The Bard takes Edinburgh fringe by storm

Shakespeare has been claimed by the Edinburgh Festival fringe as the radical dramatist of the moment.

This year's fringe festival will stage 49 Shakespeare plays, a 200 per cent increase on last year. Not all of them, it must be said, are faithful readings of the folio - the Reduced Shakespeare Company will perform Hamlet backwards in 30 seconds.

But there is a more traditionalist look to this year's fringe in ironic contrast to the official festival, which has its most avant garde look for some years.

Among the highlights of the official festival is Bernd Zimmermann's Requiem For A Young Poet, a choral work scored for an 85-strong orchestra, mas- sed choruses and a jazz combo, with electronic tapes integrating the words of Mao Tse Tung, Winston Churchill, Albert Camus and James Joyce.

While official festival audiences will have to wait for the morning papers to read reviews of the performances, fringegoers can both read and write reviews almost instantly.

For the first time, the fringe will have a site on the internet giving details of all fringe shows, as well as a public "reviews" site where fringe audience members can post their own critiques of shows.

The Fringe Society are hoping that, together with local poets, they can stage a fringe performance that will be filmed and broadcast live down the Net.

Offstage, the main festival, under the directorship of Brian McMaster, has opened two shops which will sell clothes, sweets, books, records and whisky glasses. The Edinburgh Book Festival this year has a particularly high profile line up, with talks from Lord Jenkins, Rose Tremain, Marina Warner, John Mortimer, Steven Berkoff and David Bellamy, among others.