Edinburgh Fringe

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A street performer on the Royal Mile, with volunteer (2004).
A street performer on the Royal Mile, with volunteer (2004).

The Edinburgh Fringe (officially the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, commonly just The Fringe) is the world’s largest arts festival. It takes place in Scotland's capital during three weeks every August.

Contents

[edit] Introduction

The Fringe is regarded as being part of the Edinburgh Festival. In fact, there is no single festival of that name, the term is simply a shorthand way of referring to all of the discrete festivals which take place in Edinburgh from late July through to early September. They include: the Edinburgh International Festival (started 1947), the Fringe itself (1947), the Edinburgh International Film Festival (1947), the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival (1979), Edinburgh International Book Festival (1983) and the Edinburgh People's Festival (2002). In addition, there is the ever-popular (and audible to other festival-goers) Edinburgh Military Tattoo every evening on the Castle Esplanade during August. It matters little to the festival-goer which events are part of which festival, except that each festival has a separate programme (and website) and sells tickets only for its own events. In addition to the summer festivals, Edinburgh plays host to a range of other festivals throughout the rest of the year. [1]

The Fringe is so called after Robert Kemp, a Scottish journalist, wrote during the second Edinburgh International Festival in 1948: ‘Round the fringe of official Festival drama, there seems to be more private enterprise than before … I am afraid some of us are not going to be at home during the evenings!’. He was describing those groups who were putting on performances that were not part of the "official festival". Animosity between the two festivals was particularly prevalent in the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s, but it has gradually disappeared, apart from the occasional flare-up. In particular, periodic attempts by the official Festival to compete with the Fringe were stopped by Brian McMaster when he became the director of the International Festival in 1991. It is somewhat ironic that their most successful attempt to compete, Beyond The Fringe back in 1960, is now wrongly thought of by many people as a Fringe show.

The Fringe mostly attracts events from the performing arts, particularly drama and (the big growth area in recent years) comedy, although dance and music also figure significantly. Theatre events can range from the classics of ancient Greece, Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett, through to new works. However, there is no selection committee to approve the entries, so any type of event is possible: the Fringe is well-known as a showcase for experimental works which might not be admitted to a more formal festival. The organisers are the Festival Fringe Society: they publish the programme, sell tickets and offer advice to performers from the Fringe office on the Royal Mile.

[edit] History

Typical Fringe Scene
Typical Fringe Scene

The Fringe started when eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to the first year of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947. They aimed to take advantage of the large theatre crowds and showcase their own, more alternative, theatre. It initially got most of its support from University of Edinburgh students who set up drop-in centres and subsequently provided a central booking service.

In 1958 the Fringe became more organised with the "Festival Fringe Society" producing up the first guide to all Fringe shows. A constitution was drawn up in which the policy of not vetting or censoring shows was set out. In 1959, 19 companies attended the Fringe. In following years there were problems as competition increased and the Fringe became too big for students and volunteers to deal with. In 1969 the Society became a limited company and in 1971 it employed its first administrator.

Between 1976 and 1981 the number of companies performing rose from 182 to 494. In 1988 the Society moved to its current headquarters on the Royal Mile. Since then the society has increased the amount of technology used by introducing computerised ticketing and in 2000 the Fringe became the first arts organisation in the world to sell tickets online in real time. In 2005, over 1,335,000 were sold for Fringe performances and the Fringe Society now plans years in advance.

Much of the history of the Fringe has become obscure in popular terms but there is general agreement that the artistic credentials of the Fringe were established by the creators of the Traverse Theatre, John Calder, Jim Haynes and Richard Demarco in 1963. While their original objective was to maintain something of the Festival atmosphere in Edinburgh all year round, the Traverse quickly and regularly presented cutting edge drama to an international audience on both the Edinburgh International Festival and on the Fringe during August. It set a standard to which other companies on the Fringe aspired. The Traverse is occasionally referred to as 'The Fringe venue that got away', reflecting its current status as a permanent and integral part of the Edinburgh Arts scene. However, it continues to form the bedrock of drama on the Fringe at festival time.

[edit] The Fringe Today

The Fringe has grown dramatically over the 60 years of its existence. Statistics for the 2006 festival which are published on the official website concluded that it was the largest festival on record: there were 28,014 performances of 1867 different shows in 261 venues, while ticket sales reached 1.5 million, the fourth year in a row that they had exceeded 1 million.

Of the 1800+ shows, theatre continues to be the largest genre. Comedy, the major growth area over the last 20 years, comes next. Other genres include: Dance & Physical Theatre, Music and Children's shows. Shows can be sampled without having to visit them all. The best opportunity to find out what shows you might want to see is afforded by "Fringe Sunday", which is held on the first Sunday of the festival when many companies, 200 estimated for 2006, perform all or part of their show for free on The Meadows. Alternatively, on any day during the festival 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.

[edit] Use of technology

A computerised booking system was first installed in the early 1990s, allowing tickets to be bought at a number of locations around the city. The age of the Internet eventually arrived in 2000 with the launching of the official website, which had sold over half a million tickets online by 2005. An E-Ticket Tent was introduced in 2004, allowing people to book tickets online at the festival. In the following year, a Half Price Ticket Tent was added in association with Metro, offering special ticket prices for different shows each day, selling 45,000 tickets in its first year. All major venues are now using electronic and computerised ticketing systems that are linked to the central Fringe system.

Recent years have seen the gradual introduction of mobile, audio and video technologies to the Fringe to increase the channels by which content can be distributed and feedback obtained, including:

  • The official website lets people post their own reviews and ratings for shows. In 2005 a text rating system was introduced, whereby audience members could 'text in' ratings out of 5 for shows they have seen.
  • In 2003 Sweet TV [2] became the first online TV station for the Fringe with daily webcasts of shows, performer interviews and daily news bulletins. In 2004 they linked up with web portal Yahoo! [3].
  • Festival FM was launched in 2004. It broadcasts during the festival on 87.7 FM within the city, and streams on its website from a temporary studio in Bristo Square. It features interviews with performers, reviews and competitions.
  • One of the first 'User-Generated-Content' mobile video trials was run in 2003 by Pocket Video, who ran open filming sessions for artists and acts to plug their shows, which was then aired free on 2.5G Mobile Phones.
  • The Podcast Network launched the Edinburgh Fringe Podcast in 2005. Producing a daily podcast of news, interviews, reviews and recommendations, it went on to receive a Scottish BAFTA nomination for Best Interactive Media 2005. It continued to be available throughout the 2006 Fringe.
  • ThreeWeeks has provided multi-media coverage at the Festival, sometimes piloting digital media platforms being developed by its publishers UnLimited Media. These have included an SMS ticket offer service and the provision of content for Pocket Video's Festival coverage in 2003. Since 2005 ThreeWeeks has provided podcast coverage via its website and via a WAP-enabled platform. The ThreeWeeks team also host a show on Festival FM.
  • Broadway Baby started video podcasting the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2006 and will be collaborating with The Podcast Network in 2007 to offer a combination of video reviews and audio features throughout the festival.

[edit] High Profile Names & Shows

During the 1960s and 1970s it was fairly common for a reasonable number of high profile names to appear in theatrical productions on the Fringe. From the 1980s onwards, celebrities were more likely to be comedians although their standard of performance often varied: some giving consummately professional performances; while others could be somewhat unsatisfactory.

2003 saw the interesting development of an adaptation for the theatre of the renowned 1957 film, 12 Angry Men using well-known stand up comedians in the roles of the 12 jurors. Staged at the Assembly Rooms on George Street 12 Angry Men was directed by Guy Masterson and starred Bill Bailey and Stephen Frost. It was the "hot show" of that year. In the following year, Masterson directed a stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but quit the project before it opened [4], and was replaced by Terry Johnson. The problems continued when Christian Slater twice contracted chicken pox, and the opening was further delayed. However, tickets for the run sold out before opening. The production subsequently transferred to the Gielgud Theatre in the West End. In 2005, Masterson's production of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, starring Bill Bailey and Alan Davies, became the fastest selling show in the festival's history [5] despite poor reviews. The theme continued in 2006 with a production of Midnight Cowboy which failed to excite the critics and resulted in disappointing attendances. Some feel that the Fringe is not the place for any kind of high profile shows, but that it should be reserved for more experimental and independent theatre.

Of course, high profile names constitute an extremely small percentage of the performers at the festival; the vast majority are a mixture of journeymen professionals of varying experience, amateurs, and students. The Fringe showcases a great deal of local Scottish talent, with many local clubs and individuals taking part. Edinburgh People's Theatre, one of Scotland's most respected amateur theatre companies, is the longest serving fringe participant, having taken part every year since 1959.

[edit] Criticism

The role of the Fringe Society is 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 stated, “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 vetted, or 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.

Over the years it has led to adverse criticisms about the quality of the arts on 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. It is inevitable that with 1800+ shows there will be wide variations in quality, from the top 50 shows that can readily compete with items on the International programme in terms of professional rigour and artistic content (in their own fields), to those inevitably dire shows at the bottom. In between, there are a range of shows that will have varying appeal to festival-goers. 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". More moderate views from the middle ground of this perennial debate often point out that the Fringe is not complete artistic anarchy. They say that it is extremely difficult to believe that venues such as the Traverse, Aurora Nova and The Assemby do not make judgements on the relative artistic, and in some cases financial, merits of potential shows at their venues.

A frequent criticism, well-aired in the media over the last 20 years, has been that stand-up comedy is "taking over" the Fringe, and that a large proportion of newer audiences are drawn almost exclusively to stand-up comics (particularly to big comedy stars "off the telly" in famous venues), and that they are starting to regard non-comedy events as "peripheral". Others are concerned not with the growth of comedy per se, but with the degree to which it tends to be promoted by large commercial promoters. While it is true that comedy has been a growth area, it is still the case that the largest number of shows are to be found in the area of drama, while dance & physical theatre are currently in rude health.

The advent of the "super venue" in the late 1970s and early 1980s has also prompted much debate. They are large venues that may contain 6 or more discrete performing spaces: the most notable organisations are The Assemby, Pleasance, The Gilded Balloon and most recently the Underbelly (the term organisation is used rather than venue because they all now host multiple venues). A common criticism is that these venues have not been helpful to the character of the Fringe. It is thought by some that each of these big, central, one-stop-shops becomes in effect a "festival within the festival". By staging many well-known acts in one place it is thought that they are able to attract audiences away from the more modest (but more difficult to find and get round) venues which, by charging performing groups less, offer more "traditional" fringe events involving newcomers. Concerns over what can be seen as the disproportionate power of these super venues have been heightened by their use of corporate sponsors and various attempts to work together, e.g. the production of a programme covering their venues has been tried. The latest attempt is the formation in 2006 of the Association of Independent Venue Producers, who are concerned is to fight off UK cities such as Manchester and Liverpool that have aspirations to compete with the Edinburgh Festival. They seek to do this by lobbying for better publicity for the Fringe plus improvements to Edinburgh's infrastructure to support increased numbers of festival-goers.

The perceived freedom to put on any show has led periodically to controversy when individual tastes in sexual explicitness or religion have been contravened. Some city councillors have gained a reputation for regularly wanting to have offending groups "run out of town". Needless to say, there have been the occasional performing groups who have deliberately tried to provoke controversy as a means of advertising their shows.

There are also concerns about rising ticket prices: in the mid 1990s only the occasional top show charged £10 per seat, while the average price was £5-£7; in 2006, prices are frequently £10+ and £20 has been reached for the first time (for a show that lasted 1 hour). Some reasons that are put forward for the increases include: the increasing costs associated with hiring large venues such as the Assembly Rooms; theatre licences and related costs, plus the price of accommodation during the Edinburgh Festival, which is expensive for performers as well as for audiences.

[edit] Venues

No history of the Fringe would be complete without a brief mention of the venues; there were 261 in 2006, although over 80 housed event(s) or exhibition(s) which are not part of the main performing art genres that the Fringe is generally known for. Over the first 20 years each performing group had its own hall. However, by around 1970 the concept of sharing a hall became popular, principally as a means of cutting costs. It could be possible to host up to 6 or 7 different shows per day in a hall. The obvious next step was to partition a venue into two or more performing spaces; the majority of today's venues fit into this category. This approach was taken a stage further by the early 1980s with the arrival of the super-venue - a location which contained many performing spaces. The Circuit was one of the early super-venues; it was in fact a tented “village” (including one space with room for an audience of 400) that was situated on a piece of empty ground, popularly known as “The Hole in The Ground” where the Saltire complex, which now houses the Traverse, was subsequently built in the early 1990s. The perceived super-venues are currently Assembly, Pleasance, C venues, Gilded Balloon and UnderBelly. The Fringe also has lots of slightly less "super-venues" where performers feel they are more of an essential part of the venue and less of a source of money. Some of these venues are Rocket, Sweet, Laughing Horse, Paradise Green and Zoo Venues.

Nowadays, venues come in all shapes and sizes, with use being made of every conceivable space from proper theatres (e.g. Traverse), custom-made theatres (e.g. Music Hall in the Assembly Rooms), mobile travelling venues (The Famous Spiegeltent), to lecture theatres (Pleasance, George Square and Sweet ECA), conference centres, other university rooms and spaces, churches and church halls, schools, a public toilet, the back of a taxi, and even in your own home/place of rest. The groups that operate the venues are also very diverse: some are commercial and others not-for-profit; some operate year-round, while others exist only to run venues at the Fringe.

[edit] Reviews and awards

For many groups at the Fringe the ultimate goal is a favourable review which, apart from the welcome kudos, may help to minimise any financial losses that are suffered in putting on the show.

Edinburgh newspaper The Scotsman, often seen as the 'bible' of the Edinburgh Festival, originally aimed to review every show on the Fringe. They now have to be more selective, as there are simply too many shows to cover, although they do see more or less every new play being staged as part of the Fringe's theatre programme because of their Fringe First awards. Not-for-profit title ThreeWeeks now sets out to review as many shows as possible and especially those not getting covered elsewhere - although they too cannot see absolutely everything, they do cover the vast majority, over 1250 shows.

Scottish arts and entertainment magazine The List also provides pretty extensive coverage, and in recent years the Scottish edition of Metro has become an important Edinburgh Festival reviewer. Other Scottish broadsheet The Herald (Glasgow) also provides daily coverage of the Festival, while the Scottish Sunday papers Scotland On Sunday and Sunday Herald also review. Edinburghguide.com offer local online coverage, and Scottish entertainment freesheet The Skinny went weekly during Festival 2006 as SkinnyFest.

Most of the London 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 theatre programme. 100s of journalists from all over the world will also be in Edinburgh during the festival, and their reports and reviews will appear in newspapers around the globe.

A number of arts websites also review, Broadway Baby in particular in 2006.

There are a growing number of awards for Fringe shows, particularly in the field of drama:

  • The Scotsman introduced the prestigious Fringe First awards in 1973. These awards are given only to new works (or new translations), and several are awarded for each of the three weeks of the Fringe.
  • The renowned Perrier Awards for Comedy came into existence in 1981 when it was won by the Cambridge Footlights. Perrier, the mineral water manufacturer withdrew in June 2006 and have been succeeded by the Scottish-based company Intelligent Finance. It is now known as the 'if.comeddies' award.
  • Herald Angels are awarded by critics of The Glasgow Herald to performers or shows who are deemed worthy of recognition. Similar to Fringe Firsts, they are given each week of the Fringe.
  • The Stage has awarded the Stage Awards for Acting Excellence since 1995. There are currently four categories: best actor, actress, ensemble and solo show.
  • In 2002, Amnesty International introduced the Amnesty Freedom of Expression Award [6], the 2006 winner being Unprotected [7].
  • In 2004, the Carol Tambor Edinburgh to New York Award for best drama was introduced. To be eligible for this award a show must have received a four or five star rating in The Scotsman and must not have previously played in New York, as the prize is to put the show on in New York.
  • The List magazine's The Writers' Guild List Festival Awards appeared in 2005. The categories are: best comedy, best comedy newcomer, best theatre, and best theatre newcomer.
  • Also introduced in 2005, the ThreeWeeks Editors' Awards [8] are given to the ten things that have most excited the ThreeWeeks editors each year - these might include artists, shows, companies, venues and marketing initiatives.
  • Introduced in 2006, the Terrier Awards (hosted by The Scotsman Piano Bar) joined The Tap Water Awards (hosted by the Holyrood Tavern) as alternative awards.

[edit] Fringe legacy

The most significant legacy of the Edinburgh Fringe is arguably the fact that it has provided a model for unjuried festivals; the concept of Fringe Theatre has been copied around the world. The largest and most celebrated of these spawned festivals are Adelaide Fringe Festival and Edmonton International Fringe Festival. The number of such events continues to grow, particularly in the USA and Canada.

In the field of drama, the Edinburgh Fringe has premiered several plays, most notably Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1966) and Moscow Stations (1994) which starred Tom Courtenay. 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), National Student Theatre Club (1970s and various other periods), Communicado (1980s and 1990s), Red Shift (1990s), and Grid Iron more recently. In terms of artistic form, the Fringe can legitimately be viewed as the home of 'the one man show'. While it cannot claim to have invented it, the Fringe has provided the vehicle for its subsequent blossoming.

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 Cambridge Footlights. Notable companies have included Complicite in the 1980s and the National Theatre of Brent. More recent comedy performers to have been 'discovered' include: Reduced Shakespeare Company, Steve Coogan, Jenny Eclair, The League of Gentlemen, Al Murray and Rich Hall.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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General Links:


Links to news, previews and reviews for the current year's Fringe:

Links to the UK national press for previews and reviews for the current year's Fringe:

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