Tickets for the shows that form this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival are now on sale.
The events of September 11, hard-hitting political satire and World Cup-inspired theatre are just some of the events in this year's festival line-up as art imitates life for Fringe 2002.
The 56th Edinburgh Festival Fringe (which runs from August 4-26, 2002) boasts 20,342 performances of 1,491 shows in 183 venues. From the powerful and poignant to the funny and frivolous, this year's line-up projects and dissects a year gone by, affirming the Fringe's position as a completely open platform for artistic debate and expression.
The attacks on the World Trade Center resonate throughout the program. Project 9/11 relates seven personal accounts of living in New York City on the day of the tragedy, whilst Jumpers follows four New Yorkers coping with its aftermath. Dance, poetry and music are used to examine the attack's ramifications in Bodies in Crisis, as are physical theatre techniques in The Art of War. Most of the headlines will be reserved for political provocateur Michael Moore, however, who delivers his own take on the events in his first ever live one-man show; and drag-star Tina C, who performs a biting satire on the media reaction to the event in her Twin Towers Tribute. Appearances from Rory Bremner and Tony Benn, the return of America's premier political comic Will Durst, the secretly taped girl-talk between Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp in Snatches and Perrier-winning Rich Hall and Mike Wilmot's Pretzel Logic ensure that politics at home and abroad is also high up the agenda.
Jane Krakowski, who plays Elaine Vassal in on TV's "Ally McBeal," will make her British stage debut in the European premiere of the award-winning absurd comedy, Fuddy Meers. Fuddy Meers, by David Lindsay-Abaire, will be brought to the stage by director Stephen Henry, whose production of Corpus Christi was the sell-out sensation of the 1999 Edinburgh Fringe, and was subsequently performed at the Pleasance Theatre, London.
Football and the World Cup are the inspiration for five Fringe shows this year: An Evening with Gary Lineker, The World Cup is Not Enough, My England, Owen O'Neill's My Son the Footballer and Theatrum Botanicum's outdoor spectacle The Boy with the Magic Feet.
The Fringe is famous for promoting exciting young talent, and among the plays on offer this year is Who's Harry?, a play with dance and music, written by Henry Fleet and directed by Pip Pickering, the dramaturg for the Pleasance Theatre, which is one of the major players in the Fringe Festival.
Commenting on the launch of the Program, Fringe Director Paul Gudgin said: "It's headlines that sell shows at the Fringe, but this year the headlines are the inspiration for many of the shows themselves. Supporting this strong news theme, however, is an exceptional program of home-grown and international performances, of which a quarter are world premieres."
To book Fringe shows telephone 011 44 (0)131 226 0000 (10 AM - 6 PM). Online bookings open June 19.
—By Theatrenow
