Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Out Of Woodstock
Tom Foreman Productions
Venue: Underbelly Cowgate - Big Belly
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Through the experience of Woodstock 99, writer Tom Foreman scrutinises the chaos and focuses a laser eye on mysogeny – what he terms “the contemporary crisis of masculinity”.
Review
“We are stardust, we are golden – and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden” – “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell.
1969 was defined by The Woodstock Festival held in Bethel, New York – 3 days of peace and love, 32 of the biggest music acts, watched by nearly half a million people. It went on to spawn an Academy Award winning documentary and is listed by Rolling Stone as 19th in the list of 50 moments that changed the history of rock’n’roll. As much as this festival is regarded by many as a milestone in 1960’s counter-culture – its successor (perhaps even its evil twin) Woodstock 1999, was noted for arson, violence and the greed of the promoters.
In this piece, writer Tom Foreman scrutinises the chaos and focusses a laser eye on misogyny – what he terms “the contemporary crisis of masculinity”. A solo performer (the impressive Max Beken) plays Guy, the protagonist and is supported with conversational voice-over adding 3 other characters into the mix, along with audio snatches of the actual concert. What follows is the Train Wreck of Netflix fame – from the inauspicious beginning of entering the festival and having all water confiscated, to the destruction of toilets and widespread dehydration, drug use, violence and hospitalisations.
Guy has been looking forward to this for a while – and it seems poetically fitting that he attends as his parents met and fell in love at Woodstock 30 years previously. Tasked with looking after his 15-year-old sister, he juggles seeing his favourite bands with buying drugs, drinking beer and trying not to pass out. He thinks he’s hooked up with a girl, only to see her later with someone else and the casual betrayal begins to feed an angry fire of retribution inside him. Despite the appeals of some bands to stay calm, Limp Bizkit’s exhortation to the audience to enact their number “Break Stuff” resulted in chaos. Guy witnesses the breakdown of norms and he watches on as misogyny manifests itself in assaults. Helpless and viewing the world through a crazed kaleidoscope of drugs and booze the festival turns from dream to nightmare.
Foreman writes almost like a beat-poet – this is a high energy and demanding show for one artist – but Beken pulls off a marvellous performance, alternately brooding and exultant. The flow of the piece only slackens in a couple of moments where the voice-overs are difficult to catch because the stone walls of Underbelly mean the acoustic is bouncy – and the sound balance could be better, but overall this is an exciting and challenging piece.
We are left wondering how a festival that promised so much could leave the legacy of its forerunner so tarnished. Foreman has rightly questioned the latter-day misogyny of young men, successfully holding up this 30-year-old mirror to nature. The appalling greed of the promoters lives on in the scarring of those who trod the return path to the garden.
