Theatre and Dance Previews

Bedford Fringe Festival

On the fringe in Bedford!

This summer will see top Fringe performers and many local groups heading for Bedfordshire's county town as the first Bedford Fringe Festival takes place.

The July event is a chance for many to try out their shows before heading for the Edinburgh Fringe in August and will also provide local talent with a focal point to show their wares! And there's still time to get involved!

We spoke to Artistic Director Mike David to find out more and first asked him how the idea came about.

What was the idea behind the Bedford Fringe Festival?

Mike: It began when I moved to Bedford from St Albans just under a year ago and ended up meeting Sandra Dudley. She is the sole producer of a local arts magazine called Article which is tied in with the Bedford Arts Forum - a network designed to link up all the different areas of the arts in Bedford and trying to get all the disciplines together. I was trying to make contacts in the arts community, being newly arrived and I met Sandra who is a really passionate and enthusiastic person who cares very much about supporting the arts.

We became good friends and one of the first things she asked me to do was to cover a couple of shows up at the Edinburgh Fringe that were going up from Bedford. She'd been up covering shows as well, and when we both got back around last September we began to talk about an idea that she had germinating which was that there were so many performance groups from Bedford and the surrounding area that went up to Edinburgh, it would be a great idea to have some kind of platform for them before they went up to the main Edinburgh Festival. Then, as these things do, the idea grew and got a name!

Wracking our brains and with terrific originality we came up with Bed Fringe. It has also tied in with something else I discovered. A writer who I'd liked for a long time Christopher Fry of The Lady's Not For Burning fame, was educated at Bedford Modern School so is really a local boy but Fry is not celebrated in the town at all. I then learnt that the old Bowen West Theatre was being shut down because the big new campus was being built and this sparked a thought - why don't we see what's happening to the old Bowen West and see if we can't make it the Christopher Fry Theatre so there is actually something in the town celebrating Fry.

These ideas wove together and we began to get a few more people on board including most significantly and most helpfully and most importantly a terrific guy called James Pharaoh who is the theatre manager at Bedford School. He is really who has done the bulk of the work in respect of getting the programming and getting the acts in because running Bedford School Theatre, he is the only person at the moment programming professional theatre in the town so he's got lots of contacts.

We began to bring it altogether and have meetings and discuss timescales and venues. Then we approached the Civic Theatre and discovered that we could get that at a reasonable time - about a week and a half before the Edinburgh Fringe begins so that people who are doing shows that they are taking up to Edinburgh will have a little bit of time to tinker if it turns out that a little bit of work needs to be done.

How important is it for acts to have this kind of platform before they go to Edinburgh?

Mike: Very important indeed because it's such an expensive difficult process getting a play up to Edinburgh. Usually you are opening with a show that has just got itself together in time and if you do have the misfortune or the luck to get a critic in at the very beginning of your run in Edinburgh you could be scuppered if it's not quite fine tuned. So it's very important to have some kind of chance to run it through away from the huge glare of Edinburgh first - not to say the shows that will be run through at the Bedford Fringe will be incomplete but they'll be given their first real tryout.

So it's a chance to try it out in front of audiences and see what the reactions are?

Mike: Absolutely. And it’s a local audience and it highlights the fact that they are local and that there's all this activity going on in Bedford. It's really half the platform for the Edinburgh Fringe idea and equally important, if not more, is that it's a community festival which will give an opportunity for anybody in the town or surrounding area to display their wares. There is a huge pool of talent in this part of the country, not all of whom are either professional or want to go off to Edinburgh and do that terrifying thing, but who still want some kind of showcase.

One of the things that we realised is that although there is an awful lot of artistic activity across the board in Bedford, there's not a kind of focal point for it. It's very spread out and disconnected and I've got to say it's not massively supported by the Borough. So our idea is to get a focus for all the activity and a showcase where people can see coherently, in the space of one week, just how much there is actually going on in Bedford. This should raise its profile and raise the artistic profile of the town.

So not the acts are going to Edinburgh?

Mike: Not at all. I would say probably fewer than half. The more important thing in a way is giving the local groups a chance to do their thing. 

So how did you choose who was going to be in this festival?

Mike: We have tried to make it as open and as democratic as possible. We put an online application form on our Website and have spread the word to schools and colleges and community groups across the board. We've said we're doing this, and if you have something you want to do, be it music or dance or a play, if you want to be involved, send your application in and we will consider everything equally and if there's a place for it in the programme which will give us a nice balanced programme through the week, then it will go in. It includes a bit of everything. Obviously we want to attract a large public as possible so you want to get names in too, so we also have quite a few names who are established Fringe stars .

Can you give us a sneak preview?

Mike: I don't want to give too much away but all the acts are on the Website and you can also still get involved in many ways by looking on there! But to give you an idea ….
Sandra knows Stephanie Cole from her school days and we're very lucky through Sandra's connection and Stephanie's kindness and generosity that Stephanie Cole will be performing on the opening Sunday to launch the festival with a programme of readings in which myself and Gill Martell, a local actress will also be involved. That will tie in with the whole opening Sunday which is going to be called Peace Sunday. The whole of Harpur Square is going to be taken over on the Sunday and we'll have a dance for peace event all day long. Harpur Square will be just humming with activity all day. And then in the evening, to launch the Civic Theatre - now renamed the Christopher Fry Civic Theatre with the Lord Mayor's permission for the week - we will have a programme called In Praise of Peace which will be a series of dramatic readings etc which Stephanie Cole will be in. 

Then at the completely other end of the spectrum we are very lucky to have got Norman Lovett, who used to be in Red Dwarf who is doing his stand up which should appeal to a completely different range of people.

Another really good one is a chap called Bob Kingdom who is a really big established name at the Edinburgh Fringe and the more high profile fringe circuit. I saw him first about 15 years ago in Edinburgh where he was trying out a show called Return Journey, a one man play about Dylan Thomas.

It has subsequently been re-directed by Antony Hopkins and got even better than it was. It's the most stupendous piece of biographical theatre I've seen - he talks to you and reads his poetry and talks about his life - it's uncanny - you're in the room with Dylan Thomas. It's absolutely extraordinary.

He's a major fringe star and we would normally have to pay a lot to get him but the whole premise of the festival, because we're trying to be as egalitarian as possible, is that we're not charging rental to the companies for using the space, but neither are we paying fees, so it's all working on a Box Office split - because thanks to the Civic we've got the main venue for a reasonable rent. So, we've got Bob Kingdom on a Box Office split which is amazing really - so that's three totally different people to give you an example of the breadth of stuff that's being done.

The event start on 13 July with Community Weekend. What’s happening at that?

Mike: This is one of the most important things in respect of highlighting local talent. On the 13th in St Peter's Church to launch the whole Fringe we're giving a World Premiere performance of Celestial Rock which is a musical version of the Pilgrim's Progress, written by a local author.

This was going to be a millennium project but the money fell through at the last minute. This time we've got it together. We're not doing a massive fully fledged performance but a one hour condensed version with six or seven songs that we hope will highlight two things - that we have John Bunyan as this amazing focus, which I think is still underused apart from pious ways, and we are also using Bunyan as a way of drawing attention to Christopher Fry and local authors. There's a lot of writing talent so it’s good to focus on that as well. We're also weaving through the Festival a book festival which will hopefully highlight local writing talent. 

And there are lots of different venues being used?

Mike: Yes - the main venue is the Civic Theatre, and we're using Harpur Square itself, primarily on that Sunday. We'll also be using St Peter's Church, and the library has just volunteered to lend its space. There are also lots of little places, for example, County Town books which has volunteered to give us a window to advertise. We're trying to create an umbrella really - where other venues will do their own stuff but will get the Bed Fringe stamp on their forehead.

So why should people come to an event?

Mike: In the year I've been here I've actually been quite surprised at how poor overall the attendance can be for events that come into town. Things are so spread out and not centralised and not made very apparent most of the time so although good stuff comes in, people don't really know that all this stuff is going on. The Fringe will give a focus to what's happening and a focus for local talent. One of the ways of creating a coherent society is by bringing all the strands of its culture together. I think Bedford is a remarkably well integrated town, both racially and culturally, but it happens in quite a low profile way and I think it's going to be good to demonstrate to the people of Bedford that they do have this wonderfully rich cultural mix in which they can all participate.

I think what brings people together is community activity and the most fun kinds are getting involved in doing a play or being in a jazz band or playing in an orchestra or singing in a choir. Anyone can do it and I think one of the things the Fringe can do is show people that this is fun and exciting and it will also give a sense of achievement and bring people together.