The scent of warm donuts on the pier, the endless, garish vistas of shops selling rock, the pink and sweating day-trippers with ice-cream moustaches. Ah, Brighton. Despite having lived in the seaside town as a student, to my blushing shame, I'm pretty much a Brighton festival virgin. I've caught a few shows here and there over the years, but I've never really made a concerted effort to do the festival, in the way I plunder the Edinburgh fringe every August. This year, that's going to change.
I've planned my raid and already a booked fat wodge of tickets. So far, I've seen the Ballet National de Marseilles's Metamorphoses and Frantic Assembly's Stockholm, a bristlingly beautiful play about a couple who dance, as if they were mad about each other, towards their own extinction. Orlando Gough's Happy Together project has foundered - a crying shame - and I'm sad that the street theatre jamboree, Streets of Brighton, isn't happening, but I'll be making a beeline for The Bell, a promenading, Tarkovsky-inspired "sensory extravaganza" by the Periplum company. I'll also be watching An Infinite Line, Norman, Glow, The Burst Pipe Dream, and Brilliant, a show for three- and four-year-olds by Fevered Sleep, which I'm hoping will live up to its title.
Looking beyond the official festival programme, not a whole lot has grabbed my eye in the Brighton fringe brochure, and I was dismayed by how many shows are recycled products from Edinburgh 2007. Nothing much apart from a few stilt-walkers and a plenty of outdoors drinking was happening at Fringe City when I wandered through it on bank holiday weekend (this is Brighton's pocket version of Edinburgh's Royal Mile, where flocks of performers with flyers lie in wait for unsuspecting potential punters).
But I did make time for Exposures, created by Andrew Field, a young theatre maker and occasional blogger on this site, who writes about his experiences of the festival today. For the purposes of the show, you become a character called Charlie, who burned down the West Pier in wilder days, and who is now suffering from amnesia. Equipped with a map, a camera and a few newspaper clippings, you are sent off to stroll around the city and reconstruct Charlie's story. The show is no Memento: it needs a few more intricacies and surprises, and it could expand the scope of its treasure-hunt inventiveness (I loved the bit where you have to ring a telephone number on a stick of rock). But it offers a chance to look beyond the façade of Brighton and create your own unwritten history. It's a smashing idea and a small, if unshaped, delight that will remain in my memory.
It's only a few days into the festival, and I'm already wondering how I stayed immune to its lure for so long. Now I need your tips. Write a post and tell me about your plans. And I'm really keen to hear about any shows you've come across that prove the spirit of experiment is alive on the Brighton fringe.
