Fun on the Fringe

There's the blind heckler, the deranged fan and the hypnotist dog but we'll start with the old lady story because it's sweet: for the last few nights on the Royal Mile a group of street entertainers have been putting on their show. On their first night they noticed an old woman looking out from her bedroom window. They waved to her and got the audience to wave up to her. Then they shouted up "What's your name?" and when she replied "Mary" they got the audience to shout out "Hello Mary". Last night, she was looking down as usual so they invited her down to get a proper view of the show. Being old and frail it took her forever to get down to the street but when she arrived everyone shouted "Here's Mary!" and they found her a chair to sit on. At the end of the show the performers gave her some flowers and she started crying. And then so did everybody else.

It's moments like these that edge the festival away from the manic artsfest that it has become and return it to its roots.

Elsewhere on the Fringe there was the curious case of Oscar the hypno dog. Oscar, a labrador, and his owner, Hugh Lennon, have been wooing audiences by dint of the fact that the dog can hypnotise people. All very well on stage but Hugh's landlady had a different idea and had to evict both Hugh and Oscar from her house when the dog began to spook her out. "People might call me paranoid," said landlady Fiona Torrance "but I have never seen a dog stare like that. It has huge brown eyes that never blink; it's really unnerving. I was worried that it would corner me in the kitchen and put me in a trance." Exit Hugh and Oscar but enter tons more people to see their show, thanks to all the publicity given to the story. A spokesman for the RSPCA wisely declined to comment on the case.

Then there was the strange but true case of the blind man who went along to a comedy show. Not too enamoured with what he was hearing from the performer, he decided to indulge in a bit of heckling. "Get off; you're rubbish," he shouted out to the act. After a pause, he asked "Has he gone yet?"

Strangest of all, perhaps, was what happened to performing poet and Guardian columnist, John Hegley. After one of his shows a note was sent to him backstage which read "Don't do your show on Thursday night. Meet me up at Arthur's Seat (a very large hill just outside Edinburgh) instead" and it was signed A. Potato. It wasn't so much the content of the note that worried John, it was more that the words had been written in blood.

Come Thursday night, John takes to the stage and tells the audience about the note. He gives the audience a choice: either he does the show for them or they march en masse up to Arthur's Seat to rendezvous with A. Potato. A show of hands shows unanimous support for the latter option. Because it's getting dark, they procure some torches and after the half-hour trek up the hill they reach the summit. There are worried looks all around as John approaches the tourists/young lovers/cider drinkers in turn with the question "Excuse me, I know it's a strange question but you aren't A. Potato by any chance?"

These are the sort of things that happen when 524 drama groups, 221 comedians, 320 musicians, 56 visual artists, 48 musical/opera companies and 43 dance troupes descend on a city smaller than Dublin for the month of August - and believe me, these are only the printable stories.

ON a more mundane level, the weather is the big talking point of Edinburgh '97. Because of the humidity and the cramped conditions of some of the 187 venues (which range in size from telephone box to grand Victorian theatre) people have been fainting all over the place. The first few times it happens you think it's some sort of audience participation device but once the stretchers come out you know it's serious.

Despite the heat, despite over one million visitors and despite the legions of street entertainers ("Jugglers should be shot on sight and an electric saw should be judiciously applied to any stiltwalker," as Billy Connolly noted the other night) the Fringe remains the most exhilarating and exuberant cultural experience available to man. If it's a Kabuki version of Waiting For Godot performed by mime artists; an all-singing, all-nude, lesbian, acrobatic troupe or just a plain old aboriginal interpretation of The Borstal Boy, the Fringe has it all and more. With so much to do, see and hear, sleep is a luxury you just can't afford. And when the heat of the day gives way to the cool of the night and the castle is lit up in all its splendour, you realise, not for the first time, that there really is nothing quite like Edinburgh and nothing quite like the Fringe.