Fringe 2009: 'We have to get to the essence of things quickly'

THEY say that it's too big, too commercialised, dominated by big-name comedy, and increasingly hostile to new work: and there's a grain of truth in all those complaints.

But the point about an event as big, as diverse, and as anarchically self-organising as the Edinburgh Fringe is that for every truth anyone asserts about it, you can always find a hundred shows that demonstrate the exact opposite, or a dozen signs that the Fringe itself is generating solutions to its own problems.

And that's never been more true than in this year of crisis 2009, when the Fringe – against all predictions – has remained as big and energetic as ever; and when some of the most creative venues in Edinburgh are bursting the bonds of the Fringe programme, the traditional Fringe divisions between art-forms, and – above all – the traditional one-hour or 90-minute Fringe performance slot, to generate whole new kinds of theatrical experience – instant, bite-sized, off-the-wall or improvised – that seems to speak to the time we live in.

The trend is not entirely new, of course. In Scotland, the first sign of a revival in the time-honoured tradition of short-span, low-cost theatre came five years ago, when ex-Wildcat David MacLennan launched his Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime season at Oran Mor in Glasgow, now routinely launching more than 30 new short plays on to the Scottish scene each year.

In 2007, the London-based new work company Paines Plough took the idea a step further when it commissioned top playwright Mark Ravenhill to write 17 instant 20-minute plays for a Fringe breakfast season at the Traverse Theatre, to be served up with coffee and bacon rolls; Ravenhill For Breakfast was a roaring success. Since then, the Traverse has gone into partnership with Play, Pie and Pint to present a sell-out season of lunchtime drama-with-eats at the Traverse this spring; and now, the theatre is offering its own Fringe breakfast season of 30-minute plays by a half-a-dozen leading writers, under the title "The World Is Too Much".

Meanwhile in Brighton, Nick Brice has been masterminding the global writing competition cum bite-sized theatre season that provided smash-hit breakfast sessions of fully-performed ten-minute plays on the Fringe last year, and is now about to move into the Bedlam Theatre with two new programmes of Breakfast Bites, plus a revival of last year's hits.

The Arches Theatre in Glasgow, which has been mixing it up for years with festivals of new work that smash long formats and criss-cross art-form boundaries, is creating a new Fringe home for itself this year in the old Aurora Nova space at St Stephen's Church, where a programme of major Arches shows will run alongside what director Jackie Wylie calls "a creative chaos, hopefully" of scratch nights, improvisations, and spontaneous collaborations, all fuelled by organic food and a bring-your-own-bottle bar.

And one of the Arches' leading collaborators – in tandem with a hugely supportive Battersea Art Centre in London – is the Forest Fringe in Forrest Road, a venue so new (it ran its first Fringe programme in 2007) and so determined to break the mould with an off-the-wall programme of music, installations, out-of-building audio experiences and all-night residencies, that it doesn't appear in the official Fringe programme at all.

So what are the pressures that are creating this new kind of fragmentary Fringe, hard to categorise, but full of unpredictable creative energy? The playwright David Greig, who is set to contribute a short play to the Traverse season, senses a powerful combination of threats and opportunities in the current political and artistic situation. "At one level, it is partly about money.

"Outside the National Theatre of Scotland, cash is very tight just now, and the process of staging new work on a large scale puts terrific pressure on everyone involved. So this is a creative way of making a strength out of a weakness, by reducing costs, sharing the risk, and creating a situation where writers are free again, to take chances and push an idea."

And at St Stephen's and Forest Fringe, Jackie Wylie and Andy Field would certainly agree about the importance of shaking off financial pressures, both commercial and public. Wylie is grateful for the substantial funding of 40,000 the Arches received from the Scottish Government's new Made In Scotland programme to bring the work of award-winning young director Nic Green to the Fringe.

Effectively, it freed the Arches from the need to run a tightly-programmed venue full of income-generating shows, and made it possible to dream of making St Stephen's a flexible, experimental home for artists throughout the Festival; and Andy Field is clear that the special atmosphere and programming of the Forest Fringe would be impossible without the offer of free space from the owners of the year-round Forest Caf.

What this freedom allows them to recognise, though, is the extent to which the culture itself is changing, and transforming the kind of demand audiences place on theatre.

Nick Brice, whose seasons are largely self- financing through their huge success with theatre-goers, points out that 21st-century audiences have been brought up on a diet of what he calls "highly stimulating short-span entertainment", which leaves them wanting to be stimulated and made to think without having to wait around all night for the punch-line; his short-show format is also interactive, with audiences often being asked to vote on their favourite ten-minute play.

Dominic Hill at the Traverse talks about the need for 21st century shows to "get to the essence of things quickly". Andy Field at Forest Fringe is less worried about pace, but suggests that in a world where "film and telly now do what they do so well", live performance has to recognise the things that make it special, including its ability to experiment with hybrid forms – across theatre, film, music, installation – and to offer intense one-on-one theatrical experiences.

What all of them recognise, though, is that in Edinburgh in August there is a special audience around: one that enjoys experiment, is willing to get up at 9am or stay up all night for an exciting theatrical experience and – above all – expresses in a particularly strong form the craving of audiences everywhere for a thoughtful, witty and passionate shared response to the huge crises and dilemmas our civilisation now seems to face.

"I think there's a need to respond to all this at a level that goes beyond the kind of analysis you get even in the best of the media," says David Greig. "You need a response that's immediate, and collective, and that works at a level that's more complete, emotional and personal. And that's what live performance can give, in this kind of format.

"What I'm trying to do, as a writer, is to address the question of how do you live, in this kind of time? What do you say to your children about what we're passing on to them? And this format gives me a chance to do that, in an unformed, impetuous kind of way that feels really exciting, and somehow just right for this moment, wherever it leads."

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