David Lister: The Week in Arts
As the snow fell over Easter, the summer cultural highlights seemed a long way away. Perhaps that is why the arts world largely ignored an announcement pertaining to the Edinburgh Festival. But the statement from the four top Fringe venues that they would be joining forces this year to start the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, playing 250 comedy shows, was rather important. For a start, the new jamboree will, according to its organisers, be the largest comedy festival in the world. More importantly, it dramatically changes the texture of the Fringe, and means the end of the Fringe as we know it.
The bosses of the four venues concerned, the Assembly Rooms, Pleasance, Underbelly and Gilded Balloon, look bewildered when one suggests such a thing. Anthony Alderson, director of the Pleasance Theatre, says: “It is certainly not our intention to break away from the Fringe. I think the Edinburgh Comedy Festival has already existed in all but name among comedians. This is about doing what we have to do commercially to make sure we can carry on.”
Mr Hartley T A Kemp, head of C Venues on the Fringe, is not convinced. He told The Stage: “We are concerned that the creation of a comedy festival within the Fringe could lead to confusion for artists and audience. Meanwhile, non-comedy will be relegated at those venues behind the sheer weight of a combined stand-up programme.”
Non-comedy. It’s a telling way of putting it. Unquestionably, the Fringe in recent years has become a stand-up comedy zone. It’s getting hard to remember that it was the Fringe that witnessed Tom Stoppard’s debut, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and kick-started the careers of great theatre directors such as Deborah Warner.
It was and is also, of course, the home to many other art forms, from performance art to dance to circus. It is and should be a hotch potch of experimentation, glorious discovery and inglorious failure. It should also have its fair share of stand-up comedy, something I particularly look forward to on my August visits to Edinburgh. But there’s a difference between fair share and takeover.
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had they attacked Pear Harbor maybe that bloody war could have been averted.
It’s spelled “Tokio” in German, Spanish, and Portuguese.
I’ve been on a few strikes in my time, and I can tell you right now, there’s NO WAY they can melt steel.
Strike at the Philippines, Hong Kong or Singapore, not Pearl Harbor. Everyone expected the Japanese to continue their expansion, but nobody expected them to hit the US fleet directly. Incidentally enough, they did in fact strike at Hong Kong on 8 December, so the article would have been correct even had the Pearl Harbor attack not come.
“Sdram”
I’d really like to read that newspaper.
They had prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack and they let it happen so they could put all the west-coast Japanese Americans into gulags. Wake up sheeple!
nice photoshop! Can’t you see it’s a different font sans-serif? Also, what newspaper puts a headline without an article or a reference to an article on a different page?
They started a war that they lost. Not only did they get owned, they are the only country to get nuked.BTW war was imminent not because of the US but because of Japan’s own actions. It left the League of nations to invade China. 10 or so years later they are Nazi Germany’s biggest supporters known as the “East Asian Aryans”.The rest of the world placed sanctions on them leaving Japan fucked and alone. So yes the attack on Pearl Harbor was predictable.
Do you know what Koreans call Korea?I heard someone say, “Why do they call it Korea when they can´t pronounce R´s?”
What exactly is the PEAR Harbor attack?Sorry, I’m an instigator like that.
Tokyo is actually two syllables, “to-kyo”, but it is regularly pronounced “to-ki-oh” in English because we don’t commonly use the “kyo” sound.Not only that, the word “Japan” has odd origins of its own. They call the country Nippon.We’ve also called Iran Persia, Deutschland Germany, Munchen Munich… the list goes on. I think every language has this happen.
I wish people would give it a rest with this “language is dynamic” argument against grammar nazis and realise that this argument validates their position as much as yours, since if language is dynamic, grammar nazis exert a force to keep it as is. If it weren’t dynamic, noone would need them, would we?
NU-UH WE HAD NO CLUE
very true the US knew the Japanese were on the move way before pearl Harbor actually happened. the reason why it was shocking (if i remember correctly) was b/c the US had actually been talking about not declaring war on Japan just Germany for fear of an attack like what happened.Thank you for saying that!