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Dateline: 30th July, 2002 Edfringe Snippets 7 News Items about the Forthcoming Edinburgh Fringe FestivalLatin (Stephen Fry) This remarkable story of illicit love at a 1970s prep school, performing at Gilded Balloon as part of this year's Edinburgh Fringe, mixes mirth and immorality as only Stephen Fry can. Fry's skill lies in the profound understanding with which he captures the crumbling institutions of old England floundering in a new age. How, he asks, could anyone think that packing boys away to bizarre, isolated estates, run by people accountable to no-one making their own rules, is a good idea? The way that so many institutions in the last century have proved a cover for uncontrolled sexual energies is paralleled in the way that this play about paedophilia reduces audiences to tears of laughter. Stephen Fry wrote the first version of this unique script while still an unknown Cambridge undergraduate. At Edinburgh in 1980, it won him a Fringe First and led to him teaming up with Hugh Laurie. Activated Image's sharp and stylish revival, which enjoyed a sell-out run and rave reviews earlier this year, presents the play for a new generation of Fringe-goers and asks: What do Chartham Park's values of "religion, sex and public school life" mean to us now? Activated Image at Gilded Balloon II @ Teviot: Wine Bar (venue 14): 2nd to 26th August. The Straight Man For more than half a century, Variety has entertained the nation, from the London Palladium to the Liverpool Palace, from Max Miller to Morecambe and Wise. But a brash new medium is changing everything. The country is turning on its televisions and turning away from live performance. Another Monday night, another half-full first house. But among the audience is a mysterious young man about to make them an impossible offer: a ticket to stardom that only one of them can take. As the act and those closest to it grapple with the implications, the web of myths they have drawn up around their lives begins to painfully unravel. Activated Image at Pleasance Above: 1st to 26th August The National Student Theatre Company (NSTC) Notes From Underground, by Eric Bogosian, is a one-man show, featuring Wolf E Rahlfs, graduate of Sir Paul McCartney's Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), who provides an impressive account of a different kind of incarceration, of a mind trapped in its own growing insanity (Robert Hewison, Sunday Times). The production won the highly prestigious and much-coveted Buzz Goodbody Director Award (Patron: the Royal Shakespeare Company) for Joern-Udo Kortmann, at the National Student Drama Festival 2002 and Edinburgh Fringe will be its UK premiere. Based on a story by Dostoievsky the play sets out the diarised life
of a disturbed recluse in his New York City apartment, eating crackers,
reading pornography and sharing aloud his views on life and whats wrong
with the world. His unconventional and (initially) amusing observations
become more sinister as the play progresses, leading to a frightening
and absorbing twist that leaves the audience impatient to know the conclusion
to this compelling tale. Six Women With Brain Death provides a darkly comic, wild, musical
roller coaster through American womanhood, with everything from Ken
and Barbie to the Supremes and alien abductions open for ridicule. Directed
by LIPA student Kate Golledge, this musical revue, featuring artistes
from last year's hit musical Falsettoland, receives its European premiere
on the Edinburgh Fringe and is performed (ironically) by eight women. I Love You, Youre Perfect, Now Change, directed by LIPA students
Natalie Anderson and Colin Kilbride (Colin also from Falsettoland),
provides an entertaining high-speed musical cruise down the highway
of love, stopping off at some very familiar destinations in life - adolescent
crushes, first dates, marriage and starting a family, to name but a
few. Its light-hearted and endearing style, promises to strike more
than a few well-known chords with its audience. Nothing to Declare Combining Liz Tomlin's innovative, poetic writing with movement direction from Charlotte Vincent (Vincent Dance Theatre) and design by Richard Lowden (Forced Entertainment), it tells the witty story of an obsessive would-be interior designer who lets the audience in on the next big thing in cutting edge style - her very own concept of crisis chic, inspired by her travels to war torn ghettos at the ends of the earth. Beneath its comic façade, Nothing to Declare is a biting satire of contemporary culture. The piece examines what might happen should two people from opposite ends of the earth collide when the world is already cracking down the middle. Emotionally charged and shockingly relevant, the piece interrogates the very definition of innocence in an absurdist landscape that is as darkly humorous as it is tragically brutal. POINT BLANK is the resident company at the Open Performance Centre in Sheffield. This is their third production, and their first time at Edinburgh. The play was developed at Battersea Arts Centre and was recently seen on an UK tour.
For facts and figures of the 2001 Edinburgh Fringe, go to our Fringe 2001 Factsheet.
Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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