When the Fringe Festival is in Edinburgh (7-28 August) Edinburgh is packed and the city is buzzing. The Fringe is huge, make no mistake. I come visit the Fringe annually for a few days. I usually fly north from Stansted on a cheap flight. This time I had arrived by car. When I found myself on recognizable George Street, I was amazed. I thought that Edinburgh existed in another universe that you can only visit by passing through some kind of inter-dimensional gateway like the aeroplane does. However here was I in the same Edinburgh that I knew and loved, and I'd driven here and followed a map. Did that mean the map was correct?

I went to Waverley Station to get a Fringe guide and things started to fall apart. In the Edinburgh I knew, there was a Fringe Marquee here and the Half-Price ticket Hut next to it. In this Edinburgh they were missing. I'm starting to think this is a similar, but different parallel universe. I went to the hostel to check the booking I had made before I'd been fired. There was no record of it. I was getting suspicious. I visited some of the pubs I knew - they were totally different. It was all very weird. I had an idea however: what if I leave my car here, and take a train to London and then fly here by plane. Would my car still be here? Would it be the same car? would it have the same mileage, and would it have a new distributor? Questions to be answered.

Eventually I managed to aquire a Fringe Guide, an A4 book 1cm thick listing all the shows at the 250 venues. Of 230 pages, it allocates 93 to Comedy, 40 to music, musicals and opera, 62 to Theatre and 12 to Dance. There's so much stuff that I don't know where to start. Usually I just visit the half-price hut and pick things at random. How can I communicate the Fringe experience in a book? It's a silly idea. You have to be there, you have to be a part of it, and you have to visit some shows yourself.

On Saturday I had some spare time so I wandered down the High Street, which is also known as the Royal Mile. It is, for the most part a wide pedestrian fare leading up to the castle. During the Festival the street is swarming with actors and street performers. The street performers are, well, performing the usual street entertainment: juggling balls and fire-clubs, spinning hula hoops, climbing ladders and all that stuff that you can equally see at Covent Garden and probably every major city has a place for it. The Fringe is not about, or for, street performers and I'd go so far as to say that they are upstaging the festival proper. I think the festival belongs to the actors, comics, singers and dancers who have something original to show. They all come to the Royal Mile to cajole people like me into visiting their venue and seeing them perform. I found a man standing on his own giving out flyers, and he was dressed in a black body stocking - that is a black body-suit that covered his face, hands, feet... everything really. I took one of his flyers and discovered he was Japanese, and spoke little english. I could see he was wearing spectacles under the body-stocking as well. I thought he was so bizarre that I had to see his show.

Selling tickets is one thing that is done badly at the Fringe. Admittedly it was Saturday at 1600, but the queues were unreasonably large. The queue for prepaid ticket collection wound its way down the Royal Mile and probably entailed as long a delay as the queue I joined for ticket purchase: 25 minutes. Whilst queueing I was entertained by a magician called Ian who could make a coin disappear from his hand, and do something with elastic bands that I didn't really understand. He said that if you put the elastic bands under your pillow before you went to bed, then in the morning... they'd still be there.

A young man in his twenties was next. He was promoting his play "A Montana Ranch", and his name was Dylan Dougherty. He had written the play from his experiences working for a company in the USA. The company were operating an eco-scam. The scam runs like this: you buy some Monatana countryside and tell everyone that a mining corporation wants to devastate it. All the eco-warriors and environmentalists have a big fund-raising campaign to buy the land back at a vastly inflated price. Something like that.

So here was Dylan's play exposing the scam. Since I was wearing a Confederacy Flag on my hat, I had to support this fine young playright from over the Atlantic. They were playing at "C Central", a venue down the road, one of those 50-seat auditoria, of which there are many. The play was totally cool and exactly the kind of thing that I like to see at the Fringe. There were three twenty-somethings in the cast, and being called the "actors ensemble of Berkeley", I surmise they were probably studying English and Drama at Berkeley. The script was smart, and probably hammered out in a few afternoons in a Berkeley coffee bar. Indeed, the whole show probably took a few weeks to write, rehearse, and that's all the preparation it needed. I love that because the play is fresh and dynamic. The standard fare of provincial theatre is long runs of Agatha Christie and other popular & safe authors, hopefully with a celebrity actor or two as well, and these teach me nothing. I'd so rather hear what real people have to say about concurrent issues.

I've gone off on the wrong track haven't I? I was talking about a Japanese man wearing a black full-body stocking who couldn't speak English standing on Edinburgh High Street. Well, it's easy to get distracted at the Fringe, as there are a lot of things that'll pull your attention.

At the show there were three of them: three japanese men in black all-body costumes. They did various things: chased a fly around the stage with a fly-swat and into the audience where it seemed to land on some poor fellow, they fired arrows at each other, they had fun blowing bubbles, and swapped to pink costumes to be aliens.

The black body-stocking is a familiar costume for stage-hands, and is used in television. Someone wearing one will be almost invisible against a black background. To complete the illusion, you run the footage through a computer and it turns all the dark colours to black. So this is an opportunity for puppetry, and have objects move around as if by magic.

I think they were called the Three Gaga Heads, and they were having a good Fringe. They were playing to an audience of fifty, mostly adults, and that's very good for a show like that. I hope they thought the trip over here from Tokyo was worth the effort.

Three Gaga Heads on stage

The next day (Sunday 16/8) I wasn't in the mood for Fringey stuff, so I drove east along the coast road to North Berwick. It's rather a nice little seaside town. It's quite windy, but that's good for the kite-surfers who use this part of the coast. It's great for Edinburgh to be so close to these seaside resorts. Kite-surfing seems an excellent idea that beats surfing because you don't have to swim out aginst the waves. Furthermore, kite-surfing seems to be less dependent on the waves, and more dependent on the wind. As a result there are probably more places, and safer places to do it.

On return to the campsite I met the family with the big wigwam. The clutch on their car had failed so they were stuck here until it was mended. Robin, the Dad, was a decent sort of fellow. He told me how he used to work on computers, and was a successful contractor. Then he started getting dizziness attacks, and the doctors diagnosed convergence insufficiency, which is something to do with his vision and forced him to quit IT. He ended up delivering pizzas that he'd cooked himself in his kitchen, and that seemed to gather sales-momentum so he installed an industrial pizza oven in his home. The family were on holiday for six weeks because his wife had been made redundant and their two daughters were on school holiday. Like me, then, they were travelling around with a tent.

They had this amazing contraption that I hadn't seen before: a thing known by various names such as a twig / volcano / storm kettle. It's a bit like a large steel thermos flask, except you put twigs in it to feed the fire in the centre. The water lies in the walls of the kettle, and surrounds the fire in the middle.

When we were sitting there making the spaghetti, his young daughter came running over crying, and she was very upset. Robin took her by the hand and went to investigate the problem. He was gone a good fifteen minutes, so I continued cooking the bean sauce on some charcoal briquets. Apparently there was a little scamp on the campsite who was a pathological thief. This was the second time he had stolen the girl's bicycle. The first time Robin caught him, he had refused to disclose the location of his parent's caravan. This time, when Robin caught him trying to dismantle the bicycle behind some sheds at the end of the campsite, they had to threaten him with Police involvement and so forth, and only under duress would the young criminal admit where his parents were. Robin took him back to his parents and told them he'd been theiving. I would be inclined to inflict some severe physical pain on the six-year old myself, but if I had guess who would end in gaol? that's right, me.

It's ironic but I happened to read in a newspaper the next day about pianist David Helfgott, born in Melbourne in 1947, who was playing the piano aged six. I wonder where that little scamp will be in thirty years. Will he be a master criminal? How many lives will he have wrecked by then? I am confident he won't be in prison. What are the police going to do? Congratulations all.

Back to the Fringe on the next day. I had the good fortune to meet a recent graduate of Leeds University on the High Street. She was promoting her play "Splinters of Light" (Aireborne Theatre company) and was kind enough to talk to me in the rain, even though her pile of flyers was getting soaked. She told me some things which put the whole of the Fringe into perspective: at Leeds University there are four degree courses involving theatre. The two main ones are "English and Drama" and "Theatre and Performance", the first of these takes an academic slant and the second takes a performing-arts slant. There are another two about the technicalities of lighting & sound, and probably theatre management as well. In total she says ~140 students study these things every year, and that's just one university. So we see that there are a lot of people who want to be involved in theatre and performing arts, far more indeed than there are jobs for them all. Given such numbers, it is obvious that there are going to be lots of student productions at the Fringe. The Fringe offers young people the chance to produce a small-scale, small-budget show.

The same kind of thing happens on the other side of the Atlantic. I met a girl from near Boston, USA, who was modelling stars-and-stripes facepaint. She was promoting her play "American Women", a little known script which seems to have been extracted from someone's doctoral thesis. She was studying the same kind of thing: English and Drama. She told me that "The American High School Theatre Festival" selects the best eight high-school plays from the USA annually, and arranges for them to play in Edinburgh. Her company comprised sixteen actors and four others, a total of twenty people in the company. What, don't they have a big drama festival in the USA?

This, then explains why there is a big presence of budding actors at the Fringe. However it would be unfair to say that's all there is as established professionals come here too. Someone explained to me that it's a general meeting-place for "alternative" theatre companies and theatre directors. The way it works is like this: if you're a theatre director, you've got a schedule to fill and you need good acts that the people of your town will appreciate. So you go off to the Fringe and watch some shows, if you like the show, you invite them to come down to your theatre at some point over the next year to perform. This is not student theatrics, but professional interviewing.

Cast of "Much Ado About Nothing" (Anglo-Mexican Foundation and Developing Artists) advertising their play on the Royal Mile

The cast of "Amadeus" (Close Up Theatre) on the Royal Mile (that girl was so hot!)

I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but there aren't enough jobs for all these acting graduates, this is well known. You have to wonder where they go after university. As partial answer to that, you may like to know that I sometimes visit my local lapdancing club (shocked? it's very fashionable for bachelors like me), and one of the girls there studied performing arts. Now she performs lapdancing, and makes a pretty pound from it as well I expect.

The last play I saw at the Fringe this year was performed by "The Gentlemen of the Alternative Cambridge Theatre", and was called "Cardenio". It is marketed as Shakespeare's lost play and it's all very mysterious and exciting. Supposedly. Anyway, this "Cardenio" play is very exciting and fashionable in esoteric circles, and is probably the Da Vince Code equivalent in the world of Shakespeare. There's even a book called "The Shakespeare Secret" by Lee Carrell, although I don't expect it to be adapted into a Hollywood blockbuster in the near future.

This "lost play", thought to be a collaboration, seems to have been pieced together by Oxford Don Bernard Richards , and this group of Cambridge English-Literature students are boldly taking it to the stage, and seem to be the first to do so. How typical of Oxbridge students to be at the forefront of some esoteric new knowledge, and to spurn conventional thinking.

Do you want to know what I thought of their production? I got my ticket from the half-price Hut, where some no-hoper productions collect, and paid about 5 pounds for it. I think they had managed to pull an audience of maybe ten people, but I was pleased to be among them as it was the best play I have ever seen at the Fringe. Admittedly, I am biased because I love Elizabethan english, and I'd rather see Shakespeare than this modern tripe that is better called soap-opera then drama. However, I paid fifty dollars to see Patrick Stewart act Macbeth on Broadway a few years ago, and I couldn't say that there was any much difference in quality.

I am willing to accept that Shakespeare co-wrote this play as well, as it does have a rather pretty turn to the language. Erudite people may want to know that Cardenio is a bit of a cross between "A Winter's Tale" and "Romeo and Juliet", in that it has pastoral elements, and thwarted lovers. As Shakespeare plays go, it's not one of his best, but it may well find its way to joining the accepted canon of his authorship. In my volume of "complete Shakespeare" there are several plays which are seldom enacted. One such is "Two Gentlemen of Verona" and it's a very plain and prosaic kind of play. I think that Shakespeare is not the author, but rather one of his understudies wrote it. Cardenio belongs in the same kind of class, I think, and I wounder if the two were both written by the same understudy.

The acting of the play was fine. I do not understand how students aged 20 or 21 can offer such polished performances. It does not make sense in my head. They showed maturity and stage-presence I would expect of people twice their age, and they weren't even studying performance! how can they be so advanced? I don't know anyone who could offer a better reading of those lines. I must conclude that for some people, acting lies in the blood. I expect that these people spent all their teenage years being involved with amateur dramatics. I also expect that their parents are probably involved with drama somehow, and so they would have been exposed to a lot. Everyone expects Oxbridge students to be more intelligent than average, but it was not intelligence that distinguished this troupe of actors. I rather think the word is maturity: they were far advanced in maturity. Cambridge students may show something that is far beyond your average teenager who just wants to go to pubs, get drunk, and have a pimped-up fast car. Admittedly, I am biased however. It's sad that so few people came to appreciate this play, and I suspect it's too esoteric to catch the fancy of the masses.

Enough eulogising about the cast! Exeunt the Fringe.