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Contemporary Review, Nov, 1998 by Laurence Green

The Fringe festival which runs parallel with the main festival as always generated much excitement and remains one of the most unique in the world by having an open-door policy that allows any artist or company to perform in the city without any form of artistic vetting. This year there was a record number of 16,141 performances of 1,309 shows by 9,810 performers. For the first time since its inception in 1947, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe began and ended a week earlier than the official festival. The Fringe has always provided a fertile breeding ground for new talent, experimentation and artistic development and this year was no exception. The Fringe Theatre covered a wide variety of topical issues from the World Cup to the Millenium as well as more contentious issues, such as the death of Princess Diana, and Myra Hindley. Inventor of the female pill, author and playwright, Carl Djerassi's An Immaculate Misconception revealed how babies can be made without men. Time-honoured works included twenty-one Shakespeare productions, four Samuel Beckett plays including the European premiere of All Strange Away and Chekhov's Three Sisters turned into a gay musical by three men from the US.

It was a pleasure to welcome back Arnold Wesker after such a long absence but sadly the writer of Chicken Soup With Barley came up with a disappointing new work. His play Letter to a Daughter (Assembly Rooms) is about a popular singer (Julie Clare) writing to her fourteen-year-old daughter, a letter of advice, which ends being the confession of a single parent who fears she has been an inadequate mother. The 90-minute play, which is punctuated by six songs, is cliche ridden and lacks dramatic bite.

One of the biggest attractions on the Fringe was Gargantua, devised by Ben Harrison and performed by the Grid Iron Theatre Company in one of the most unusual venues I have ever visited - the dank, derelict basement of the Central Library where in a succession of rooms the company enacted a series of evocative tableaux celebrating food and sensual excess and included excerpts from the subversive novels of Rabelais, concluding with an account of the birth of Gargantua. This was wickedly funny and devilishly entertaining and a worthy winner of a Fringe First Award.

Two other Fringe shows worth a mention were: The National Theatre of Brent's Love Upon the Throne (Assembly Rooms and now at the Comedy Theatre, London), a very funny, good-natured send up of pomp and pomposity centring on the marriage and divorce of Prince Charles and Diana which skillfully avoids bad taste, and Cool Heat Urban Beat (Palladium), a rapid fire jazz tap, hip-hop show about rival gangs battling for supremacy, featuring a dazzling display of African-American street dance culture.

As usual the centre of the Fringe was the Traverse Theatre where the best new writing can be found. Festival favourites Communicado staged a sharp little Czech parable, first played clandestinely in Prague in 1973 - Fire in the Basement by Pavel Kahout. A pair of young, naive lovers are in bed enjoying newly married life when the window explodes and a huge pole crashes through, swiftly followed by a team of loud, overbearing and over-equipped firemen. The couple's world is literally turned upside down as they are sucked into exploitation, corruption and the sinister search for a fire which may - or may not - exist. This well acted, funny, scary, intriguing Czech farce that is fuelled by a mood of despairing irony, both celebrates the absurdity of the situation and relishes its darker threat.