Fiona Shepherd
The spirit of the Fringe manifests in many forms. Sure, this year we are missing the big purple cows and the carnival-like complexes in leafy university gardens, but the Fringe would not be the creative hive it is without its network of grassroots venues, which embody the comeand-try spirit of the festival more organically than the big commercial operators.
For the past 25 years, thespaceuk organisation has colonised hotel function spaces and meeting rooms across the city, as well as creating a buzzing hub at the Surgeons Hall. In keeping with the open access nature of the event, the quality of their programme varies considerably, but gems emerge. Fringe First award-winning companies such as Breach Theatre and Little Bulb found their first Edinburgh homes at thespace.
This year, the producers invited companies to contribute new work for a virtual Fringe line-up and the response has been substantial. Online@thespaceuk is an online arts festival in its own right, with 80 bespoke shows, mostly new writing, across the disciplines. Some shows are broadcast live on Saturday evenings, but most are available to view anytime, with new content added every Saturday.
Theatre has always been a mainstay of thespace programme and so it is in this online incarnation, with many companies making the most of the new strictures.
Nottingham New Theatre’s diptych, Spring and Awakening, based on Frank Wedekind’s classic exploration of adolescent sexuality, literally confines the teenagers to their bedrooms where they communicate their desires by phone or straight to camera. There are bedroom balladeers reaching out to those who feel isolated, dysfunctional Zoom rehearsals for ill-fated new musicals, and even an old-fashioned radio play, The Boom Room, about new-fangled digital relations.
Inevitably, lockdown conditions have bred a number of lockdown stories. The Plague Thing by Marcia Kelson is a short and bittersweet smartphone dispatch from elderly Enid (Carol Hudson) who is struggling to grasp the changes wrought by “the plague thing”, not least the heightened risk of her care home environment. There is also the remote anguish of the relatives she no longer recognises.
Detachment is a bite-sized revengers’ tragedy borne of Covid-19 cauldron conditions. ICU doctor Toby (Malcolm Jeffries) and his shielding pregnant partner V (Gemma Wray) speak every