Good evening! This week's edition of the In Common newsletter comes from Kaitlin Dryburgh, policy and communication director at Common Weal.
To receive the newsletter direct to your inbox every week click here.
THE Fringe is here, and the capital is bouncing once again.
But who’s the most happy, the performers, punters, landlords, residents or businesses?
Aside from the landlords and businesses, everyone else has a rather difficult relationship with the Fringe. Like getting mugged but then subsequently thanking your mugger at the end of the encounter and wishing them well.
The performers know this is one of the biggest comedy festivals around.
Where shows with worldwide success can spawn like Baby Reindeer and Fleabag.
It’s a place where careers can be launched, craft can be honed, and people ‘discovered’.
On the flip side it might break them mentally as their bank account becomes depleted.
The whole experience will forever give them sweaty palms remembering the couch surfing, living off instant noodles, and praying that someone turns up to their show.
Meanwhile, punters get shown the dark side of the tourist industry as the accommodation price hikes could leave most people feeling queasy.
They get bled dry of money from extortionate food and drink, while corporate marketing is plastered all around.
Yet, at the core of it, the Fringe can still offer a good time and still produce up and coming talent (even if they did have to sell a kidney to perform in the first place).
Residents get grumpy with tourists, but deep down there is pride that their city hosts a world-renowned festival.
Even if it does mean the pavements are crammed, someone is trying to pay their bus ticket with a £50 note, and they’ve been offered approximately 1000 flyers on their way to work.
Perhaps the only legitimate gripe residents can have with the festival is the effect it has on housing. If there was no Fringe festival, the deluge of holiday lets in the city would be a lot less.
Accommodation would be a lot more available, and prices wouldn’t be so ridiculous.
Although this is spurred on by pure greediness and capitalistic plundering, the housing crisis hasn’t been caused by a comedy and performing arts festival – but it is one of the many catalysts. The true causes are of course much more significant.
The sad news is many report the festival to be at breaking point for all the above-mentioned reasons.
Many performers recommend only going for a maximum of seven days in order to reduce the financial loss.
It is now widely understood that without backing you will make a loss, even if you do sell a lot of tickets. Therefore, a three-week run is damn-near impossible.
Aside from the accommodation daylight robbery the actual Fringe has gotten away from itself.
The corporate bolstering is a long cry away from the artist-led festival that celebrated diversity in the arts.
The unfortunate thing is the majority of shows won’t be the new Fleabag, and they won’t go on to have a Netflix special.
Yet the event seems to be making it harder for them to survive.
They haven’t managed to face up to the times and find solutions to rising costs, there’s not been a huge push back on extortionate venue prices.
Marketing, for example, poses an expensive issue for performers; even from last year some estimate that the cost of marketing has increased 20%.
Flyering is costly yet there has been no moves by the organisers to make this more affordable.
Many performers are having to rely on private investors to ensure they aren’t out of pocket, but that travesty means two things.
One, many will not be able to achieve that, after all there are only a limited number of investors and there are currently over 3,000 shows this year.
Secondly, private investors means more constraints on art and a more business-like approach.
Performing art will no longer have the freedom to push boundaries, instead confined to an investor-friendly PR exercise.
We’re barrelling towards a group making a ‘fringe’ festival to rival the Fringe Festival, and who could blame them? If the Fringe isn’t at breaking point, the quality of art surely is.
Although you can’t help but ask ‘who can afford to be here?’, the question should really be, ‘who can’t?'. What are we missing out on, home-grown talent that can’t even perform in their own country?
But considering bigger names like Jason Manford has made it clear he’ll be making a loss if he attends, who can afford it?
Is this a festival for the rich, or just a one-way ticket to bankruptcy court?
How far is the Fringe festival and Edinburgh willing to push profits above art? Because right now it seems they’re going to push it right off a cliff.
It’s a shame because what was once this free flowing, anti-establishment, art-driven festival is now too often a vessel for landlords, hotels and businesses to be able to extract an extortionate amount of money from the very people the festival is about – its artists and its audience.
