— read write play

On Fringes

Some short answers to short questions: what makes a good fringe festival? It’s a festival where you see work you couldn’t or wouldn’t see otherwise; a festival where makers can make performance which couldn’t or wouldn’t otherwise be made.

What should fringe organisers do? Create opportunities (and even incentives) for makers to take risks on creating work which can’t be made anywhere else. Create opportunities (and even incentives) for audiences to see that work.

Implicit in those quick answers is a reading of the Edinburgh Fringe as it stands, and of the Fringe’s own fringe.

Quick history lesson: the Fringe began in 1947 as an alternative to the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) when eight theatre companies arrived, uninvited, to perform their own, more alternative, theatre.

Fast forward to today. While there is no centralised selection process and any type of event is technically possible, many – if not most – fringe venues actively programme their choice of productions, though the most persistent benchmark is whether you can afford the cost of staging a fringe show.

Minimal costs – beyond venue hire, cost of accommodation and the actual production budget for your show – include the entry fee for registering and appearing in the offical Edinburgh Fringe Festival programme. Without it, few people will know your production exists. Within the fringe itself is a group of powerhouse venues – Assembly, Pleasance, The Gilded Balloon and Underbelly – who in 2008 formed the Edinburgh Comedy Festival as a festival-within-a-festival, publishing their own programme (which you’ll pay, again, to appear in).

In fewer words, minimal costs can start to look maximal pretty damn quickly.

It’s possible to do very well – to even make money – at the Fringe. I’ve been lucky enough to work with a group who’ve done just that for several years running. It is certainly possible to stage a Fringe show on a small budget, and to break even. However, it’s very likely that (even with “professional” representation) you’ll lose money. To the order of thousands of pounds. This is either a financially and emotionally crippling loss, or the price of raising your profile for TV executives, agents and funding bodies at the largest arts festival in the world.

60 years later, the Fringe overwhelming outsizes the International Festival for performances, venues, audiences and ticket sales. In other words, the Fringe has been distinctly un-fringe like for a large number of years; this is news to precisely no-one. The important bit is that for a number of years the Fringe has had a fringe of its own, characterised by the attempt to reduce the cost of staging work and thus encourage new artists and more adventurous productions.

The Forest Fringe, based at The Forest and run in partnership with the BAC, aims to encourage experimentation by reducing costs to performers – not charging for space, offering limited or one-off performance dates and providing accommodation. In other words, the Forest Fringe attempts to remove the economic incentive to either a) not produce work at the Fringe or b) produce safer, more financially viable “mainstream” work.

Similarly, The Free Fringe, led by Peter Buckley Hill, was created in response to the difficult conditions of the Edinburgh Fringe: high participation and promotion costs, frequent under-attendance, and high ticket prices:

He saw that this was a vicious cycle. As costs to the performers rose, ticket prices rose. As ticket prices rose, fewer people went to shows and even fewer went to shows by artists they hadn’t heard of. And this was bad for comedy; you can’t make people laugh if there are only four of them, one in each corner of an otherwise empty room.

And the more empty the audiences were, the more prices went up, to cover the rising costs of the venues. There seemed no escape from the cycle, and yet it was providing no opportunity for performers to rise through the ranks. The circle had to be cut.

Making the space free to performers would not be enough. The benefit had to be passed on to the consumer.

So the Free Fringe offers free entry to all its venues, and doesn’t charge performers for performing.

So, if a fringe festival was starting from scratch in a city with a well-established theatre circuit, I’d have one question: what do you hope the fringe will achieve that you couldn’t otherwise? If the answer is “sell (more) tickets during the off-season,” you might want to look for a different word to describe it.