The Culture Show at the Edinburgh Festival - Part 1 The Culture Show

Welcome to The Culture Show at the Edinburgh Festival, where we aim to

separate our arts from our elbow. This is distracting. Coming up, we

have the fringe debut of an 0s -- 80s icon. We have a giant, that is

illegal in several countrys what he's doing now. He have tributes to

Mr Pinter. Edinburgh has it. Guys, On tonight's show, two Marks, Ten

Plagues. Marc Almond and Mark Ravenhill tell us about working

together on musical theatre. Robert Rauschenberg. We check out the

first major exhibition of his in 30 years. Homage to Harold. John and

Julian tell Simon about their passion for poetry. Ruby Wax talks

to me about Losing It. Her show on mental illness. We may be up north,

but at the theatre, we are heading east. We have theatre from China,

Taiwan and Korea. AS Byatt tell us about her latest

book and festival virgin, Michael Smith, takes the 24-hour endurance

test. First up, a tale of two marks, Marc Almond and Mark Ravenhill. One

is a 1980s new wave pop star, another a prominent playwright.

They have teamed up together to create a show called Ten Plagues,

which had its world premier in Edinburgh earlier this week. They

spoke to Miranda Sawyer and told spoke to Miranda Sawyer and told

Humanity is obsessed with its own demise. We see the apocalyse in

every epidemic, AIDS, swine flu, E- Coli from bean sprout. Which will

be the plague to wipe us out? It is this and more that Marc Almond and

Mark Ravenhill explore in their new piece, Ten Plagues.

Almond plays a man who bears witness to the carnage brought by

the plague in London, in the graveyard the city became.

# As it fell # One face turned

# And I saw that it was you # You are talking about the plague in

1665, but it has modern resonances. You can take it at different levels.

You can take it one man's journey through the great plague. There was

lots of other levels to it as well. Every year, we seem to have new

pandemic that we are threatened with. Outcomes of fear things and

the tabloid things and the crazy behaviour. Going back to AIDS and

HIV when it first started in the early 80s.

# To die # To sleep

# A chance to dream # I would not have written this

unless with my own experiences with HIV. I had a trauma when I was in a

coma after a big epileptic fit due to AIDS and my parents were told

there was no chance he would recover.

For me, it is about other things as well. It is about loneliness as

well. As well as solitude. About surviving through something. Then

you feel you are a different person and you cannot relate to people in

the same way. # Sometimes I feel I've got to

# Runaway # It was 30 years ago that Soft Cell took a northern soul

classic and transformed it into a sleaze pop anthem.

In 2004, he was involved in a motorcycle accident which nearly

killed him. This left him in a coma for two weeks and initially

destroyed his singing voice. I felt I was in fragments and had to put

things back together again. That took maybe a few years to do that,

just dogged determination really. I lost my short-term memory, which

made things like memorising lyrics to songs really well I could not

remember. I had to use cue and lyric sheets on stage for quite a

while. I could never have done something like this two years ago.

It is an achievement for me, for my recovery, that I have come this far

to do something that is probably the most difficult piece that I've

ever done. # I've come to say goodbye

# Still I almost kissed you # I almost kissed you

# But you stopped me # Said I found a tumour

# And pulling up your shirt showed me the tobg en hard -- token hard

and round # A contagion # We have both shared

this feeling of having a near-death experience, or possible death

experience and surviving through it. I think that when you come through

something like that and you do survive, you get a thing like a

survivor's guilt. There is the flip-side, which is the survivor's

arrogance, which this character has. You have cheated death. So it is a

total two sides of the two coin. There is the guilt and the

arrogance as well. That That leads to the question, do you feel like

it has improved your life to have discovered you are HIV-positive or

to have had a motorcycle accident? It has fired you into other areas

that you might not have reached? always say it has been a good

experience for me which sound creepy. I did discover so much

about myself and the loyalty of my friends and about the world around

me through that experience that I can't imagine not having had that

experience. Most of the stuff I found out through a lot of

suffering and lo at of -- a lot of I like to think that I'm better

than I was before. I'm put together in a different way. I'm a kind of

better than I was before. A new improved Mark? Improved, not in

physical ways sometimes. I think certainly as a more rounded sort of

centred person. I feel I'm not afraid of death any more. I feel

I'm not afraid of things like that any more. I'm not afraid of things

happening to me. When something awful happens to you, you think,

throw it at me and I'll take it. And Ten Plagues is on at the

theatre until 28th August. If you would like to find out what the

panel made of the play, then tune in tomorrow night, BBC 2 at 11pm.

The late Robert Rauschenberg was one of the most influential artists

of the 20th century. He has been celebrated this summer at

Inverleith House, where they have hosted an exhibition of his work,

the first major one in three decades.

Alastair Sooke went along to take a look. Look how the light falls on

that fifth chin. You've really got me. Magnificent!

Cardboard boxes. Household junk, mundane objects -

nowadays we are used to art being made out of rubbish. It was much

more unusual in 1950s America. Robert Rauschenberg believed that

art can be made out of anything, light bulbs, empty bottles. Even a

stuffed goat. He said he thought a picture was like the real world if

it is made out of the real world. Which if you think about it makes

sense. Rauschenberg shot to fame in New

York 60 years ago. He is often mentioned in the same breath as

Picasso. His work is not seen all that often in the UK.

Now, three years after his death, Inverleith House is hosting his

first major British exhibition since 1981, with more than 30 of

his late works on display. For more than half a century,

fuelled by inorder napbt amounts of bur born, he challenged our

preconceptions about what paintings and sculptures could be. His

fearless experimentation proved influential. Today, he is

recognised as the godfather of a whole host of avant-garde movements

from the 60s and 70s. He studied at the liberal Black Mountain College,

in North Carolina. Where his teachers encouraged experimentation.

After settling in New York, Rauschenberg developed his unusual

combine style. He merged paintings, news print, photographs and found

objects into striking collages which were a combination.

Just over here is one of the first works you will encounter in the

exhibition. It is from a series called "Gluts." He made them in the

1980s. There was a glut in the oil market. He would drive around,

trawling the streets savaging for odds and ends. Car parts, broken

petrol pumps, street signs, that sort of thing. He would take them

back to the studio and transform them into these elegant and refined

metal collages. Like most of the gluts, it is not

just a dead exercise, if you like, ins a thethics. That is the thing

about Rauschenberg. He was always commenting on American society. The

gluts are all about greed. Greed is rampant, he said at the time, I am

trying to expose it, trying to wake people up. I simply want to present

people with their ruins. There's one detail of the work that

really intrigues me. You can see here at the bottom of this big

green free way sign, what would have spelt out "county" now it

looks like it spells out an inflammatory word. This detail is

what drew him to use the sign and incorporate it into the work in the

first place. This is his way of deliberately referring to the

blighted racial history of America's south, the land where he

himself was brought up. Throughout his career, Rauschenberg

experimented with silk screening images on to a variety of different

surfaces. Like Warhol, he started to use silk

screens in the early 60s. Where as Warhol would show the same thing

again and again and again, Rauschenberg offers these random

visual imagery. In this case, mostly his own photographs,

including that highly suggestive elephant's tail, over there in the

right-hand corner. He was so drawn to collage he found it the right

medium of living amid the chaos and overload of the 20th century.

Rauschenberg attributed his style in part to his mother, who used to

make his clothes for him out of scraps of old fabric. Similarly his

images have a distinctive patch- Rauschenberg was forever

experimenting with materials, with performance, with technology. The

results were often playful and ingenious, like this completely

borchingers creation, part painting, part sculpture, part windmill. His

watch words were multiplicity, inclusion and variety. If this

doesn't exemplify that, I don't know what does. Usually the motor

is activated by sound. For this exhibition, you can also trigger it

It used to be fashionable to say Rauschenberg lost his edge towards

the end of the 60s. It's true that some of his later work lacks that

deliberately crude, rough hewn energy of his celebrated combines,

which made his name. As he got older, Rauschenberg's art became

progressively sleeker and glossier, shinier, literally, as he

experimented with silkscreening images onto metal. You could argue

he was reflecting the way the world had changed. You can't help but

warm to the genial, impish, free spirit that animates all his art,

Robert Rauschenberg's botanical vowedville is on at Inverleith

House until September 2. This weekend sees the start of Edinburgh

Book Festival with nearly 800 authors taking part in 17 days of

reading and events. Amongst them is the esteemed AS Byatt who's here to

discuss her new work Ragnarok, which sounds like a fantasy play,

which will be turned into a film starring Sean Bean. But it is in

fact, she tells, Mullan, a reworking of an ancient Norse myth,

which is very close to her heart. AS Byatt is one of the most

important writers in Britain. Successful as an academic, critic

and cultural commentator, she's most famous for her novels, in

particularly Possession, which won the Booker Prize in 1990.

AS Byatt is a wonderfully, fearlessly intellectual writer. All

her novels are packed with passages of botany or art history or complex

literary paradi. What's extraordinary about her is

something child like, a delight in the primtive pleasures of story

telling. All her books are about the rediscovery, retelling of old

stories. Her latest book Ragnarok, which means the Twilight of the

Gods, retells an ancient Norse myth about the end of the world, but

combines the story with Byatt's personal account of reading the

myth for the first time as a child in wartime Britain.

She was a thin, sickly, boney child, like an eft, with fine help. Her

elders told her not to do this, to avoid that, because there was a war

on. Life was a state in which a war was on. Nevertheless, by a paradox

caliphate, the child may only have lived because her people level the

sulphurous air of the steel city, full of smoking chimneys for a

country town of no interest to enemy bombers. This book is not

exactly a novel really. It's a retelling of Norse myths, but it's

also a book about your childhood, evacuated to the English

countryside during the Second World War. Why did you want to do those

two things together, the story of yourself and the story of Norse

methology? -- mythology snfrplts I accepted the publisher's invitation

to do the myth because I was interested in retelling myths.

had no hesitation about which myth I wanted to write. Then I made

several attempts to write the end of the gods in Norse mythology and

I couldn't get the right tone of voice. So I thought, "What is

happen sning" I went back to my pretty well lifelong relationship

with this particular myth. I thought if I can distance myself by

putting myself as a child into the story, so in fact, the child is

only there as a kind of instrument. I'm not trying to write

autobiography. I'm not very interested in autobiography as a

form. The child is there to make the myth both more distant and

closer. You say you didn't hesitate about which myth you were

interested in. Why didn't you hesitate? Why is Norse mythology so

gripping to you? When I was a child, my mother gave or I suspect Lent me

her book. I thought it was a real story about the nature of things.

This is terrifying and powerful. Asgard and the gods relates the

stories of Norse mythology including the tale of Ragnarok the

destruction of the gods themselves. In her retelling of the myth Byatt

draws paralegals between this apocalyptic story, the dem nation

of the war, and the destruction of the natural world taking place

today. Do you remember this Eden- like experience of nature and the

uncertainty and violence of war being alongside each other somehow?

I do. I thought of the natural world and the trees and the corn

fields and the hedges and the birds in the sky as being a kind of

permanent natural form that would outlast me. It had been there long

before me. And it would be there long after me. I thought of the war

as a human thing. The war had taken my father away. He was fighting in

the Air Force in Algeria. What was happening to him and where he was

weren't visible, weren't imaginable. I had no images of them. I was

wondering if the Norse myths were especially vivid to you because

they took you into the zones of fear and apprehension and violence

too, that were only at the edge of your actual vision or imagination.

I think they did satisfy me. They satisfied my knowledge that things

were not good. Yes. Despite the fact that I was constantly being

told that things were all right. I knew the world was not a good place.

I had great trouble with gentle Jesus meek and mild. That didn't

say anything to me about the nature of things, the Christian religion,

at all. Whereas, this sort of story that drops you in real disaster.

"Hungry creatures, hungry men will eat anything. The battle winners

feasted among the dead bodies, which were being torn at by

creeping, crouching beasts. They gripped each other and fell about

the fire, fornicating with whoever was to hand. They bit and kissed

and chewed and swallowed and fought and struggled and waited for the

world to end, which it did not, not yet. They ate each other, of course,

in the end. "Why do these Norse myths seem so resonant to you now?

I, when I started working on it, I realised that as well as fitting my

childhood sense of being threatened, they fit more and more closely to

my sense of what the world is like now. All these gods did was eat and

trick people and go to battle. And they weren't, in a way, capable of

saving themselves from disaster. I feel that we live, we do live on a

planet which is threatened and in a society that is threatened by

ourselves. We are those stupid gods. "She blew at the sand and hooked up

the creatures with her spiked tongue. She loved and sucked and

swallowed and spat out the debris. She was always hungry and always

killed more than she needed, out of curiosity, out of love, out of

insatiable businessiness." There seems to be a pleasure, a

fascination in stories of what an absolute catastrophe would be like

that people keep returning to. Fplgts this is very true. I suppose

that this is because you have an image, a story, with which to

think out the unthinkable. It's easier to think it out with a story

than try and imagine yourself in a catastrophe, which just fills you

with panic. The strange thing is this very, very old story, which

ends in this black winter should be very unconsoling, but it's also

just still as captivating I think. Lots of new readers will discover

how captivating these Norse stories are. Thanks very much for having me,

inviting me into your home. Thank you.

AS Byatt will be speaking at the Book Festival on Sunday, August 28.

If anyone can get away with writing and performing in a comedy show

about mental illness, it's our very own Ruby Wax. She found prominence

as an aSerbic comic before a break down stopped her career dead in its

track. She's back. But is this part of her rehabilitation? I asked her

to my own venue called Room with a Sue - forgive me - to find out.

That's a taste of Edinburgh! After studying at the Royal

Shakespeare Company Ruby Wax became part of the comedy elite, writing

Not the Nine O'Clock News and starring alongside Jennifer Saund

ers and Dawn French. She's interviewed Madonna and Pamela

Anderson. Now she's in a new show alongside her friend Judith Owen.

Because we have a lot in common. A, we both like smoked mackerel. I

used to go out with her husband. That's really the truth. I swear to

God that's true. She's still laughing about that one.

LAUGHTER The show in itself has a clever

meknoix it, two voices as one. That's you and Judith. I've rarely

seen a synergy like that on stage. Do you enjoy sharing the stage?

have her there it's like mummy's home. That's how we can do this

show. If you were doing this alone, I couldn't. It would be too much me,

In the show you talk about four years and four months of a lapse

since you had a depressive episode. Did it come on suddenly? Or was it

a slow puncture? You know, we don't know whether it's nature or nurture,

when I was a little kid, I always ended up kind of in this awake -- a

waking coma. Then eventually somebody said you've got clinical

depression. Not that I'm embarrassed. So many

people are coming down with this and with mental thing. One in four.

It's more than the flu now. One in four, so one, two, three, four,

it's you. I got it, yeah and you too a little bit. Actually that

whole row is not well. I knew it was going to be funny. I had heard

it was moving. I thought those are going to be the bits where the

reserves, low middle class Susan is a bit squeamish, doesn't want to

hear about other people's pain. I was totally take an long by all of

it. We toured mental institutions for two years. I said if you can

make a schizophrenic laugh, you're in. It took a long time to figure

out how do you take people on a roller coaster ride. It is about us

all. Everyone would know this, that we all have no man you'll. We

always think the next guy knows what they're doing and they're

pretending to be an adult. Then we get the appropriate clothes and go

yeah, yeah. We never know. You say it's not a show about mental

illness, it's about trying to make sense of the world in a general

sense. Yeah and understanding in a funny way really what's on the

bottom line of what marriage is about - it's cash. What love is

about - a couple of hormones and then it's cold turkey. Some people

would say I'm cynical. If your husband is making �250,000

a year plus bonuses, you, as a wife, have no rights. You must take care

of the house, take care of the kids, have sex with him wherever and

whenever he wants. You must stay young and pert to death do you part.

Those are the rules. I didn't make them up. You did make them up

right, I did, but they're right. The show ends, I don't want to

scare people off. We finish the show and we say, if you have

anything you would like to say. I don't know what happens in the room,

they feel like I've never said this before. They feel contained and

safe. They don't feel self- indulgent. I love that people go

"My husband hasn't left the house in 20 years." You think that's a

bad thing. Wouldn't it be something if it was

four in four and we could tell each other what we were thinking. Can

you imagine what a wonderful tribe we would be? Do you think your

success sometimes is a prison, you've created this personality,

who is a bit like you, the real Ruby. Bits are dissimilar, but it

was so successful that model that it traps you. Is it hard to break

out and being a bit more serious? stupidly or smartly, made the

American an idiot. But I was only loud because I was so nervous. You

know it was like ter receipts. I was saying lines. I was really

nervous. People think I'm that person. They come up to me and go

"You're obnoxious!" And I think, well if you paid, I'll be whatever

you want to be. Now we want to be famous for the

sake of being famous. We don't even want the skill. We just want to be

on TV and we'll do anything on it. You want me to eat my mother-in-law,

toss her on the barbeque. Five years ago, I was going to be

kicked out of TV, I thought I'm leaving the party first. Then I

thought I'd go to school and get my brain back. She's going to Oxford.

I'm not saying I'm doing well, but I'm in there. You're doing

neuroPalace tisity. This is serious stuff. Yeah, I have to write a

masters. Instead of writing like everybody else, they're letting me

write another one-woman show about how your brain does work. You're

doing a performance for your MA? Yeah. If you could have one thing

out of these two what would it be, funny or happy? To be happy. That's

great. Because I don't think you would have said that five years

ago? No, I would think nobody would like me if I wasn't funny. Now I

don't give a, whatever that word is. Now when I go to a dinner party and

somebody asks me what I'm doing. I say I'm doing the same thing you're

doing, I'm dealing with heart ache Ruby Wax is at the UnderBelly until

29th August. If you have never been to the Edinburgh Festival, you are

missing out, you are missing out on crowded streets, inflated

accommodation prizes. You are also missing out on the most exciting

and vibrant arts festival in the world. Michael Smith confessed he

had never been to the festival. We sent him on his own endurance test.

Could he survive the pace? Could he cope with 24 hours of this city?

Stay tuned to find out. I've never been to the Edinburgh

Festival bfrplt people go on about it like it is a magical reality in

its own bubble. It sound more like a state of mind than a place. I'll

go and see what the fuss is about. The first port of call is Royal

Mile. It is like a feeding frenzy. Hundreds of facting trying to snap

up punters for their shows. It is What can I say? It was bedlam out

there. I thought I'd better go and check into a hotel and dump my

stuff off before I got stuck in. Have you got a room for Mr Smith?

Here we go. You're in 27. If you could just

sign here. You've got a lot of balls coming in

here! I'd only just arrived. It seems

like everywhere you turn in this town there's something weird going

The thing about Edinburgh is it's not just one festival, it's loads

all bundled together. Now f you've never been here before it is

difficult to get your head around the scale of it. It is like 45,000

performances and averages out at 2,500 shows a day. You can do it

from dusk till dawn if you like. They asked me to check out some of

the more physically demanding shows here. It is clear I need a lot of

energy to get through all of this. It wears you out just watching some

of these acts! There's plenty of other ones which

demand a lot more from their audience.

They've told me to bring some shorts along for this show which is

set in a gym in for a penny, in for a pound.

This is sink or swim. It is the first ever comedy show performed on

exercise bikes. You've come to watch me. Good!

It's a funny show that really. It's about a sort of fitness instructer

in his mid-life crisis or breakdown. We were the sort of fitness group.

I got really involved because you were physically involved with the

cycling. You felt more part of it. I can't believe this act.

It was good fun, that! It's a crazy thing this festival,

you know. We're only halfway through the first day. I amount

nabgered already. Apparently we have -- knackers already.

Apparently we have a dance Martha thon next. I'm not much of a dancer

-- a dance marathon next. I'm not much of a dancer. I don't know what

is going on. I have been given this number. I have walked into this

hall and my number corresponds to my feet. I'm dancing with this

lovely young lady tonight. You have to move your feet at all

times or you'll get eliminated. Basically you are paired up with a

complete stranger and you have to dance for four hours. It is

terrifying. I think the most important thing

for people to know is it is not a dance contest. It's more like an

endurance test. You are not necessarily going to be judged with

the way that you are dancing. Not - I'm not trying to

underestimate you. It is half painful and half a good

laugh this. I looked around the room and saw an old man dancing. I

realised he was a better dancer than me. I took a breather and

forgot to keep my feet dancing and they disqualified me immediately!

Me dance partner looked so disappointed. I thought I better

not ask for her phone number! It's been a pretty full day. I've been

on exercise bikes, on a dance marathon. Apparently I have no idea

what it is, but the next thing I am going to I am going to get into

some pyjamas, so I am looking forward to that. Last up was hotel

Madire. Based on the myth of the mother who kills her children. The

critics are going crazy for it. I found it hard work. It is a

demanding piece for the audience. It goes on from midnight to dawn.

It's so long you even get to bed at one point. I tell you what I don't

like about this thing, it's totally patronising, man. They dress you up

like a little kid. The show deliberately invades your personal

space. It is designed to put you off guard. Everyone else seemed to

be an eager victim. I had been at it all day and was getting frazzled

at this point. Well, the dawn is up now. I've done

my first full day at the Edinburgh Festival and you know, some of it I

have really liked and some I have not been so keen on. I guess that's

part of the festival experience, isn't it, really. I cannot believe

how much you can fit into a day really. The thing is though there's

three weeks over it left. I think now I'm going to get off to bed.

I'm going to say good night. Good night.

Mr Smith is currently lieing in a darkened room wishing we would all

fobg-trot off. We will send him on -- foxtrot off. Harold Pinter was a

noble laurri yet. It is his poetry which is the source of inspiration

for this festival, with Julian Sands, directed by John Malcovich.

Pinter's poems are often blunt, opinionated and unashamedly

political. It's not so much the slow motion sword fighting of his

dramatic dialogue, it is more like being hit over the head with a

sledgehammer. I am curious to find out whether Julian Sands and John

Malkovich can turn it into a drama and whether they can make this one

of the biggest draws on the fringe. Now, look here, he said. This is a

beak. This is a pause. And this... Is a silence.

Harold Pinter started writing poetry at 11 years old. It is his

powerful plays that brought him acclaim. All my life I took the

same. Play up, play up or play the same. My mother and father, all

along the line, follow the line we can and you won't go wrong. Never

afraid to speak his mind his opinions have not always met with

universal approval. Critics have not always appreciated his verse.

Maybe sap skands and Malkovich's apparents will -- Sands throw new

It is repeated as a memorial tribute after he died. John had a

recording of this event in Los Angeles. You put it on your iPod.

And John had the idea that this could be worked uch into something

more than just a poetry reading. -- worked up into something more than

just a poetry reading. How did you commit to reading poetry for Harold

Pinter? His illness had impaired his reading voice. He asked me,

spending time with him, working on each poem, very closely. It sound a

bit quaint reading poetry, but there ain't nothing quaint about

Harold Pinter. There are no more words to be said. All we have are

the bongs which suck out our blood. And all we have are those which

polish the skulls of the dead. theatre works are famous for

agonised control of dialogue and conversation. Is that earful

language evident in the poetry as well? The earful language very much

so. It is not the same language. You could hardly believe it was the

same person. Of course some of the poems have a

great violence of verbal and great tenderness. This is sort of

Harold pure. Harold Pinter unplugged.

You hold my touch in you. Turning to fasten you the one shape of our

look. I hold your face too. Always where you are. My touch, to love

you, looks into your eyes. When you met him did you get a

sense that he was mellowing at all in his old age? You know, no.

Harold had within him a physical presence a Kennetic power. Like a

wounded beast. That panther-like athleticism I think he had. No, he

did not wilt into a sweet old geezer. Vehemently left wing he was

defiantly anti-war. The United States, it is a country

run by a bunch of lunatics with Tony Blair as a hired thug. You are

a fan of his work. Are you a fan of his politics? I don't know if I am

a fan of anybody's politics particularly. I work with mooist,

Marxists, Communists, socialists, left-wingers, centralists, right-

wingers. Really any group you could name. I never have a problem.

And the idea that people will agree with your perceived or alleged or

real politics, of which I don't have much, by the way, but the idea

that they will is mental. I mean.... He thought that Bush was a mass

murderer, you don't have to sign up to that idea to get involved with

the work. No. When you're an actor or director you're always, your

actual job deaf fin nations is to pre-- definition is to pretend you

are someone you're not, doing something you don't, somewhere

you're not. # You're lovely with your smile so warm

. # I've got woman # Crazy for me

# She's funny that way # You are the promised kiss of

sunshine. The fringe throws up an image of

people sort of roughing it sometimes, washing their underwear

in the sink and handing out flyers down the Royal Mile. You are two

established Hollywood stars. Is there a sense of going back to

basics? I don't think we got away from basics, I have been washing

socks for 30 years. Yes, that is a lot of hand-washing. This is part

Breasts, bottoms thighs, the whole palava. I raise my hat to my

uncensored sister, who shone the light of love of those around her

who lusted longest on her black suspender. Harold was an only

child! LAUGHTER

This is a celebration, isn't it, it's called a celebration. It is a

celebration. It began as a memorial tribute. But now it's absolutely a

celebration of someone who called himself the luckiest man in the

world. I might well be enigmatic, tas turn, terse, prickly, explosive

and forbidding, but I have also enjoyed my writing life and indeed,

my life to the hilt. It's a real no-frills performance. It's

somebody on stage with a book. But you really get a sense of Pinter's

character developing. What carries is is Julian Sands, who has a great

respect and dedication to the text and the man. He really means it and

he really feels it. So did I. And Julian Sands in a celebration

of Harold Pinter is on until August 21. We're spoiling you this week,

with two Hollywood legends. Margaret Cho is a household legend

in the States. But she's a controversial figure with her

material often risque and sexually and politically charged. Think of

her as a Korean cranky. We asked her along to explain the world

according to Margaret Cho. It is a very strange profession that I've

gone into. It's hard on my family. They're freaked out. Or they were

freaked out about it, when I decided I was going to be a

comedian, I told my mother. I was 13. I said "I want to be a comic."

She said, "Oohhh, maybe is better Some people are raised by woofls, I

was raised by drag queens. She say certain smells bring you back to

childhood. Like my friend says when she smells wood burning in the air,

she's reminded of Christmas when she was five years old. The smell

that takes me back is balls in pantyhose. That's tights to UK

viewers. I'm sorry if you came to the show

and you didn't know me or anything and you didn't know what you were

coming to see. This is what it's going to be like, you saw my

picture and oh, I love Chinese things. Oh, let's go. I love

crouching tiger, hidden dragon. I'd love to go see Memoirs of a Geisha,

it's fabulous, acrobatics. Let's go. It's not going to be that, so

My poor father put me into the care of gay men because he knew they

could teach me what he couldn't. He knew that gay men knew about art

and literature and fashion and music and most importantly, he knew

that gay men knew how to teach me about men. That's why I am the way

that I am. If I could pick, I would rather be

a gay man. Like, to me being a gay man, it's got to be the greatest

existance possible for a human being. I think if you're a gay man,

you're probably near the end of your reincarnation cycle. You've

got a couple of life Times left to be fierce, just work! I work

towards legalising gay marriage in America. We don't have it in every

state and we should because it's important. To deny a gay man the

right to bridal registry, that's inhumane. And people ask me, well,

are you gay? I don't know. I just don't care who you are. I want you

to want me. I'm not bi, I'm I. It's been tough, like, I've been

living in the south. I've been shooting a TV show called Drop dead

Diva. We are in a small town in Georgia. Peach Tree City, Georgia,

where I am the blackest person there.

I'm ice cube. That's weird when your apartment is the ghetto, the

gay neighbourhood and Chinatown. I was being interviewed on a radio

show and the DJ asked me, "What if you woke up tomorrow and you were

beautiful?" I was like, "What?. He said "Yeah, what if you woke up

tomorrow and you were blonde, you had blue eyes, you were 17 years

old, you're thin, tall and beautiful?" I was shocked. I was

like, erm, I'm already beautiful. If you can't see it, I feel sorry

for you. I think it's so important to feel beautiful because I think

beauty is power. For people like us, beauty is vital. In Edinburgh,

beauty is absolutely essential. When I was a little girl people

would tell me that I was ugly. My grandmother would say, "Your face

is bloated beyond recognition." My grandfather would say, "You know

they tell us that you and me are ugly, but they don't (BLEEP) ."

Cho dependent is on at the Assembly until August 29th.

This year's international festival kicks off tomorrow. For that we

need to look east, because it's all about Asia and Asian culture. I

went to talk to the festival's director Jonathan Mills to find out

Since its foundation in 1947, the aim of the Edinburgh international

festival has always been to embrace global culture. Director Jonathan

Mills has made it Asia's turn in the spotlight, turning it into a

discovery where those from Asia share their talents with us in the

far West. Last three years, you've tackled

the blurring boundaries of Europe. You've looked at Scottish

enlightenment and the new world. What does this year bring? A very

different theme, a bridge between Asia and Europe. I want to make the

point that there's a lot that's really familiar aboutation culture

that we take for granted. The fact that anyone who's fascinated by

martial arts, who's seen a Bruce Lee movie has had an experience

rather like pee king op ra. There's a lot that I want to bring to

people's consciousness and celebrate.

We in the West have been guilty of casual orientalism, a shoddy

stereotyping. Is this programme your way of redressing that

balance? I'm not quite doing that. What I'm trying to do is suggest

that artists have been mixing it up for centuries and artists have a

much greater understanding of different cultures. What I'm really

saying is that be led by them in their curiosity into Asia. Your

starting point, I gather was the Peony Pavilion. The greatest

Chinese poet of the late 16th century died exactly the same year

as Shakespeare. They're identical contemporaries. In the peony

Pavilion, if there's a contemporary to Shakespeare is the Chinese

experience of Romeo to Juliet. The love interest is already debt and -

- dead, it's actually a dream. It's a beautiful elegy.

The focus seems to be on Shakespeare. You have a Korean,

Taiwanese and Chinese take on three Shakespearean classics. It's fair

to say that shake peer is an obsession with artists across

aishya. One thinks of films like Thrown of Blood as his tribute to

Shakespeare. We have three great tributes to Shakespeare and three

different versions of that. The most standard, I guess, if you

can call it that, it's magical nevertheless, is the version of The

Tempest. And the magical aisles and their

stormy brooding poet triare no longer in the Mediterranean, but

the south China sea. And focusing on comedy as well. Whereas we in

the West are preoccupied with notions of tragedy. They look at

the more playful elements in the text. It's very compelling and

beguiling and very funny. We've also got a one-man version of King

Lear, imagine that, for all of its monumentality brought down to the

single tragic figure of Leer. An extraordinary actor playing a range

of roles and techniques. It suggests to us that actually our

version of King Lear as the person at the centre of power, who

abandons everything and abdicates power and everyone is treacherous

to him actually, there's a different version of King Lear. It

suggests that he was only -- always lonely and his decisions to on

diKate only reinforce what was really there in the first place,

which is that we're all alone, and especially if we're powerful. It's

a very different take on one of our greatest tragedies. There is also a

very different treatment of Shakespeare on offer from the

Shanghai Peking opera this year. The thing Shakespearean adventure

is a hamlet that you'll never ever seat like of again, in a company

that you only see once in perhaps a decade, a company of this calibre

in the UK, the shang eye opera company doing the resenk of Prince

-- remake of Prince zedong. Some would say this is cynical because

of the collapse of financial markets in America and Europe, we

look perhaps to the east to provide the essential arts funding. How do

you respond to criticism like that? I would love to be able to indulge

in the sort of instant cynicism that you describe, because what I

mean... This has taken years to generate, what do you mean instant?

This is part of a five-year programme, where I thought in

keeping to the original ethos of the Edinburgh Festival, which was

always going to be about embracing the world, and one of the important

parts of the world that we haven't embraced for a little while was

Asia. It is a festival that looks at many facets of the different

cultures, different stories, different attitudes that one can

find across Asia. You share this beautiful city with the fringe

festival. Do you ever weigh anchor in town and see show that's aren't

connected with the festival. course, this is the week I can do

that. It's almost impossible. I enjoy this moment in Edinburgh's

calendar especially for that. expect to see you at 2am drinking.

The international festival begins tomorrow. That's about it for this

week. Join us next week for more Edinburgh fun and madness. I leave