canada. Prestigious "Fringe First" awards went to America's Tamarind Theatre for Hellcab and Canada's Catalyst Theatre for Elephant Wake. Already grabbing most of the headlines is the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, famously featuring a man who swings two irons from his penis. When I saw the show in London in 1993, the man in front of me fainted. The Times reported that this year Rose himself joined those protesting his presence in Edinburgh. "They didn't recognize me and they even gave me a placard to hold," he boasted.
Margarita Pracatan, the Cuban New Yorker spotted on Manhattan Cable by British TV presenter Clive James, made the news just by falling off the stage and canceling one of her sold-out shows. Pracatan's tuneless renditions of pop standards have made her a cult sensation in the U.K. My friends in New York think I'm joking when I insist that she is mobbed here during national tours. Well, it's true.
Among other Yanks on the Fringe were Austin Pendleton in his own play Uncle Bob; paranormal showman Max Maven; comics Rick Almada, Rich Fulcher, Scott Capurro, Greg Proops, and Steven Alan Green; dance groups Bodies Electric and the Burklyn Youth Ballet; and theatre companies California Faultzone, Foolery, Ghost Road, The Unseam'd Shakespeare Company, and Theater Ten Ten.
The phenomenal West End and Edinburgh hit Shopping and Fucking will premiere in New York early in 1998--probably as a co-production with New York Theatre Workshop. If you want to join the jamboree in 1998, call the Fringe Society from November onwards on 011 44 31 225 5257, or E-mail on admin edfringe.com.
Royal Opera House Investigated
Members of Parliament have been listening to shocking revelations about the Royal Opera House, currently closed for rebuilding. On July 24 the Committee appointed to investigate alleged mismanagement at the House heard from Genista McIntosh that she resigned after only four months as chief executive because she was "extremely unhappy in the job." Committee Chairman Gerald Kaufman told her, "You've just utterly blown this cover story that you resigned due to ill health." McIntosh's predecessor, Sir Jeremy Isaacs, admitted that he was still being paid his salary nine months after quitting his post.
On July 29, Opera House chairman Lord Chadlington revealed that the previous week an "eleventh hour" contribution of £2 million by private trusts had saved the House from insolvency. "These donors have made it quite clear they will not bail us out again," said His Lordship. Hearings will resume in September.
On Aug. 3, Adrian Noble, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, attacked the Opera House on a television chat show. "The antics of the Opera House have set back the cause of arts and the lottery in this country by years," he claimed. Noble wants the National Lottery to contribute £20 million to redevelop the RSC's theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, but suspects that the public is "now hostile towards the arts and particularly to lottery funding for buildings for the arts."
Producer Kenwright in Turmoil
Charismatic producer Bill Kenwright has been hit by a series of disasters that would have defeated many a lesser mortal. In my last column, I reported on his revival of Pygmalion, which lost its star, Emily Lloyd, and went through three changes of director before struggling into the West End on July 28. Now his production of David Rabe's Hurlyburly, seen earlier this year at the Old Vic, has suffered similar upheaval. After one day's rehearsal, star Ethan Hawke walked out and returned to the U.S. His leading lady, Patsy Kensit, who had come on board specifically to work with Hawke, then quit as well. "It looks like curtains," a Kenwright staffer told the Evening Standard.
But Kenwright was not to be thwarted. He replaced Hawke with Rupert Graves, who was in the Old Vic production, and Kensit with his (Kenwright's) girlfriend, Jenny Seagrove. The play opened at the Queens only one week late, on Aug. 28. Wilson Milam, co-founder of Chicago's Hired Gun Theater, directs. Kenwright will not be drawn into an argument over the debacle. "Ethan Hawke inexplicably abandoned the project during the first week of rehearsal," he stated to The Guardian. "The rest is in the hands of lawyers."
SUB: Child Rape Play Attacked
The announcement of an upcoming play at the Royal Court, in which a teenage girl is gang-raped by boys, coincided with the news that four 10-year-old boys are to be prosecuted for the alleged rape of a nine-year-old girl in a toilet at their West London school. Seemingly to whip up further outrage, the Times of Aug. 26 claimed that children's charities are "alarmed" by the prospect that Fairgame, by Rebecca Prichard, opens at the Royal Court on Oct. 30. Further into that story, the Times revealed that one of the two charities interviewed, Childline, would only go so far as to say, "We are concerned but it depends on how the scenes are going to be depicted."
Fairgame is inspired by an Israeli play first seen in Haifa in 1991. The British adaptation premiered last October at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth, where response, according to the press officer I telephoned, was "very positive." The Royal Court's press release goes to great pains to point out that "Fairgame is a serious-minded and moral play," and that all the young actors under consideration for the roles will be given the script in advance to discuss with their parents or guardians. A spokesman for the Royal Court told me, "This play has been sensationalized by people who have not read the script."
SUB: Brooklyn Actor Opens London Theatre
Brooklyn-born actor and director Riggs O'Hara has opened London's newest theatre in a Victorian school later used as a mail-sorting office. The Post Office Theatre, located in a dead-end street in North Kensington, is a unique project comprising both a performance and living space. It opened Aug. 3 with O'Hara's musical comedy Noel Coward in Poland. "I'm not going to close the door to anyone with talent," says O'Hara of the theatre's policy.
Arriving in London in 1958 with the Broadway production of West Side Story, O'Hara fell under the spell of John Dexter's revolutionary productions for the Royal Court. O'Hara worked regularly for Dexter on stage and screen, but retired as an actor in 1977. He's since directed both in the U.K. and abroad. After Dexter's death in 1990, O'Hara was idly looking at properties advertised in an estate agent's window. "Boy, have I got a place for you," said the agent, and drove O'Hara to the derelict post office. O'Hara took one look and said, "I'll have it." Three months later, he had sold his house in nearby Holland Park and had begun gutting his new acquisition. "When I got involved with the Royal Court," O'Hara explains, "I learned that the be-all and end-all was to have your own space and your own company."
It took him a year to open his first theatre, which he designed himself. The front door opens directly on to a 40-seat performance space and O'Hara's kitchen, which doubles as a refreshment bar. His living room, on a raised deck, overlooks the auditorium. Beneath the deck are rooms where members of his company live. "I'm master of all I survey," beams the puckish entrepreneur, who looks in his late 40s, but has to be considerably older. "If I told you how old I am, you'd help me across the street," he chuckles. O'Hara doesn't care that he has no money left. Bills are paid by "faith, hope, and charity." He plans to turn the space into an Italian piazza and stage Romeo and Juliet with the cast serving wine and pasta to the audience.
SUB: Finally
Charlton Heston and his wife, Lydia Clarke Heston, are undertaking a very low-key U.K. tour of A.R. Gurney's Love Letters. The popular two-hander is playing one- and two-night stands in eight U.K. cities without hitting London . The Royal Ballet's first black dancer is 17-year-old Jerry Douglas from Sacramento, Calif. He will make his debut with the company at the Apollo, Hammersmith, September 24 . Producer David Mirvish's statement of faith in Sir Peter Hall's repertory season at the Old Vic appears all the more noble now that it has been revealed that the first year of operations is likely to lose £1 million. "We are losing money," Mirvish admitted to critic Nicholas de Jongh. "It's been much more ambitious and expensive than I anticipated" . Playwright David Hare is to leave the Royal National Theatre after 15 years. His last play for the National, Amy's View, opened in June. His next, The Judas Kiss, about Oscar Wilde, will open in 1998 at the Almeida.