The next big thing

It’s been little over two years since Steve Marmion became Artistic Director at the Soho Theatre in London, but he’s always been clear about his vision for the venue. “It should feel like Edinburgh,” he tells me over lunch, during a packed day of Fringe shows. “It should feel like the best of Edinburgh actually. We want to feel like a conservatoire of production whilst having an amazingly buzzy festival programme 365 days a year.”

And with six slots an evening to fill across three spaces, Marmion has his work cut out for him every August. In 2010, his first year in the job, he saw nearly 200 shows at Edinburgh. He only picked up two: Little Bulb’s Herald Angel Award-winning Operation Greenfield and Bryony Kimmings’ Sex Idiot, which won a Total Theatre Award and then went on to develop last year’s 7 Day Drunk with the theatre.

After that exhausting first year, he now relies on his network of colleagues and trusted associates to help him cover the Fringe. But his enthusiasm stems from his own experiences as a writer and director bringing work to the festival. Marmion has been coming to Edinburgh every year since 1996, when he was a fresh university graduate who’d written a play about the 1989 Hillsborough disaster (he was at Hillsborough that day). It caught the eye of the National Theatre’s Jack Bradley but Marmion says that “other than that first year, I’d never managed to get anyone to see my work. Not anyone who would have given it further life.”

We meet on the first Monday of the Fringe; Marmion’s already been in town for a few days and seen around 20 shows. So far, he’s most enthusiastic about Bitch Boxer —“It’s one of the proudest hours I’ve ever spent in the theatre”—and Boris and Sergey’s Vaudevillian Adventure, an adult puppet show recommended to him by Mervyn Millar, puppet director on War Horse.

His next stop is Carnival of Crows, a free show whose company members work with Marmion at the Soho Theatre. Marmion is there to show his support, rather than because he’s had a hot tip about the work. It’s a macabre story about Victorian carnival sideshows, and Marmion is engaged by the play and impressed by the one-woman performance. But—as with many plays he’ll see at the Fringe—he’s much more likely to build a relationship with the company off the back of this rather than give it a straight transfer to the Soho.

He explains the process: “I’ll have a drink with the guys in the company one evening up here or in London and ask what they’re up to, what their plans are and how we can support them. It’ll probably mean some rehearsal space here and there, or I’ll watch a run-through and offer notes or a script-writer attachment. The one way I can’t help is with money. We haven’t got any – no one has. But I can help with the artistic resources we’ve got.”

Knowing Marmion, or one of his trusted advisors, helps if you want to get his attention at the Fringe. But the theatre aims to see every Edinburgh show they’re invited to. So if you pitch your show correctly, it’s likely to get a viewing from him or a Soho associate.

“The people who tweet me to come and see a show are less likely to get there than the ones that have written me an email,” he admits. “The way to get me there is to know me already and have made contact. Come and see my work, too. Tell me, ‘I like what you’re doing at your theatre. I think my play would fit this space beautifully and this time slot.’ Make it impossible for me to say no, that’s the way people can really get me along to their show.”

For Marmion, Edinburgh is a two way street. In one direction, you’ve got the shows that the Soho Theatre has helped produce or develop to bring up to the Fringe. This year, that includes Phil Porter’s Blink at the Traverse, Joel Horwood’s I Heart Peterborough and Oh, the Humanity and Other Good Intentions by Will Eno. And since the opening of its downstairs comedy and cabaret space, the theatre has also become influential in the comedy world: this year they’ve helped bring Bourgeois and Maurice and Doctor Brown’s Befrdfgth, one of this year’s hottest tickets, to Edinburgh.

The other direction is “pegging it from venue to venue and seeing who’s next”. And although Marmion is resistant to having one-man shows in the main Soho theatre (“We do them already,” he shrugs, “and they’re called comedy”) he thinks there’s a space for the right solo pieces in the theatre’s more intimate upstairs venue, which is about “those young and emerging companies – that raw work, work that’s at the convergence point of genres.”

Coincidentally, the next show we see together turns out to be a one-man piece – Oliver Reed: Wild Thing. Over the two minute walk from our lunch spot to the venue, Marmion seems every bit the Edinburgh veteran, waving to or pointing out people he knows on every street. In the queue for the show, we bump into Ali Robertson—Marmion’s counterpart at the Tobacco Factory Theatre in Bristol—and, as the two chat frantically about everything they’ve seen so far, the extent of the director’s trusted network becomes clear.

Oliver Reed is an engaging hour and, again, Marmion admires the performance. Yet, despite a brief scene in which the young Reed visits seedy Soho for a night of debauchery, it’s not edgy enough for him to feel it merits a transfer to his theatre. But although today hasn’t brought any big surprises or exciting discoveries, he’s still convinced that Edinburgh is the only place to find the best new companies in the UK.

“Where else would you do it?” he says. I suggest Brighton’s own expanding Fringe, but he's not convinced. “I don’t go to Brighton. There are other festivals, and things like Latitude and Glastonbury. But you couldn’t invent this festival from a blank page. What’s wonderful about Edinburgh is that it’s really democratic and open access. It’s up to you to make your splash and it’s up to me to find out what the buzz is and come and see the good stuff.

“And it’s not just up to me on my lovely Soho throne," he continues. "It’s up to every single punter here to find their own Edinburgh. It doesn’t matter how many posters you’ve got on a lamppost, people will find it if the work’s right. If there’s a picture of someone in a Liverpool kit on a poster, my head turns. I can’t help it but that’s the work I want to see and it’s all here for me.”