The Fringe: bringing it all back home

Early trail-blazers have made Brighton the cultured town it is today writes Bill Smith

So that’s it. It’s over for another year. This year Vanessa Redgrave was guest director, last year it was Aung San Suu Kyi, and the years before that Brian Eno and Anish Kapoor. Massive names for the arts – well done, Andrew Comben. The Festival is covered in all the national press now: Sky Arts were in town, Julian Caddy has got The Fringe re-energised and box-officed. As in Edinburgh, fringes of The Fringe are now developing, which is, when you think of it, a tribute to how Brighton Fringe has become established. Brian Mitchell has started the £5 Fringe and had much success especially with his own great wrestling play, Big Daddy v Giant Haystacks.

“Once upon a time Brighton was seen as a very arty town. That meant high culture – y’know, nice architecture, nice theatres, fur coats and expensive jewellery (‘fur coats and nae knickers’ is Edinburgh). In the late ‘60s Brighton got scruffier and hippy culture flourished. The town became known as the San Francisco of the UK. Around the same time there were serious developments in theatre, with the likes of Barker, Berkoff and Brenton living and working here as they changed the contours of British drama. Poets littered the streets. Most of the population could play the sitar. Grateful Dead albums were provided free on the rates.

“Time passed, and people began to wear platform soles. This was a low-water mark. Young musicians tried to find a way out, and through the late ’70s a whole string of bands formed, split and re-grouped; some achieved a degree of national recognition, others rarely strayed from such attractive dives as The Alhambra or the Resource Centre vaults. To be a Brighton band was to be seen by the outside world – if they cared at all – as quirky, not very serious, a bunch of tosspots. Little was happening on other fronts; the water was rising very slowly.”

The late great Tony Miller wrote most of that with a little bit of help from yours truly in what is now The Mash Tun in the late 1980s when we started The Latest (it was called The Punter then). But you can’t really see it happening until it’s happened – a bunch of people had arrived and changed the cultural landscape. Who were they?

One such was a street band who moved on from busking to just playing dustbins and turned into STOMP – Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas’s band Pookiesnackenburger became Yes/No People, then turned into STOMP and are now performing all over the world. They were in the music tent for The Fringe at the Brighton Festival in the late ‘80s. Those two guys have now bought The Old Market, so they’ve come home.

Pioneers continue
Just as an aside, my personal highlight of those Fringe years was James Poulter’s The Peasants Revolt. James had his own page in our magazine at the time entitled ‘James Poulter’s Mighty Column’. No wonder his girlfriend liked him. And as if he wasn’t big enough and good-looking enough, he was also one of the funniest writers I’ve ever met. He said, “my play was definitely the best play of the 80s – the 1380s”. Now James is teaching a new generation of great performers at The Fringe.

One of the guys that he often performed with on the same bill back then was Roy Hutchins who had huge success later in the West End with Autogeddon and Whale Nation plus his own show, Spacehoppers, Clackers and Really Big Fish. A Times reviewer said of Roy; “A wonderful performance – no one wanted to leave and we had to be thrown out.” I agree, I first saw Roy in a Fringe student group called Tollygunge – Roy mimicked the OCD businessman – frantically checking whether he still has his wallet, watch and glasses on. I saw Roy a few weeks back in the audience at TOM (The Old Market) where a young theatre group were performing, Journey to X, and Roy told me to look out for some of the young performers. They were brilliant. I was just as excited watching his protégées as I was when I first watched him.

So what goes around comes around: those trail-blazers – I could mention hundreds but have named only a few – have made the Brighton Festival and Fringe the all round arty town it is today.

Steve Berkoff, who has a house in Kemp Town, the bad boy of British theatre (where else could he live?) had the hit show of this year’s festival, East. I saw it performed by byMoonlight Theatre – it was advertised as the play with the most ‘c’ words ever, but it was ‘f’ fantastic, riveting to watch, it stomped across middle-class theatre just like Luke and Steve did.

Audience shift
I’ll finish by telling a little story my girlfriend witnessed in 1990 when I saw the play first performed. Two women are in the toilet touching up their make-up ready for the pub after the show:

First woman: what did you think of it, then?
Second woman: Collette spoilt it for me actually, she said it was going to be really raunchy. If she’d just told me they were going to stand on stage and act I wouldn’t have been expecting anything.
First woman: oh.
Second woman: I put rollers in my hair before I came out. Can you tell?

Exit girlfriend, hysterically laughing as she approached me. I wondered how you could have so much fun in the girls’ toilets.
Those early pioneers changed Brighton, just as Andrew Comben and Julian Caddy and, yes, Brian Mitchell are doing now. The only difference is that the audience is perhaps more sophisticated. Brighton has gone from dirty weekends to CelebCity.

Bill Smith is Managing Editor of Latest 7/Homes magazine and
a director of Latest TV.