Taking A Stand

Upstairs in London's Jerwood Space, Stewart Lee is watching a calamitous rehearsal unfold of his new play, Elizabeth and Raleigh: Late But Live. He looks amused. “I don't like plays,” he confides with a grin. “And we've got a late night spot so other than some loose stage directions, there is no point trying to make it neat and tidy.” The scraps of script that do exist for Lee's disheveled work are cobbled together from what he calls "old Simon Munnery material," while the play stars Munnery himself as Queen Elizabeth I in a historical high-jinx version of An Audience With...

Lee adores Munnery. "The way I see it," he says, "there are two types of comic at Edinburgh. There are those who think of it as a stepping-stone to bigger things, who you'll see knocking around for a
couple of years, and then for ever after as just another face on the TV; and then there's the other sort, for whom being a comedian means going up to Scotland for a month out of every year of their life to act like a total idiot. Simon is the latter kind of comic."

As well as a play, Lee also returns to the Fringe with his customary stand-up set, bringing his festival total to a staggering 23. "The one time I couldn't afford to go I spent a month with this terrible feeling that I was missing something. That the way things were done would change and I wouldn't know." Lee only is only half joking. In case you missed it, his wry reference concerns the plans of Edinburgh's 'Big Four' – namely The Underbelly, Assembly Rooms, Gilded Balloon and Pleasance. This year, they have launched a new festival, separate from the Fringe, using the £587 entrance fee paid by performers to print an "official" Edinburgh Comedy Festival programme. The widely criticised move is threatening sidelined the 1200 acts performing in other venues, and seems intended to divide Fringe comedy into two tiers.

"The brilliant thing about the Fringe is that it is not run by monopolies," Lee stresses. "As a performer or writer you might fall foul of one of the major broadcasters by not working within the
current 'in' genre and suddenly find yourself out of work. Edinburgh, on the other hand, is totally diffused. Anyone who can afford the entrance fee can do what they please for whoever is willing to listen. The 'Big Four' have created a monopoly but," says Lee fervently, "it looks like it has totally backfired."

The lack of a sponsor for the Edinburgh Comedy Festival has been attributed both to the shambolic nature of the pitch and to the reluctance of many comedians to be associated with the new event. "When people paid their entrance fee, they assumed they were paying to be part of a level playing field. Now you have the mentality 'anyone can do it but we will do it better.'"

But it is not only the lack of sponsorship which has blown up in the faces of the venues' directors. "The 'Big Four' now look to festival goers like 'this is where you go if you're square,'" he says, "while the higgle piggle of other venues still have the essence of being something special, something personal that people have found by themselves without someone pointing it out with a big neon sign."

But Lee, who jokingly refers to himself as on the cusp on being discovered "for the third time," is 41 and not in the business of holding unnecessary anti-corporate views. "Ignoring how badly people
have behaved," he says, "it is a shame we have not been able to attract some money to the Comedy Festival, because it could have been money which then trickled down to performers."

The Fringe emerged in Edinburgh because the Scottish capital was a cheap city. People could come from around the world to doss on people's floors by day and perform their antics by night. "Now it is, like anywhere, a cappuccino town," complains Lee. "If we had got some money we could have implemented the idea a friend of mine had: to buy a big ocean liner, moor it in the docks and create an enormous dorm, charging a third of the rent for a night's kip rather than three times the price like everywhere else. Only, the raising of that money should have been policed a little closer by those organising the Fringe rather than by a group of people who are essentially landlords."