Naughty but Nice: the Brighton Festival and Fringe Festival by Richard Waters
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No other English city encompasses such a vivid population of highbrow and lowbrow, boho and camp; muso and wino. The Brighton Festival and Fringe Festival, which run concurrently, express this plurality perfectly. A good way to get to grips with the giddying list of attractions - ranging from theatre, stand up comedy and music concerts to philosophy in pubs, discussions on climate change, street performances and modern art - is to divide your time between the two festivals; this way you're seeing the city in its true light, with a pick n'mix of high art and edgy new talent.
And what could be edgier than a comedian dying onstage in front of a rapidly glacial audience? Upstairs at the One and Ten is an intimate venue and all the more painful for that as the first comedians I see rattle through their numbers desperate to exit stage-left. Then compeer, Marcel Lucont like the love child of the 70s Courvoisier man and a third wheel from Air, makes us laugh, and very hard at that, with his Gallic observations of English conservatism.
Absurdist Theatre and a Moorish Palace
Next up is a visit to Wired - part mime, part absurdist theatre. The clowns, sporting 'League of Gentlemen' noses, appear in clouds of dry ice and cleverly choreographed lighting. Their existential dilemmas and compulsive obsessions are eerily beautiful, as if they were extras in 'Waiting for Godot' who never managed to get into the play. I liked it – my son Finn didn't. At five he's not ready for absurdist theatre, like those comedians he was too busy trying to escape stage left.
The Lady Boys of Bangkok were flexing amber limbs as we passed their marquee on the Old Steine. We grabbed some lunch and ate it in the Pavilion Gardens - between Finn helping himself to a busker's trumpet and shades - Prince Albert's Moorish palace our backdrop. There were face painters and people learning to make brown paper pixie hats. Meanwhile, a trouser-less man in a black mackintosh was pacing about like something that hopped the gate at the local asylum.
Brighton - you gotta love it - is a weirdo magnet, so it's always good to check yourself before you start laughing; that street performer may just be the genuine ticket! Fortunately this charismatic oddball from San Francisco starts catapulting water-balloons and propels his underpants-clad frame up a ramp and through a hoop. What I love about the Fringe festival is its utter celebration of weird.
It's time to equalize with a dose of highbrow as Melvyn Bragg interviews David Attenborough about his life's work. With his crumpled, fawn-coloured suit, earnest brow and mop of white hair it's easy to see why we regard him as our most trustworthy British celebrity. You could have heard a pin drop in that audience; many of us transported to being kids again watching 'Life on Earth' in our pyjamas.
The next day, Finn and I head to the Chinese State Circus. As solemn-faced performers begin spinning plates on the end of sticks, an acrobat somehow does a headstand on another's head whilst continuing to spin her plates. My son's eyes are wide with disbelief, even more so with the next act; the legendary Shaolin warriors with their flashing swords and back-flips are breathtaking. One has a line of bricks smashed on his head with a ball-peen hammer, after which he lies chest-down on a row of spears. I suck my stomach in self-consciously.
Alice in Wonderland and Anish Kapoor
Time to soften the tone with a visit to creepy Preston Manor, where a magical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland takes place in a walled garden. Finn decides - halfway through the Mock Turtle's rendition that he'd rather try and pick the carp out of the pond the unfortunate creature is fishing in. So to do the other kids - these performers they earn their money tenfold! Halfway through this menagerie of culture I realise I haven't seen any of the work of Brighton Festival's Curator, esteemed sculptor, Anish Kapoor. His 'C-Curve', an arc of polished steel that sits like a fragment of a downed UFO on the South Downs, is hauntingly evocative. The best time to visit is first thing in the morning - and it has to be a blue one - or as the sun goes down; for Kapoor's work centres on the interplay between light and darkness and the contrast between elements - in this case, earth and sky. We watch ourselves upside down, the hills and blue sky in freefall across its surface.
Before the end of the festival it was time to check out its Burlesque offerings - of which there was a fair bit. Feeling as if I've sneaked out for an illicit rendezvous, I take my seat in an old church for The Devil May Drag You Under, a riotously camp buffet of New York trapeze artists, illusionists and the most delicately elfin stripper-extraordinaire who poured milk over her sequinned self in a giant teacup. Following this saucy theme I head to Concorde 2 for Cherchez La Femme's lively raft of burlesque artistes. A slim lady from Berlin is ordering a beer beside me dressed like a droog from 'A Clockwork Orange', while others are decked in feather boas, sequins and basques. It's a celebration of sexiness, and as a chanteuse croons Jaques Brell's 'Ne me quitte pas', I'm loving every minute of it.
The Finale
The final day I happen upon a troupe of performers with scary masks, blonde wigs and dresses, swarming about a black kiosk waving knives and doing strange things with slats that they open and close. Moments later I'm alone inside the kiosk and I realise they're telling me a story - or to be more accurate, a noir film - for each time I see a face or body through a window, it suggests a different camera angle. As the freaks capture the heroine a singular stream of theatrical blood drips down a perspex slide. Then I scream - for a face no more than five inches away is watching me - the performer had snuck in to the black box right under my nose. Genius! Bootworks Theatre's Black Box is nothing short of inspired.
Come the 1st June a silent lament seemed to blow through the streets, as the sequinned beast of Brighton Festival was put to bed for another year. And less than a week after its end I find myself having fallen for Brighton, the enfant terrible of the south coast, all over again.