LOS ANGELES FESTIVAL : FROM A WEE BEGINNING TO A BONNY, BOOMING FRINGE FETE

Running concurrently with the Los Angeles Festival will be the Fringe Festival, a wide-ranging offering of theater, music, dance and art events that opens Friday. The festival was patterned after the Fringe of the Edinburgh Festival.

A year before Donald Wolfit was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to English theater in general and to Shakespearean theater in particular, he appeared on the Fringe of the Edinburgh Festival in a one-man play, “The Strong Are Lonely.” When people said he should have been invited to present the play at the official festival, the veteran actor-manager said: “There is no such thing as a fringe of art. Wherever an artist is, there is the center.”

Expressed by Wolfit in 1956, such sentiments are shared by the thousands of people who flock to Edinburgh each August to perform on the Fringe of its international festival. In contrast to the formal festival, the Fringe is a gathering of uninvited but primarily professional entertainers.

But if these Fringe performers didn’t believe in their own ability or even genius, they would not go to this city where the supply of entertainment and artistic activity can far exceed demand.

When the main festival began in 1947, it invited two or three major companies from London and Paris to present theatrical classics performed by famous players. The Fringe grew up as a more adventurous, and often disrespectful, alternative to this dignified diet of drama. From a dozen plays in the first year, the Fringe steadily grew to 100 shows by 1969, then it soared to 1,000. This year’s Fringe (which ended Saturday) attracted some 5,000 performers.

Although it is estimated that 500,000 tickets were sold for productions from all over the world this year, many of the 460 performing groups lost money, and Frank Dunlop, director of the main Festival, complained recently that Fringe groups were being priced out of existence and were being asked to pay too much rent for many of the 150 halls on the Fringe. The Fringe organizers, however, reported record business at their central box office, where long lines of people waited for tickets for the main attractions.

In some theaters on the Fringe, more than a dozen different shows were staged around the clock every day. Stagehands and theater critics claim to be the hardest working people on the Fringe, and some of the latter have reviewed as many as 70 shows in three weeks.

I can remember when the Fringe was much smaller and an individual critic could see virtually all that was worth reviewing. There were critics from six newspapers and one paying customer at a performance I attended in a drab hall on the historic Royal Mile between Edinburgh Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse. We watched the students of the Oxford Theater Group struggling to enliven a new comedy. When it was over, a few cheers came from the actors’ friends at the back of the hall.

The rest of us gave no signs of having enjoyed ourselves, and the next morning it became apparent that only a few of us had. It was Sunday before the Observer appeared with Ronald Bryden’s celebration of the “brilliant debut” of a young playwright named Tom Stoppard, whose “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” then began to draw crowds.

In the early years of the Fringe, Oxford set high standards for humorous late-night revues, to which people went for lighthearted relaxation after the more formal concerts, operatic and theatrical occasions on the official festival program. “Cakes and Ale,” the 1953 Oxford revue, featured a bright young student, Margaret Smith, who later became more familiar as Maggie Smith (winning an Oscar, as it happens, for playing that redoubtable Edinburgh character, Miss Jean Brodie, in 1969).

In 1958, a school production of “Hamlet” attracted attention, with a bright boy named Derek Jacobi playing the Prince of Denmark, and that same year the pianist in the Oxford revue was young Dudley Moore. The following year, Alan Bennett joined the Oxford team. Along with Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, Bennett and Moore formed the quartet that presented “Beyond the Fringe” in 1960 and opened up the era of “alternative comedy,” but that was at the invitation of the official festival, outstripping and, for once, outwitting the Fringe.

Oxford, Cambridge and dozens of other university groups from Britain and the United States continue to present cabaret and revue on the Fringe, but they also produce more substantial drama, and some of these student directors have risen to the top of their profession. Trevor Nunn, who became director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Richard Eyre, director-designate of the National Theater of Great Britain, are among those whose careers began on the Edinburgh Fringe.

The first professional group of American actors to appear on the Fringe came from La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York 20 years ago. Ellen Stewart and Tom O’Horgan were surprised (but not too disappointed) by the shocked response of some of the staider newspapers, one of which denounced “Filth on the Fringe.” A few years earlier it was an American, Jim Haynes, who set up an experimental theater in Edinburgh--the Traverse--which continues to be one of Britain’s most innovative theaters, entirely committed to new writing.

The presentation of new plays is the special concern of the Fringe Society, an organization to which all the groups subscribe. Through its central box office, people can buy tickets for shows scattered around 150-odd halls and theaters, and it is for comedy and light entertainment that there is the greatest demand. New, unpredictable work is difficult to sell, but without it the Fringe would lose its spirit of adventure.

In 1972, the year before the Scotsman Fringe First Awards were inaugurated, there were 45 new plays on the Fringe. By 1977 there were 138, and in some years the number of productions eligible for Fringe Firsts has exceeded 300. Although student and other amateur groups may represent the majority of Fringe participants, most of the awards have been won by professional companies.

One of the early winners was Tadeusz Kantor’s Cricot Theater from Poland, presenting the strangely surreal “Lovelies and Dowdies.” Kantor won again three years later with “The Dead Class.” The awards are given to new adaptations and translations, as well as to plays receiving their first performance in Britain. Among American award winners have been Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child,” Denver Center Theater Company’s “Quilters,” Theater El Dorado’s “Spoon River Anthology,” Doug Wright’s “Stonewater Rapture” and Laura Shamas’ “Amelia Lives.”

There is incredible competition for the audience, and the official festival has in recent years broadened the range and style of its own drama program. Certainly it can be galling to have the misfortune to be trapped in some hall, watching a shoddy production of under-rehearsed and feebly written material when so much is happening only a few doors away or a couple of blocks around the corner.

It can happen, after all.