WHILE Edinburgh girds its loins for the Fringe, a funny thing has been
happening in London. Short BAC and Sides is a season featuring some of
the best comic performers and theatre acts who will appear in Edinburgh
-- including Hattie Hayridge, Ben Keaton, and Paul Davies, John Shuttle-
worth, Sheila Steafel, Helen Lederer, Donna McPhail, Harry Hill, Al
Murray, Stephen Oxley.
In fact, in a season which runs throughout August, BAC (Battersea Arts
Centre) will be playing host to almost 60 different companies in 80
different performances -- the kind of statistic to make the head spin
and inevitably invite comparison with its Scottish counterparts.
Time Out (co-sponsors of the BAC season) recently likened the
atmosphere at the south London arts centre with its three performing
spaces and bars to ''the Assembly Rooms on acid all year round''.
Paul Blackman, its artistic director, quotes this with some pride.
When he inherited BAC the centre was dying on its feet after its initial
golden era when Jude Kelly, West Yorkshire Playhouse's present director,
had hauled the old town hall out of oblivion and made it into a thriving
local resource.
Blackman's emphasis has been rather different, encouraging risk-taking
particularly in the visual theatre area and giving a boost to stand-up
and cabaret acts: very 1990s.
Short BAC and Sides is in its third year. Blackman explains: ''When I
first came here I inherited a situation where BAC was closed for the
summer. People said you couldn't get audiences because everyone had gone
to Edinburgh! All eyes are on the north. Even the London Evening
Standard carries Edinburgh reviews. But what about those people who, for
one reason or another, can't go?''
So, partly for budgetary reasons -- he can't, he says, really afford
to close for so long -- and partly because he sees it as a way of
feeding London audiences in what is a notoriously dull theatre month, he
began to ring round a few chums to offer the venue as a way of
Edinburgh-bound comedy and theatre performers getting their material
into better shape.
The response was phenomenal -- and his instinct rock solid. So much so
that last year Short BAC and Sides achieved the remarkable feat of
previewing in their season five of the six Perrier Award nominees.
Colin Watkeys, who produces Ken Campbell, Claire Dowie, and Starving
Artists, the group from Hawaii whose Mark Pinkosh appeared with Dowie so
successfully last year, speaks glowingly of the idea of Short BAC and
Sides (though laments the increasing safety and lack of experimentation
on the Edinburgh Fringe).
Like Blackman, however, he welcomes the development the season
represents of the increasing crossover between stand-up comedy and
theatre.
''They're not one-person shows -- and they're not just looking for
another gag. They have more structure than that. The old forms don't
work any more. Audiences want to get involved and excited. These are
strong performers. But they need an audience. BAC gives them that -- the
chance to hone their material, change it in front of an audience. You
never really learn until you try it out in front of them. BAC has that
atmosphere of edge; audiences really want them to take risks.''
Blackman, too, is excited by the array of talent queueing up to create
new theatre forms who have come up through the ranks of stand-up and
cabaret -- among them Arthur Smith (who wrote the Gary Lineker show),
Ben Miller (whose Gone with Noakes was one of last year's Perrier Award
nominees and who returns with a new show, Huge), and Kevin Day (this
year in I Was A Teenage Racist).
Londoners therefore have a prime opportunity to second-guess the
Perrier Award judges. Among those to look out for are the
above-mentioned plus new musicals by Tony Hawks (Heartbreak Kid), Steve
Furst and Mike Leigh (The Gary Glitter Story), the world's first ever
Jewish heavy metal band, Guns 'n' Moses with Jim Tavare, Al Murray, and
Dave Cohen, Ra-Ra-Rasputin with Richard Herring (''Boney M meets
pre-revolutionary Russia -- just to set the tone in the first week'') --
not to mention new shows by Lee Evans, Chris Lynham, Harry Hill,
Geraldine McNulty and Red Shift's new version of Death in Venice. Ken
Campbell also tries out his new show, Jamais Vu (before his one-man
trilogy goes to the Traverse after the Festival, and then back to London
-- to the National Theatre -- in October), while Claire Dowie gets going
with Leaking from Every Orifice.
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