Forest Through the Trees

A visitor walking past 3 Bristo Place after a few years away might well do a double-take. The place that used to be the Forest Café still has a ramshackle look to it, but it's a polished kind of ramshackle. Then you see the sign: Assembly Checkpoint.

"It breaks my heart," says Andy Field, one of the three founders of the Forest Fringe, the alternative theatre festival which, every August from 2007 to 2011, shacked up with the collective of artists and activists who ran the café.

"It was such a rare thing," Field says. "A space in central Edinburgh for politically engaged work, formally unconventional work."

Every year, George Square spawns a few more licensed food vans. The plastic grass spreads out a little further. Looking back, it seems inevitable that the Forest's thoroughly unprofitable bubble of weird artistic goings-on would one day be absorbed by the encroaching entertainment vortex.

In late 2011, the university body which owned the building ran out of cash. The administrators decided—who can blame them?—that housing a bunch of avant-garde film-makers and vegan foodies perhaps wasn't quite the way to squeeze maximum value from the building.

"Nowadays the George Square area feels more like the circumscribed space of a music festival," says Field. He's rueful but surprisingly sanguine about the whole business. He recognises that radical art needs something to react against, for one thing. What's more, the project he helped to start has found a new home.

Last year saw the sixth edition of the Forest Fringe – but only just. In the absence of a venue, it published a book of one-act plays which could be performed anywhere. These so-called Paper Stages proved a neat way of hacking the city (similar books will appear across Britain this autumn) but they could hardly compensate for the loss of a performance space. 

2013 sees the festival move into the Out of the Blue Drill Hall, an arts centre in a former Salvation Army building in Leith. Starting afresh allowed the team to become more ambitious, while keeping the Forest's principles—performers don't pay to perform, audiences contribute what they can—and its DIY ethic. Access for disabled people, for instance, underprovided at the mainstream Fringe, was made a priority.

“The Forest Fringe is like a shark,” says Field, quoting Woody Allen. “It has to keep moving forward or it'll die.”

The highlight of the brief, packed theatrical schedule is what happens to the hope at the end of the evening, a low-key, unsettling metafiction by Tim Crouch and his friend and fellow playwright Andy Smith.

Crouch usually puts on his unsettling metafictions at the Traverse, but he and Field wanted a one-week run and the Traverse doesn't do one-week runs. Crouch laughs, "I used to lampoon people who only do one week as lightweights, lollygaggers and opportunists!"

The search for an alternative venue wasn't a difficult one, given the play's subject matter. The plot—inspired in part by My Dinner With Andre, Louis Malle's film depicting a conversation in a New York restaurant—is loosely structured as an argument about the power of radical art to change the world.

"Whenever I talk about an ideal image of the theatre, I describe the Forest Fringe," Crouch says. "Money isn't important, ideas take precedence, there's a sense of community. It reminds people that there's a radical core to what happens in Edinburgh, when the radical potential of the mainstream Fringe has been gobbled up."

DRILL INSTRUCTORS

The Forest Fringe line-up at the Blue Drill Hall is exceptional this year, with artists like Bryony Kimmings, Fevered Sleep, Fuel, Ira Brand and Paper Birds all contributing work. Particular highlights include:

Bristol-based charm factory Sam Halmarack and his band The Miserablites raise plenty of smiles with their gig-cum-show that lies somewhere "between theatre and a stadium pop concert". It's Sam's big night, he's got a big crowd in, but will his bandmates let him down? Trust us, you'll want to find out.

Perhaps the most exciting spoken word of the Fringe, certainly the weirdest vision of the afterlife, comes from Ross Sutherland and his hypnotic Stand By For Tape Back-up. It's a poem about the death of his grandfather, or thereabouts, and it plays out against the backdrop of the endlessly-looping intro to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. 

Lo-tech funsters, Action Hero, one of several theatre companies to grow to maturity in parallel with the Forest Fringe, perform the follow-up to their lauded Watch Me Fall, called Hoke's Bluff; a send-up of the eternal "winning is everything" mantra that underpins the much-loved American ‘underdog’ movie genre.

Fancy something a little more intimate? Jo Bannon's Exposure is a one-on-one performance and a "tender and tentative look into autobiography, asking how fully we can reveal ourselves – to ourselves, to another, with another."

Perhaps the event that best captures what the Forest is about is the exploration of radical hairdressing. Exactly what it sounds like, this event takes place in a vast abandoned Tollcross Job Centre – the new home of the artists' collective who lent their name to the Forest Fringe, the people Andy Field calls its "moral compass." All over the globe, activists have taken to providing free haircuts to people from marginalised communities in an effort to – well, we're not sure what. To foster political discourse? To celebrate freedom of expression? Whatever – surely it's a cause for celebration that the people providing counter-cultural coiffures in Indonesian slums are offering the same experience to the right-on crowds of Edinburgh.

If it sometimes feels like the Fringe is all about big money and dodging flyerers, it's people like those at the Forest Fringe who ensure that at least a corner of its heart still belongs to the radical hairdressers of the world.