Whilst I wouldn't advocate hiding your forehead behind a mop of hair, another kind of fringe is definitely in fashion right now. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival has long been popular with students, and with this year's festival promising to be bigger and better than ever before, 2005 should be no exception.
The Festival is just one part of the Edinburgh Festival, a generic term used to describe the cultural explosion that has taken place in the city in August each year since the late 1940s (the others being the International Festival, the Edinburgh Book Festival, the Film Festival, the Military Tattoo, the Jazz Festival and the Edinburgh Mela). With such a phenomenal six weeks of art and culture, it is no wonder that Edinburgh has arguably become the festival city and a Mecca for wannabe actors, musicians and comedians.
But it is the Fringe Festival that has historically offered the most for student visitors to the city, with over half of Fringe-goers under 25. The Fringe has consistently broken its own record every year as the largest arts festival in the world (Guinness Book of Records), and in 2003 it broke through the one million visitor barrier for the first time.
Each year it brings thousands of performances of hundreds of shows in over 200 venues across the Scottish capital. The popularity of the festival is reflected in the number of visitors that return every year, with three quarters of visitors having attended more than once and a third more than five times. Over a quarter return every year.
This year a group of students from the University of Hull will be joining the hundreds of other students taking their own productions to the festival. Two final year students, Jeremy Williams and Lynsey Mellor, have established a new student theatre company, Gist, which will be taking their self-written play, Poppycock!, to the Fringe in August.
The play concentrates on the relationship between the two central characters, Becky and Mike, who on the face of it have little in common but are kept together for some mysterious reason. As Lynsey, who co-wrote the script and plays the role of Becky, remarks, "The idea that these two people are together is nonsensical and defies rational explanation. Poppycock! looks at the relationship Mike and Becky have and tries to explain why, whilst they can't seem to live with each other, they can't live apart."
For those for whom neither visiting the festival in the conventional manner (and let's face it, with the next loan instalment not due until September, that could be most of us) nor starring in a production is an option, the Edinburgh Festival offers numerous part-time job opportunities for students. Collecting tickets or working in one the many bars and cafés that capitalise on the huge numbers of affluent Festivalgoers are popular options.
This year the Edinburgh Fringe Festival will take place from the 7th to the 29th of August. Tickets go on sale from the 10th of June and may be bought from the Fringe box office at 180 High Street in Edinburgh, by telephone on 0131 226 0026 or from the official Fringe website at
www.edfringe.com.
Poppycock! runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival between 23 and 29 August 2005 and will be performed daily in Augustine's Studio 1 (time to be confirmed). For more information about Gist, visit
gisttheatre.blogspot.com.
Article written by Tom Hart and can be found at http://www.therundown.co.uk
