Edinburgh Festival Fringe
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe (also referred to as the Edinburgh Fringe, Edinburgh Fringe Festival or the Fringe) is the world's largest performance arts festival, which in 2019 spanned 25 days and featured more than 59,600 performances of 3,841 different shows[1] in 322 venues.[2] Established in 1947 as an alternative to (and on the fringe of) the Edinburgh International Festival, it takes place in Edinburgh every August.[3] The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has become a world-leading celebration of arts and culture, surpassed only by the Olympics and the World Cup in terms of global ticketed events.[4] As an event it "has done more to place Edinburgh in the forefront of world cities than anything else" according to historian and former chairman of the board, Michael Dale.[5]
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
It is an open-access (or "unjuried") performing arts festival, meaning that there is no selection committee, and anyone may participate, with any type of performance. The official Fringe Programme categorises shows into sections for theatre, comedy, dance, physical theatre, circus, cabaret, children's shows, musicals, opera, music, spoken word, exhibitions, and events. Comedy is the largest section, making up over one-third of the programme, and the one that in modern times has the highest public profile, due in part to the Edinburgh Comedy Awards.
The Festival is supported by the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, which publishes the programme, sells tickets to all events from a central physical box office and website, and offers year-round advice and support to performers. The Society's permanent location is at the Fringe Shop on the Royal Mile, and in August they also manage Fringe Central, a separate collection of spaces dedicated to providing support for Fringe participants during their time at the festival.
The Fringe board of directors is drawn from members of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, many of whom are Fringe participants themselves – performers or venue operators. Elections are held once a year, in August, and board members serve a term of four years. The Board appoints the Fringe Society's Chief Executive (formerly known as the Fringe Administrator or Director), currently Shona McCarthy who assumed the role in March 2016.[6] The Chief Executive operates under the chair, currently Benny Higgins.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose show Fleabag was performed at the Fringe in 2013 before it was adapted for television, was named the first-ever President of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society in 2021.[7]
The planned 2020 Fringe Festival was suspended along with all of the city's other major summer festivals. This came as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak in the early months of the year, with concerns of spreading the virus any further.[8][9] However, one live show was performed at the 2020 Festival and this was Nathan Cassidy with his stand-up show 'Observational'.[10]
The 2021 festival took place during 6–30 August 2021, though it was much reduced in size, with 528 shows in person and 414 online.[11] The 2022 festival took place from 5–29 August 2022 and marked a return to pre-pandemic levels, with 3,334 shows.[12] Fifty were livestreamed, by NextUp Comedy, for the first time ever since the founding of The Fringe, in an effort to stay true to The Fringe Society's 2022 vision of equality and inclusiveness.[13] The 2023 festival was scheduled from 4–28 August 2023.
Fringe venues come in all shapes and sizes, with use being made of nearly any viable space that is available, from regular theatres (e.g. the Traverse or Bedlam Theatre), function rooms (e.g. the Assembly Rooms), churches and church halls (e.g. the Quaker Meeting House, Paradise in Augustines[54]), lecture theatres (including the notable George Square Theatre), conference centres, other university rooms and spaces, bars and pubs, temporary structures (The Famous Spiegeltent and the Udderbelly), schools, a public toilet, the back of a taxi, a double-decker bus and even in the audience's own homes.[55]
The groups that operate the venues are also diverse: some are commercial and others not-for-profit; some operate year-round, while others exist only to run venues at the Fringe. Some are local, others are based in London and elsewhere and transfer to Edinburgh for August.
From the performers' perspective, the decision on where to perform is typically based on a mixture of cost, location (close proximity to the main Fringe hubs around the university is seen as an advantage), and the philosophy of the venue – some of whom specialise in amateur, school or college productions, some of whom are semi or wholly professional.
In 2019 there were more than 3,800 shows registered in the programme taking place in 322 different venues.
The main venue operators can broadly be split into four groups:
There also continue to be single, independent venues, sometimes only hosting one show, sometimes only for a limited period.
During the Fringe the pedestrianised area of the High Street around St Giles' Cathedral and the Fringe Office becomes the focal point for theatre companies to hand out flyers, perform scenes from their shows, and attempt to sell tickets. These performances run alongside the Fringe Street Events which feature more than 200 street performers and thousands of buskers on the High Street and Mound Precinct. Many shows are "2 for 1" on the first Monday and Tuesday of the festival and different venues operate independent ticket offers throughout the festival.
Ethos[edit]
The Fringe is an open access festival. The role of the Fringe Society is solely to facilitate the festival, concentrating mainly on the challenging logistics of organising such a large event. Alistair Moffat (Fringe administrator 1976–1981) summarised the role of the Society when he said, "As a direct result of the wishes of the participants, the Society had been set up to help the performers that come to Edinburgh and to promote them collectively to the public. It did not come together so that groups could be invited, or in some way artistically vetted. What was performed and how it was done was left entirely to each Fringe group". This approach is now sometimes referred to as an unjuried festival, open access arts festival or a fringe festival.[83]
Over the years, this approach has led to adverse criticism about the quality of the Fringe. Much of this criticism comes from individual arts critics in national newspapers, hard-line aficionados of the Edinburgh International Festival, and occasionally from the Edinburgh International Festival itself.
The Fringe's own position on this debate may be summed up by Michael Dale (Fringe Administrator 1982–1986) in his book Sore Throats & Overdrafts, "No-one can say what the quality will be like overall. It does not much matter, actually, for that is not the point of the Fringe ... The Fringe is a forum for ideas and achievement unique in the UK, and in the whole world ... Where else could all this be attempted, let alone work?". Views from the middle ground of this perennial debate point out that the Fringe is not complete artistic anarchy. Some venues do influence or decide on the content of their programme, such as the Traverse and Aurora Nova, who used to run their own venue but are now just a production group.
The Fringe itself at times sprouts a fringe. While the festival is unjuried, participating in the Fringe requires registration, payment of a registration fee,[84]
and use of a Fringe venue. For example, the 2008 registration fee was £289.05.[85]
Some outdoor spaces also require registration, notably the Royal Mile.[86][87]
Thus some artists perform outside the auspices of the Fringe, either individually or as part of a festival or in association with a venue, either outdoors or in non-Fringe venues.
Started by Deborah Pearson in 2007, and continuing in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, under the co-directorship of Andy Field and Pearson, a primary "Fringe of the Fringe" festival was held,[88][89]
at The Forest, with support from 2008 to 2010 by the Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) and support from several organisations including the Jerwood Foundation and Queen's University in Canada. Its aim was to encourage experimentation by reducing costs to performers – not charging for space, and providing accommodation. The same applied to audiences: all shows being "pay what you can".[90]
In 2022, the festival's 75th anniversary year, the Fringe Society consulted with stakeholders from across the festival – from artists to venues, residents to government bodies – to create a shared vision and set of values. The vision was “to give anyone a stage and everyone a seat”. Rooted in equality and inclusiveness, it was designed inspire all Fringe stakeholders to pull in the same direction.
Three values were also established to guide the behaviours and decisions of everyone involved with the Fringe. The Fringe Society said they would “live by them, champion them and uphold them where necessary”. The three values are:
• Celebrate performing arts
• Be open to all
• Look out for each other.[91]
Influence[edit]
The concept of fringe theatre has been copied around the world. The largest and most celebrated of these spawned festivals are Adelaide Fringe (established 1960 and second biggest in the world), National Arts Festival in Machanda, formerly Grahamstown, South Africa (1973), and Edmonton International Fringe Festival (1982). The number of such events continues to grow, particularly in the US and Canada. (In the case of Edinburgh, the Fringe is an addition to the Festival proper, being officially known as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Where there is no pre-existing Festival to be added to, such as New York International Fringe Festival (est. 1997), the word comes before the word "festival".)
In August 2016, the Adelaide Fringe began an official partnership with Edinburgh Fringe.[92]
In the field of drama, the Edinburgh Fringe has premièred several plays and musicals, most notably Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1966), Moscow Stations (1994), which starred Tom Courtenay, and most recently Six the Musical by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss (2017). Over the years, it has attracted a number of companies that have made repeated visits to the Fringe, and in doing so helped to set high artistic standards. They have included: the London Club Theatre Group (1950s), 7:84 Scotland (1970s), the Children's Music Theatre, later the National Youth Music Theatre under Jeremy James Taylor, the National Student Theatre Company (from the 1970s), Communicado (1980s and 1990s), Red Shift (1990s), Grid Iron and Fitchburg State University. The Fringe is also the staging ground of the American High School Theatre Festival.
In the field of comedy, the Fringe has provided a platform that has allowed the careers of many performers to bloom. In the 1960s, various members of the Monty Python team appeared in student productions, as subsequently did Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, the latter three with the 1981 Cambridge Footlights. Atkinson was at Oxford. Notable companies in the 1980s have included Complicite and the National Theatre of Brent. More recent comedy performers to have been "discovered" include Rory Bremner, Fascinating Aïda, Reduced Shakespeare Company, Steve Coogan, Jenny Eclair, The League of Gentlemen, Flight of the Conchords, Al Murray and Rich Hall.
Many performers have spoken highly of the Fringe, and the effect it has had on their career. Magician Paul Daniels first appeared at the Fringe in the twilight of his career in 2013, and commented: "I've become Edinburgh's publicity agent. I tell everybody, 'You've got to be in it.'"[93]
Controversies[edit]
Subject matter[edit]
The freedom to put on any show has led periodically to controversy when individual tastes in sexual explicitness or religion have been contravened. This has brought some into conflict with local city councillors. There have been occasional performing groups that have deliberately tried to provoke controversy as a means of advertising their shows, and this has led to censorship of sexual explicitness in such shows.[94] Organisers continued to defend the festival's role as an open platform when they contacted controversial YouTuber Mark Meechan to request that he clarify the fact that he had not been banned, which ran contrary to the punch line of one of his jokes.[95]
Reviews and awards[edit]
Sources of reviews[edit]
For many groups at the Fringe, the ultimate goal is a favourable review—which, apart from the welcome kudos, may help minimise financial losses from putting on the show.
Edinburgh based newspaper The Scotsman has been integral to the Fringe since the start, and has become known for its comprehensive festival coverage in August. Originally, it aimed to review every show on the Fringe.[111] Now they are more selective, as there are simply too many shows to cover, although they do see almost every new play being staged as part of the Fringe's theatre programme, because of their Fringe First awards. For many years, the Scotsman's Arts Editor, Allen Wright was a familiar figure at the Fringe and today, the young critics' award is named in his honour.[112]
Other Scottish media outlets that provide coverage include: The Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Herald and the Scottish edition of Metro. Scottish arts and entertainment magazines The List, The Skinny and Fest Magazine also provide extensive coverage.
From the 1990s onwards, Fringe-specific publications emerged. ThreeWeeks was founded in 1996, and Fest followed a few years later. After the turn of the millennium, these were joined by online publications, some of which specialised in the Fringe, some of which had a broader remit. These include Chortle (2000), Broadway Baby (2004), Fringe Review (2006), Fringe Guru (2007) and The Wee Review (2008 as TV Bomb). The latter two merged in 2019.
The now defunct Festival Media Network was founded in 2010 to act as a trade organisation for these independent media. Its members were Broadway Baby, Festival Previews, Fringe Guru, Fringe Review, Hairline, iFringe, ThreeWeeks, The Podcast Network, and WhatsOnStage.[113]
In 2012, the most prolific reviewers were Broadway Baby which published over 1900 reviews,[114] ThreeWeeks, which published 1000 reviews during August,[115] and The Scotsman with 826 reviews. The List published 480 reviews.[116] By 2019, The Scotsman was once again the most prolific reviewer, followed by The Wee Review.[116]
Most of the London-based broadsheets also review, in particular The Guardian and The Independent, while arts industry weekly The Stage publish a large number of Edinburgh reviews, especially of the drama programme.
Since 2010, the British Comedy Guide has collated comedy reviews from as many publications as possible. In 2018, it gathered over 4,700 reviews from 135 publications,[117] up from 4,300 from 83 different publications in 2014.[118]