comedy feature

What’s wrong with the Edinburgh Festival?

The Director of The Stand has his stint on the soapbox.

It’s ThreeWeeks’ 13th year covering the Edinburgh Festival, so something is sure to go horribly wrong before the Festival is out. To, erm, celebrate that fact we thought we’d dedicate some space to all things ‘wrong’. Or more to the point, to what is wrong with the Edinburgh Festival. This week we hear from Tommy Sheppard, director of The Stand.

A pretty negative brief this. Let’s rephrase it as “what can we do to make the world’s greatest arts festival even better?” Well, quite a lot probably. But I’ve only room for five ideas.

Firstly, there’s a need to co-ordinate the various summer festivals – International, Fringe, Jazz etc – much much better. The creation by the city council of a co-ordinator to do just that is a first step, but there’s a lot more head-knocking-together needed.

Secondly, the Fringe – perhaps more than the other festivals – needs to be integrated with the local community. Sure the city gets a lot out of the festivals, but the problem is that an awful lot of the city’s residents don’t see it that way. A Fringe development programme with local schools, where creative arts courses have a focus on performance at the festival, would help. As would a programme in conjunction with local communities to stage fringe theatre and cabaret throughout the year.

Doing this would help solve a third problem; underfunding. There’s a lot of discussion, indeed moaning, about the investment made in the Festival by the city and national governments. In truth, this is more a problem for the Fringe, as the other festivals feed quite well on the municipal teat. But how to get that money? Petulant demands for cash, and even scare-mongering about how the Festival might re-locate to another city, are counter-productive. Being seen to put something back into the city and its communities would work
better methinks.

Branching out throughout the city with these sorts of development programmes would also tackle a fourth big problem; the over-centralisation of the Fringe in a small part of the city’s Southside, around one of its universities. The Stand Comedy Club is three minutes walk from Princes Street and yet at the moment we are on the edge of the Fringe. This is crazy. Most areas of the city feel completely unconnected. It didn’t used to be as bad as this, and it’s weird that as the Fringe has got bigger it has become super-concentrated in just one small area. If you live in Leith, Gorgie or Portobello you really wouldn’t know the Festival is on, save for the fact it takes a lot longer to get into town. To survive it will have to spread out.

A fifth way of securing the Fringe’s long term future is to take action to create a level playing field for companies and producers. I’ve always felt uneasy about the laissez-faire attitude which has dominated the Fringe; the belief that everything will find its own level. This is more than a little naive. In fact the over-commercialisation in recent years had led to the creation of mega-venues who operate as gate-keepers to the Fringe programme. They’ve made it harder and more expensive than ever before to put a show on at the Fringe.

The Fringe Society and its officers need to act as a counter-balance to the free market; trying to create the space for small companies, with limited resources, to have a slice of the action. There is actually quite a lot that could be done, from making registration fees and charges related to the size of the production, to working with the city council and others to develop new non profit-making venue complexes.

http://www.thestand.co.uk

published: Aug-2008

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