An annual “poster war” has raged between rival promoters for as long as the festival fringe has been filling Edinburgh’s small theatres and pop-up venues. But now the battleground has shifted. For some, what was once just a simple process of pasting up a silly or striking poster in order to get noticed has been weaponised, as tastes change and sexual politics becomes more controversial. As a result, at this year’s festival, some of the more provocative imagery printed by performers has already been censored or even defaced.
Posters, including those displaying a lineup of bare buttocks, a large pair of breasts, a woman wearing cat paws and a drag queen children’s entertainer have all become embroiled in censorship rows and gender disputes as the festival begins this weekend.
The printers who produce posters for the shows work in collaboration with Edinburgh city council and must check all promotional images in advance of the festival. While obscenity has always been banned, attitudes to nudity, swearing and sexual content have become more sensitive and so the rules, the Observer has learned, are being followed more strictly.
Among those who feel their shows have been caught in the crossfire is the American actor Cindy D’Andrea. The performer from Los Angeles has been upset by a decision to blank out the swear word in her show Cat Sh!t Crazy, about animal rights and attitudes to pets. She discovered the change to her poster just before she arrived to rehearse at her venue, Space Triplex. “My heart sank,” she told Edinburgh News. “I love the title of my show and it has gotten so much recognition. Now I’m very upset and discouraged.”
Producer Richard Lambert has also complained that his shows were early victims of a wave of apparent puritanism. The poster for his musical comedy Tickle, which featured a bare torso and a feather, was queried, as were the nude images of five pairs of buttocks on the flier for his other show, Boys in the Buff. Lambert was asked to pixelate the bottoms.
Out of Hand, the printing company that also blanked out the offending word in D’Andrea’s show’s title, had originally warned Lambert that the Tickle picture “could be a risk for objectification”. The request for censorship was eventually resolved “amicably but after a minor battle”, Lambert has said, but he complains that similar posters were approved without comment in the past. “We’re sanitising arts and culture,” Lambert said last week.
Out of Hand’s Nigel Muntz said the rules had not changed but this year they were being “enforced with more rigour”. The company had a duty, he said, to ensure that outdoor advertising complied with the Advertising Standards Authority code, and so it sent potentially unsuitable artwork to its copy advice service.
Some performers, of course, are deliberately using more unsettling sexual images to make a feminist point. A trend for posters showing breasts and nude women is marked this year, and while they have not all been officially censored, some have been defaced. Sexually explicit posters for shows such as the Gilded Balloon’s I’ve Got Some Things to Get Off My Chest, or Attack of the 36 Triple-G Woman at the Symposium Hall Annex, are not the simple tease they might once have been.
