eif 08 (updated)
April 3rd, 2008 • theatre
The programme for the 2008 Edinburgh International Festival is out, [correction: it's a teaser story. The programme launches in full on April 7] the second produced by relative newcomer Jonathan Mills, and with a theatre line-up including 4.48 Psychosis (staged by Poland’s TR Warszawa) and a new work by the National Theatre of Scotland. The Guardian has a write up here, with a discrete recognition of the festival’s recent financially interesting times:
Mills said that the festival had broken even last year, but was still carrying a £200,000 accumulated deficit. Its public funding has been raised by £600,000 this year. “We have communicated very clearly with the government and they have acknowledged that what we need to fulfil the very high expectations of the festival comes at an international price,” said Mills.
In the recent past, the way in which that price is negotiated is one of the primary tasks of the festival director - staging Wagner’s Ring cycle in 2003 (with the similarly financially troubled Scottish Opera) was a truly international project, in scale and quality, but it came with an appropriately global price tag.
Then there’s the demand of balancing whatever income you can generate from ticket sales with the requirement for widening access via cheap seats that’s one of the strings tied to public funding - the majority of which comes via grants from Edinburgh Council. So, that’s a job based in the recreational juggling of snowflakes in hell, then.
