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Edinburgh Fringe
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The Edinburgh Festival Fringe (The Fringe) is the world’s largest arts festival. Established in 1947 as an alternative to the Edinburgh International Festival, it takes place in Scotland's capital during three weeks every August alongside several other arts and cultural festivals, collectively known as the Edinburgh Festival.
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.
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Encyclopedia
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe (The Fringe) is the world’s largest arts festival. Established in 1947 as an alternative to the Edinburgh International Festival, it takes place in Scotland's capital during three weeks every August alongside several other arts and cultural festivals, collectively known as the Edinburgh Festival.
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, William 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 often showcases 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.
History
The Fringe started life when eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to the inaugural Edinburgh International Festival in 1947. They aimed to take advantage of the large theatre crowds and showcase their own, more alternative, theatre. It got its name in the following year (1948) after Robert Kemp, a Scottish playwright and journalist, wrote during the second Edinburgh International Festival: ‘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!’.
There was no organisation initially until students of the University of Edinburgh set up a drop-in centre in 1951 where cheap food and a bed for the night were made available to participating groups. It was 1955 before the first attempt was made to provide a central booking service.
In 1959 there came the first signs of organisation with the formation of the "Festival Fringe Society". A constitution was drawn up in which the policy of not vetting or censoring shows was set out and the Society produced the first guide to all Fringe shows. 19 companies attended the Fringe in that year. In following years problems began to arise as the Fringe became too big for students and volunteers to deal with. Eventually in 1969 the Society became a constitued body, and in 1970 it employed its first administrator, John Milligan.
Under the second Fringe administrator Alistair Moffat, between 1976 and 1981, the number of companies performing rose from 182 to 494, thus achieving its position of largest arts festival in the world. 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 2007, 1.697.293 tickets were sold for Fringe performances, and the Fringe Society now plans years in advance.
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 Theatre 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.
The advent of the Fringe was not warmly greeted by some sections of the International Festival (and the Edinburgh hierarchy), leading to outbursts of animosity between the two festivals. They were particularly prevalent in the 1950s, 1960s and through into the 1970s. 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.
Venues
According to the Fringe Society there were 261 venues in 2006, although over 80 of them 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 that contains 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.
Due to legacy, close partnership and the commercial nature of their operations, the perceived super-venues are Assembly, C venues, Gilded Balloon, Pleasance and Underbelly. There are larger, middle tier, venues, including:Greenside, Bedlam, , Rocket Venues, , and and smaller, lower tier, venues such as, the Laughing Horse Free Edinburgh Fringe Festival venues, The Holyrood, PBH's Free Fringe, Quaker Meeting House and St John's Church.
Nowadays, venues come in all shapes and sizes, with use being made of every conceivable space from proper theatres (e.g. Traverse or Bedlam Theatre), custom-made theatres (e.g. Music Hall in the Assembly Rooms), historic castles (C venues), to lecture theatres (Pleasance, [George Square Theatre ] and Sweet ECA), conference centres, other university rooms and spaces, temporary structures (The Famous Spiegeltent and the Udderbelly ), churches and church halls, schools, a public toilet, the back of a taxi, and even in the audience's own homes.
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.
From the performers' perspective, the decision on where to perform is typically based on a mixture of cost, location (close proximity to other venues is seen as a plus), and the philosophy of the venue, i.e. some will prefer a site where commercial consideration is not the obvious primary driver, a site where they will feel more comfortable and more an integral part of the venue.
The professionalism of venues and of organisations has increased hugely. The church hall at Lauriston Place used by EUTC as Bedlam Theatre was taken over by Richard Crane and Faynia Williams from Bradford University in 1975 to house "Satan's Ball". This was a benchmark production which inspired others. By 1980 when William Burdett-Coutts set up Assembly Theatre in the abandoned Assembly Rooms on George Street, the investment in staging, lighting and sound meant that the original amateur or student theatricals had been left behind. There was still theatre done on a shoestring, but several cultural entrepreneurs had raised the stakes to the point where a venue like Aurora (St Stephen's Church, Stockbridge) could hold its head up in any major world festival.
Criticism
Unjuried Festival
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 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.
Quality
Over the years this approach 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.
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, e.g. the Traverse and Aurora Nova.
A frequent criticism, well-aired in the media over the last 20 years, has been that stand-up comedy is "taking over" the Fringe, that a large proportion of newer audiences are drawn almost exclusively to stand-up comics (particularly to television comedy stars in famous venues), and that they are starting to regard non-comedy events as "peripheral". The 2008 Fringe will mark the first time that comedy has made up the largest category of entertainment.
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. Needless to say, there have been the occasional performing groups who have deliberately tried to provoke controversy as a means of advertising their shows.
The power of the "super venues"
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 Assembly, Pleasance, The Gilded Balloon, C Venues and Underbelly (the term organisation is used rather than venue because they all now host multiple venues). 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 (and 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.
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 were frequently £10+ and £20 was reached for the first time in 2006 for a show that lasted 1 hour. Some of the reasons that are put forward for the increases include: the increasing costs associated with hiring large venues; theatre licences and related costs; plus the price of accommodation during the Edinburgh Festival which is expensive for performers as well as for audiences.
In recent years a different business model has been adopted by two organisations; The Free Fringe and The Laughing Horse Free Edinburgh Fringe Festival have introduced the concept of the free show. There were 22 shows that came under this banner in 2005, growing to 69 in 2006 and 320 in 2007. Ninety percent of these free shows are comedy.
Reviews and awards
Sources of reviews
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 based newspaper The Scotsman, often seen as the 'bible' of the Edinburgh Festival for its comprehensive coverage, 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.
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 and Fest Magazine - also provide extensive coverage.
Several organisations have appeared in recent years who freely offer a comprehensive mixture of printed and web-based reviews. They aim to cover shows that are missed by the larger organisations. They include: Edinburghguide.com; not-for-profit ThreeWeeks; BroadwayBaby; and Chortle which is limited to comedy. * Garden Sessions are an internet based outlet which provides coverage on its weekly radio show, as well as reviews on folk music and the more traditional aspects of the festival.
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.
In addition, journalists / reviewers from all over the world are in Edinburgh during the festival, and their reports and reviews appear in media outlets around the globe.
Awards
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. Herald Angels are awarded by critics of The 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. Amnesty International introduced the Amnesty Freedom of Expression Award in 2002.. The Carol Tambor Edinburgh to New York Award for best drama was introduced in 2004. 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 ThreeWeeks Editors' Awards was introduced in 2005 and 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. The Terrier Awards (hosted by The Scotsman Piano Bar) joined The Tap Water Awards (hosted by the Holyrood Tavern) as alternative awards in 2006 The Edinburgh Musical Theatre Awards were introduced in 2007 by Musical Theatre Matters, to encourage the writing and production of new musicals on the Fringe. The Holden Street Theatres Edinburgh Award - presented at The Scotsman Fringe Awards Ceremony. The Award offers an outstanding production the opportunity to tour as the headline act for Holden Street Theatres in its Adelaide Fringe Program in the following year.
Purely for comedy:
- The Perrier Awards for Comedy came into existence in 1981 when the award was won by the Cambridge Footlights. (Two further award categories have since been added.) Perrier, the mineral water manufacturer withdrew in June 2006 and have been succeeded by the Scottish-based company Intelligent Finance. They are now known as the if.comedy awards.
- The Malcolm Hardee Award "for comic originality of thought or performance" is to be presented for ten years, 2008-2017. An initial one-off Malcolm Hardee Award had been made at the Fringe in 2005, the year of Hardee's death, to American musical comic Reggie Watts
High profile names and shows
During the 1960s and 1970s there were very few "names". Roger McGough and Brian Patten were the Fringe's first really celebrated names, and local celebrities such as Russell Hunter performed from the 1970s virtually up to his death in 2004. The coming of the Assembly Rooms in particular opened the flood-gates to more recognised names. From the 1980s onwards, celebrities were more likely to be comedians.
2003 saw a landark production in the 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. In the following year, Masterson directed a stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but quit the project before it opened, 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 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.
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.
In 2007, celebrity on the Fringe reached a doubtful pinnacle when the Tattoo set-up at Edinburgh Castle served as a 6000-seat venue to Ricky Gervais. Venues such as the Pleasance, Assembly and Underbelly vie with each other for established comedy names at inflated ticket prices, while audience members who have been for years continue to trawl the undergrowth for new talent, sometimes finding it.
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 its official website, which 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.
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 ratings out of 5 from their mobile phones for shows they have seen.
In March 2008 the Fringe Society contracted Pivotal Integration of Glasgow to supply a new computerised box-office system, the previous system being outdated and no longer supported. The supplied system, Liquid Box Office, failed on 9 June 2008, the first day of advance sales, unable to cope with the volume of transactions. The Fringe Society was unable to sell tickets until 11 July 2008. Before the start of the 2008 Fringe, the VIA ticketing software as used by the 'Big Four' was installed in the Fringe Box Office, initially to sell for those venues and reduce the load on Liquid.
The events surrounding the failed box office software led directly to the resignation of Fringe Society Director Jon Morgan after only one year in post. The resultant loss suffered by the Fringe Society has been estimated at £300,000 which it was forced to meet from its reserves. 2008 was not a good year for the organisers of the Fringe, attracting much comment from the UK and world media. More debts emerged as the year went on, and an independent report criticised the Board and the two outgoing directors for a failure of management and an inability to provide the basic service. As at February 2009, it is considered likely that Fringe Sunday will be cancelled as it would incur a loss of some £75,000 should a sponsor not be secured.. Long-term Edinburgh festival and fringe regular Kath Mainland was appointed in February 2009 to stabilise the situation, and after leaving the Book Festival, she will take up her post as Director just before the 2009 Fringe.
The Fringe today
The Fringe has grown dramatically over the 60 years of its existence. Statistics for the 2007 festival concluded that it was the largest festival on record: there were 31,000 performances of 2,050 different shows in 250 venues. Ticket sales amount to around £1.5 million.
Of the 2000+ shows, theatre continues to be the largest genre. Comedy, the major growth area over the last 20 years, is only marginally behind and may well overtake theatre soon if recent trends are maintained. Other genres include: Dance & Physical Theatre, Music and Children's shows.
It is possible to sample some shows before committing to seeing them. For many years, the Fringe Club (variously in the High Street and at Teviot Row from 1981 to 2004) provided nightly showcases of Fringe fare to allow audiences to sample shows before purchasing tickets. The Fringe Club closed down in 2004, and various venues still provide "the Best of the Fest" and similar. The best opportunity is afforded by "Fringe Sunday", started in the High Street in 1981 and moved through pressure of popularity to Holyrood Park in 1983, which is held on the second Sunday of the Fringe when many companies perform all or part of their show for free. Having outgrown even Holyrood Park, this now takes place 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. Many shows are "2 for 1" on the opening weekend of the Festival.
During the 2006 festival 20 venues got together to form the Associated Independent Venue Producers (AIVP). Its main role is to lobby public bodies for better publicity for the Fringe, and to seek improvements to Edinburgh's infrastructure to support increased numbers of festival-goers.
Fringe legacy
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 case of Edinburgh (est 1947) the Fringe is an addition to the Festival proper. Hence the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. But where there is no actual Festival to be added to - such as New York (est 1997) - or where the festival is more "fringe" than anything else, the word comes before the word "festival", thus the "Adelaide Fringe Festival." (est 1979).
In the field of drama, the Edinburgh Fringe has premièred 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), 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), and Grid Iron. 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 Aida, Reduced Shakespeare Company, Steve Coogan, Jenny Eclair, The League of Gentlemen, Al Murray and Rich Hall.
See also
Further reading
The Fringe: 50 Years of the Greatest Show on Earth, The Scotsman Publications Ltd, 1996 Dale, M., Sore Throats and Overdrafts: An illustrated story of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Precedent Publications Ltd, Edinburgh, 1988 McMillan, J., Carnegie, J., The Traverse Theatre Story 1963-1988, Methuen Publishing, London, 1988
External links
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