THE Edinburgh Fringe often suffers from first week nerves and this week was no exception.
Here’s how one newspaper report on the future of the festival rang out over the weekend: “The UK’s leading Fringe event opens to a backdrop of rising discontent over costs and criticism it has lost its edge… some believe that the future of the entire international event is in danger.”
No guesses on the leading sources for this story: the comedian Stewart Lee, denouncing the agents of crass commercialism, and Tommy Sheppard, the Stand Comedy boss, hosting his show, who has taken his socialist values into the running of the Assembly Rooms.
I’ve covered the Edinburgh festivals as a journalist for enough years now to start fudging the numbers. Each year, after a couple of days, the bubble closes and it draws you back in, addictively and probably for life. In a couple of nights, back-to-back, you can sample an Australian youth choir, a South African comedian, New York drama graduates with a play on the tragi-comic backstage life of clowns.
Take the Polish production of The Blind, in the Old Quad of the University of Edinburgh: audiences blasted with glittering coloured foil, in some dark, demented variation on Danny Boyle’s paean to the NHS at the Olympics.
It’s not the quality of shows, but the sight of the creative drive at work, getting it right and getting it wrong. And yes, it’s a great big party, with a lot of late nights in the opening week, which is why things can get a little hysterical.
Twenty years ago, the director of the Edinburgh International Festival, Frank Dunlop, took on a Sunday newspaper critic over carping coverage of the Edinburgh festivals. What they really wanted the festival to do, he said, was move to London. The suggestion now is that the Edinburgh Fringe risks losing ground – to Fringe festivals in Brighton, Bath, Bedford or Buxton, Derbyshire.
The Brighton Fringe is the second biggest in Britain, and it’s run by an Edinburgh alumni, Julian Caddy, who has his own criticisms of Edinburgh, and ambitions. But it’s been a largely weekend event, vastly smaller, in May. Brighton has an admirable festival offering, but it ain’t in the same league.
It does not have the gruelling month-long runs that fuel Edinburgh’s bear pit, which allows audience build and failure in a completely open access event, with both punters and critics weeding out the wheat from the chaff in the theatre world’s biggest trade fair, while international producers go shopping.
Costs to performers here need to be scrutinised. If there are sharp practises, they need rooting out. Performers are owed transparency in the choices they face when they chose a venue, a promoter, or a PR agency, to know what’s the upfront guarantee they pay, what’s the split on ticket revenues, what are the hidden charges.
But I spent four hours at the Fringe’s Meet the Media event on Saturday, listening to performers who’d queued for about two hours to make the pitch for their shows to The Scotsman. Some were in the Free Fringe, some in the big venues, some in the popular intermediate spaces like C or Space.
They ran from a former Royal Marine with seven years in Iraq and his first full-length comedy show to an Italian actor probing the child psychology of superheroes. Asked about costs, they mostly say yes, it’s expensive, and yes, they expect to lose money. But they’d done the sums, and they know what they’re getting into, and they know it’s worth a try; it’s R&D for a future career, a chance to get noticed and just a place to have a blast.
If you think Edinburgh’s festival scene is losing its moxie, go out to the Royal Highland Centre, where the Edinburgh International Festival director Jonathan Mills is carving a cavernous cattle barn into three theatres in a single building. It’s not the Fringe, but it’s in the spirit that nurtured it. Run or walk over Arthur’s Seat in the Speed of Light, particularly if it’s miserably foggy and wet.
Or take a leaf from the book festival, which has come back from some possibly faltering years with a charismatic and undeniably strong programme for 2012. In the Fringe, there’s Summerhall, one new venue among several, capturing the spirit of the Fringe we’re all said to be missing.
Don’t knock it. Enjoy it.