Irvine Welsh says his new Edinburgh Fringe show is about the domination of the arts by the rich
'I think now you get a lot of rich kids going into the arts who wouldn't have bothered before because they had different career paths. But all these professions are drying up now'
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Your support makes all the difference.Anyone familiar with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival will be aware of its reputation as an event with a certain class homogeneity.
A reflection of a frustrating trend in the arts as a whole, something which Irvine Welsh hopes to examine with his own Fringe production Creatives. Described as a "dark comic pop-opera", the play first debuted at the Chicago Theatre Workshop, before hitting the Fringe for a run at the Pleasance with its original cast in tow.
Co-written with author Don De Grazia, the work sets itself within a Chicago songwriting class and its group of aspiring young pop stars, promising to showcase "incestuous dysfunction, navel-gazing narcissism, bitterness, and occasional brilliance".
"It's like a 12 Angry Men," Welsh described the show to Sky News. "Kinda set in this very hot classroom, but with music... it's all about cultural appropriation. It's about modern America, it's about contemporary America, Trump's America."
It's a show, also, which sets to explore the idea of class in the arts, and how dominated the industry has become by those with certain economic privileges, aided by the freedom it offers them.
"I think now you get a lot of rich kids going into the arts who wouldn't have bothered before, because they had different career paths," Welsh stated. "But all these professions are drying up now."
"So there's a temptation to kind of go into the arts and also to use the connections that wealthier people have, that poorer people don't have, to get established in these fields. So you do get a blanding out of the voices."
Creatives runs from the 2 - 28 August at 4pm, Pleasance Courtyard.
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