Edinburgh Festival: City becomes capital of stress

Sleepless, hungover and tortured by hours of student theatre, generations of arts lovers have found out the hard way. Now psychologists have confirmed it really is true: the Edinburgh Festival messes with your mind.

A study of performers and audiences at the month-long event has found they suffer a range of mental health problems thanks to squalid living conditions, excessive drinking and the pressure of competition. More than four out of five admitted to psychological difficulties including anxiety attacks, stress and depression.

The findings have prompted a mental health charity to issue a guide to surviving the event - complete with telephone helpline for those who cannot cope. The study was commissioned by David Mercatali, director of !Runners - The Return, a play now showing at the festival which tackles issues of mental health.

"Edinburgh in August is a pressure cooker of creativity - a city crammed with talented and inventive people," he said. "We had anticipated that there might be a number of people who would class themselves as being under stress or depressed, but we had not anticipated the scale of the problem. What is most upsetting and frustrating about the results is the considerable majority who would simply not consider getting any help for their problems."

The charity Breathing Space is running the helpline between 6pm and 2am, when it says people are likely to be "wide awake and running over problems in their minds".

Its survival guide tells festival-goers to give themselves a break from the artistic treadmill and get some real exercise instead: "Get away for a while: read a book, watch a movie, play a game, listen to music or take a trip away for the afternoon and enjoy some of the most beautiful countryside in the world."

!Runners - The Return has even drafted in a psychologist to help members of the audience affected by its play. One audience member ran from the theatre, claiming the play had brought on an "episode of mania". According to the playwright, Brazilian-born Cristina Teixeira, who is herself a psychologist, Edinburgh audiences have had a uniquely British reaction to the play, which has been shown in several countries.

"It is only in Britain that a few audience members have taken exception to finding themselves interacting in a situation where mental illness is under discussion," she says.

Breathing Space helpline: 0800 838587, 6pm-2am.

Fashionably late, and no one even noticed

When the curtain went up on The Odd Couple last Sunday, one of its stars was only just belting through the front door of the theatre. Alan Davies had been caught on the wrong side of Princes Street as the festival's opening cavalcade got under way, and found to his horror that there was a parade, two metal barriers and 170,000 spectators between him and the venue. The show went ahead: his character doesn't appear until 15 minutes into the action. But after a beating of rare brutality from some of the critics, he might wish that he'd watched the parade instead.

Dara O'Briain is currently less of a stand-up comic than a lean-to comic. Thanks to a footballing injury and a knee operation, he has to walk with a stick for the next three months, even when he's on stage. What's worse is that O'Briain - one of the tallest men in comedy - is suffering from back pain because, thus far, the NHS has been unable to find him a long enough walking stick.

Kerry Gilbert, who appears in Steve Oram's sketch show, was lucky that no one recognised her when she made the trip from London to Edinburgh on an overcrowded train. Unable to get a seat, she put on the fake pregnancy belly she wears in the show, and was sitting down just a minute or two later.

One of the pearls of wisdom in Chris Neill's show is that you're not officially middle class if you haven't appeared in a student production of Abigail's Party. As if to prove his point, there are three separate stagings of the play at this year's Fringe.

Who says that Edinburgh is all about instant success? A 73-year-old retired accountant, Margaret Boschi, has spent 30 years with the Nantwich Players from Cheshire. Now, following a successful production at the festival, she is treading the boards on Broadway for the first time after an invitation to attend the New York International Fringe.

Nicholas Barber