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Edinburgh festivals
Fringe-onomics
Aug 13th 2009 | EDINBURGH
From The Economist print edition
The macro and micro of an impromptu festival
ANXIOUS father shuts his eyes. Forget the £4,000 it has cost to bring
his teenage son’s play to Edinburgh: as the house lights go down,
please let there be no humiliation.
Eyevine
Performers of all kinds, from schoolboy writer-directors to stars with
household names, are drawn to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe like
moths to a giant searchlight. More than 260 venues, from big
theatres to dim vaults, even moving buses, provide the platform for
more than 2,000 shows over 25 days in August.
The Fringe began as a foil to the snootier Edinburgh International
Festival of music and theatre. Now, some 60 years on, it dwarfs the
original, generating £75m of the £200m that the city’s twelve main
festivals bring in each year. (That includes not just tickets, but
accommodation, food and drink for the estimated 4m visitors they
attract.) All the signs are that this will be a record year for the
Fringe, with advance ticket sales 20% up on 2007.
On the prowl for an audience
Unlike the curated and subsidised International Festival, the Fringe is open to anyone with a little money
and plenty of passion. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, incorporated in 1969, exercises no quality
control, but just prints the programmes, runs the box office and provides support, such as rehearsal
space.
Quality control, such as it is, is exercised at the bigger venues. At the Assembly Rooms, the Pleasance and
the Underbelly, for example, entrepreneurs try to ensure that most of their big spaces are packed, by
using big names and tested shows, a heady mix of two-fifths comedy, two-fifths theatre, and the rest
music and dance. Each turns over several million pounds in ticket and drink sales.
But the Fringe is also about those hopefuls—stand-up comics, actors, writers and musicians—to be seen
canvassing on the cobbled Royal Mile below the castle. They compete to bring their show to the attention
of a reviewer, or even one of the 1,200 talent scouts rumoured to be hunting for the next big thing.
Though the Fringe has an international reputation, around two-thirds of its audiences comes from the
Edinburgh region, a figure that surprises most visitors. “The locals see it as their festival, which is a good
thing,” says Faith Liddell, director of Festivals Edinburgh, an umbrella body which seeks to co-ordinate the
festivals where possible. “Thundering Hooves”, a 2006 review of Edinburgh’s offering, gave warning of
what could happen if those responsible failed to provide efficient and attractive infrastructure. Last year
the Fringe Society’s online ticketing-system crashed, denting sales and the festival’s reputation.
“It showed us how fragile the whole thing is,” says Kath Mainland, the Society’s post-fiasco chief
executive. She has her eyes set on 2012 when the August festivals overlap with the Olympic Games in
London. Will it be a clash or a fantastic opportunity to cross-sell? By then the intrepid teenage playwright
will be nearly 20 and, if not too dispirited by his “mixed” review in the Scotsman, may return with
something sensational.
Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
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