RSC Stars Show Up for Four-Star Opening of Davidson's Fringe Show
RSC friends Endy McKay and Gemma Fairlie (standing in the back) posed with Davidson student actors in front of the Edinburgh venue.
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8/8/2006
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
For more information about Davidson’s student production at the Fringe, visit this earlier story.
Also, you can keep up with the adventures in Edinburgh, and see photos, at the blog site.
Two good friends from the Royal Shakespeare Company dropped by to help Davidson students celebrate their opening night success on Sunday at the Edinburgh Fringe. Gemma Fairlie, who directed them in the RSC Davidson Residency for two weeks last winter in creating the production they’re now presenting, told them she was delighted at the restaging for the new space. Endy McKay, an RSC actor who served as acting and vocal coach last winter, also offered her congratulations.
The RSC’s hard work last winter, and the students’ hard work for the entire project, was also rewarded the next morning with a four-out-of-five star review for the “Infinite Variety” show from the daily festival tabloid, Three Weeks. To read the reviewer’s comments, visit the Three Weeks website (registration required), or read it on the Davidson blog.
Fairlie is in town for several days of technical rehearsal for a new show by Anthony Neilson entitled “Realism,” for which she serves as assistant and movement director. It runs August 14-19 as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, the festival initiated in 1947 that attracted from its beginning uninvited groups that staged renegade shows that became “The Fringe.” McKay is appearing in a Fringe production entitled “White Open Spaces” about racial issues in Britain.
Well-wishers at the first official production of Davidson’s two Fringe offerings, “Infinite Variety” and “For Every Passion Something,” also included several sets of parents and student friends on vacation in the British Isles. The Sunday night show was actually the fourth of the fourteen-show run. The twenty-one student actors and seven musicians warmed up for opening night with preview performances the three previous evenings.
Sunday was the first official day of the Edinburgh Fringe, and featured a kick-off “cavalcade.” The two-mile route of the parade down broad Princes Street was mobbed with viewers who came to enjoy the multiple pipe and drum bands marching in kilted regalia, and floats of performers presenting song and dance previews of their shows. Davidson students circulated through the throngs for about an hour proffering advertising fliers for their own show, then hustled back to the theatre to warm up for the 5 p.m. curtain call.
Davidson’s performances are in the Rocket Venues at the Demarco Roxy Art House, a converted church with four performance spaces. Sixty different groups will use those spaces during the three weeks of the Fringe, staging shows that run throughout the day from 11 a.m. and concluding past midnight.
Because they are performing there, Davidson’s students may see any of the other shows in the Roxy for free, or get tickets for shows presented constantly at about 261 venues across town.
The Fringe is now the world’s largest arts festival, and Edinburgh’s August calendar of events has been described as “a month of cultural gluttony and mind-boggling artistic activity.” In 2005, more than 16,000 performers in 1,800 troupes were involved in nearly 27,000 total performances. If that weren’t enough for one city, in addition to the Fringe and International Festival, visitors to Edinburgh may enjoy concurrent major jazz, film, and literary festivals.
The Edinburgh Fringe began in 1947, when Edinburgh organized an international arts festival as a post-war initiative to re-unite Europe through culture. Eight theatre companies turned up uninvited that year to take advantage of the large theatre crowds and showcase their own, more alternative, theatre. The number of unplanned performances grew each year, until in 1958 the Fringe Festival Society drew up a constitution and produced its first guide to the shows. It now employs a year-round staff of eleven people, and employment swells to 120 during August.
Anyone can perform at the Fringe. The Festival Fringe Society does not produce any of the shows, does not invite performances, and pays no fees to performers. Those who want to stage their work make their own arrangements to rent venues, and are listed in the official program as long as they meet the printing deadline.
Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,700 students. Since its founding by Presbyterians in 1837, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently recognized as one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the nation.
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