The diversion of an exploding piano in a recital

Beyond the bombs and the piano-trashing, Monsieur Duchable may be making a serious point

There will be hundreds of performers who, right now, are preparing for their great Edinburgh moment. Appearing either at the official festival or, more significantly, the fringe that goes with it, has become established as a useful rung on the ladder to success for musicians, comedians, actors, writers and performances artists.

With the perfect Edinburgh moment, you can arrive as a little-known alternative comedian with a penchant for cross-dressing and leave as Eddie Izzard, the much-loved family entertainer. You can turn up as a couple of hairy Australians with an act that involves twisting your genitalia into funny shapes and, a month later, wake up to find that you have an international reputation as puppeteers of the penis.

The need to show off in front of others hangs over the Edinburgh Festival like spoors carried on the winds of ambition and exhibitionism - indeed, because working in the arts has become fashionable and mainstream, a career in performance is now seen as a desirable way of making a living, rather than an activity that appeals to an eccentric minority.

But those enjoying their Edinburgh moment and considering building a future upon it might just consider the case of the celebrated French concert pianist François-René Duchable. Since winning a major international music prize at the age of 16, Duchable has had a successful career performing and recording all over the world. Recently, he has announced his retirement at the age of 51. Touring, he explained in an interview, was hell; audiences were smug and middle-class. In fact, the piano itself was "a symbol of a certain domineering bourgeois and industrial society that has to be destroyed".

His contribution to the process of destruction will be a series of three farewell concerts which will take place over the next few days. In the first, he plans to close his performance by having a grand piano dropped from a great height into Lake Mercantour. During the second, he will set light to the formal recital clothes. His final performance will involve another grand piano being destroyed, this time with some sort of mid-air explosion. Once these concerts have been satisfactorily completed, he will restrict his touring to travelling around France on a bicycle with a portable keyboard strapped to the back. His audience, he hopes, will be "children, the ill and prisoners".

The terrible pressures of early success, touring and performance on concert pianists are familiar from biographies of Glenn Gould to Paul Micou's novel The Death of Debrizzi but, by any standards, Duchable's crisis ranks with the most spectacular. It is tempting to put his antics down to a pretentiously French version of the mid-life crisis - he does not help his case by expressing a desire for "a physical communion, almost a carnal communion" with audiences - but, beyond the bombast and piano-trashing, he may be making a serious point.

Who, while attending a concert or sitting through a ludicrously over-praised West End play, has not found himself wondering whether the experience is not social rather than cultural, an exercise in one-upmanship that has little or nothing to do with art? Who, in all honesty, would not welcome the diversion of an exploding Bechstein during a particularly tedious recital?

The question that the more thoughtful would-be performers at Edinburgh may care to ask themselves is whether expressing themselves artistically will be helped or hindered by the various compromises so often involved in playing to the public. For all but true geniuses, performance involves meeting the demands of the market-place halfway, a tension between what they feel intimately and what the audience expects.

Musicians soon end up playing the more obviously crowd-pleasing items from the repertoire. Actors accept TV gigs of which they feel slightly ashamed. The most fiercely independent-minded comedians find that popularity and acclaim somehow take the edge off their acts.

Perhaps the best example of the corrupting effect of putting on a show lies among a group of people whose chosen discipline is not, officially at least, supposed to be a performance art form at all. Writers are now obliged, as part of the publicity-led business of being published, to do readings and be interviewed at festivals. With every performance, these public acts erode the ability to write. As a rule, the less writers appear in public, the more likely they are to create something worthwhile.

Musicians and actors face a starker choice for, apart from following the piano-on-a-bike route, appearing in theatres and concert halls is the only way they can make a living. We live in the great age of exhibitionism, and the pressure to pursue their chosen career will be great. But they may find that the tale of François-René Duchable and his exploding pianos offers a useful parable for the life of a performer.

terblacker@aol.com