The Edinburgh festival fringe is expecting to host artists from nearly 70 countries this year, with participants hungry to return to live performances after the Covid crisis, its directors have said.
The fringe, regarded until the pandemic as the world’s largest arts event, is fighting to rebuild its finances and win back audiences after the twin shocks of Covid and the economic crises triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Liz Truss’s short-lived government last year.
Fringe executives have adopted the slogan “fill yer boots” for this year’s event, in an effort to persuade audiences to watch as many shows as possible.
Shona McCarthy, its chief executive, said productions from 64 countries, as well as the UK’s four home nations, had booked to take part.
“I think it is a strong indication that artists, that creatives, are looking for those opportunities to have their work seen in other places again. So that’s exciting,” she said.
This year’s event also features 50 lesser-known and experimental productions that have, for the first time, been given £2,000 grants as part of a £100,000 initiative called Keep it Fringe, part-funded by the Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the fringe’s honorary president.
Lyndsey Jackson, the fringe’s deputy chief executive, said the initiative was massively oversubscribed. Nearly 680 performers applied to the fund. McCarthy said in future years the fund could need up to £500,000 to meet that demand.
The fund was designed to uphold the festival’s core ethos, Jackson said, to support artists “doing something bold, that’s ambitious, maybe a bit daring [and] actually high risk”.
The fringe was shut down in 2020 during the Covid lockdowns and began re-establishing itself slowly in 2021, initially leaning heavily on streaming many shows.
While the number of overseas countries represented in August’s festival is higher than the 59 in 2019, when sales records were broken, this year’s event remains noticeably smaller. At 3,013, the number of shows this year is 21% lower than in 2019, with venues and productions down 23% and 24% respectively.
McCarthy said the recent health and economic crises exposed how fragile the fringe’s finances had become: “It was already stretched to the seams, even in 2019,” she said. “I would say Covid has been an accelerant … [the festival] needs help and it needs attention.”
The fringe has frozen its registration fee for performers for 16 years, with average ticket prices at £12. It is pressuring the Scottish government, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and Edinburgh council to offer tax breaks, reduce fees and increase subsidies to ensure the event survives.
The UK government has offered the fringe, which is spread across three cramped city-centre offices, up to £7m to build a new headquarters in a Victorian primary school.
McCarthy said venues needed tax breaks, while the council should also waive the daily tourist tax, to be introduced on hotel and guest-room beds for performers and backstage crew. “We would argue that artists are key workers,” she said.
“It has not really been recognised as the mega event that it is,” McCarthy added. “Because this festival has grown organically over 75 years, there is just this expectation because we pull it off every year, every venue, all the artists taking the risk to come here, and because we keep making it happen, everyone assumes it will keep happening.
“I think the risk here is that we’re all still smiling, there’s an amazing programme this year but there are very few organisations across the fringe landscape that are not carrying debt from the last three years. Certainly there’s nobody I know of that has any reserves of any kind left. Everybody is hanging on by such a thin thread.”
• The Edinburgh festival fringe takes place from 4-28 August.
