Edge Eradica

Having worked at Theatre Workshop for two years, David Roberts was inspired to continue his engagement with community performance. Developing the Edge Eradica Festival, a bank holiday weekend of rehearsed readings, works in progress, music, poetry and new plays getting ready for the Fringe, he took the basement of Edinburgh's Argyle Bar and converted it into a temporary hub for drama.

Edge Eradica is a festival with a difference: the emphasis is community based work. The rehearsed reading of The Reign Of Sawney Bean was based on a script by Tracey Lane, who has been involved in drama for less than a year, while the collection of short pieces from Campbell Lauder grappled with issues of identity and gender from comic and tragic perspectives. Across the events, new writers and new performers were given the chance to shine and the re-imagining of Sartre's Huis Clos updated the existentialist hell myth for the credit crunch.

If community was the keynote, this comes from Roberts' time at Theatre Workshop, a company who were famous for public participation and challenging the line between professional actors and community work. At the same time, the festival reflects a shift in thinking about the role of performance within society.

In the aftermath of WWII, when the British government attempted to build a utopia from the ruins of the Blitz and laid the foundations for the welfare state that we are currently trying to dismantle, it was decided that the best way to advance the nation's cultural life was to spend money on the high arts. This policy would eventually lead to London's South Bank, the creation of the National Theatre, the maintenance of The Royal Ballet and Opera and, eventually, scandal about lottery funding going to the toffs, in the form of refurbishing Covent Garden's opera house.

Based as it was on the trickle-down theory of aesthetics, it ignored community performance. Studies in recent years, collected in John Carey's What Good Are The Arts? insist that this was a mistake, and that community engagement in creativity has a positive impact on society, which cannot be matched by any amount of prestige companies.

In the past few years, various funding bodies have sought to redress this, but it is in the work of people like Roberts that the idea of community theatre comes to life. Not only does it enable people to stage their own work, or devise responses to existing pieces; it also offers a model of working that cuts past the typical process for bringing a play to the stage.

Using the Argyll Bar, for example, is a master-stroke: the performance happens in a familiar venue, that gives the audience more ownership than a traditional theatre, which might be seen to have hidden rules of etiquette. Furthermore, the venue turns the productions into site-specific shows: Campbell's use of the space was particularly inspired, with actors emerging from the audience, disappearing into the bar and dominating the room from a central table. Equally, Which Way Now converted Sartre's humanist hell into a dry bar – a vision of materialist damnation that matched the tormented souls' frustrations.

In events like Edge Eradica, new talent can emerge, but also new ways of thinking about theatre. Roberts is an advocate of Forum Theatre, a politically aware approach that attacks social oppression. The content is less important than the methodology: there is no need to bang on about oppression if the process of creation is explicitly egalitarian and inclusive. While community theatre may lack the sheen of the big shows, it maintains a radical energy that can be used both for revitalising communities and developing new drama.