Somebody is crying themselves famous. Somebody has been forced to sleep for a month in a nuclear bunker. Somebody has replaced their labia with two sides of beef. It can only be the Edinburgh fringe – as variegated, attention-seeking and all-life-is-here as ever.
Beyond that, opinions diverge. Depending on whom you listen to, fringe 2023 is an atrocity against mental health, social justice and artists’ bank accounts. Or it is a phoenix-from-the-ashes rebirth of the world’s biggest arts festival after the Covid hiatus and last year’s tetchy, partial re-emergence.
Cock an ear to the wind and you can hear the sound of pandemic demons being laid to rest. For two years or so, we wondered whether the festival would ever rise again. Crowds cocooned in dank cellars? In a dreich city where everyone catches “fringe flu”?
Turns out audiences have responded with a resounding: “Oh, yes please!” Box office income is said to be back up to immediate pre-Covid levels, when the fringe reached its zenith of bloat – and that is with a programme significantly smaller than in 2019. Shows are selling, which tends to inoculate everyone involved (artists, venues, agents and PRs) against the festival’s well-documented downsides.
Of course, the downsides haven’t disappeared. A queer sketch group from the US called Alphabet Soup are sequestered beneath a second world war base in the absence of anything affordable above ground. “Staying at a nuclear bunker is crazy,” one of them told an interviewer. “Something long and traditional in American culture is fearing the Russians and I don’t wake a day without thinking of Putin.” Not the ideal start to your festival day.
Frustration persists with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, which many perceive to be doing little to address accommodation costs, particularly given the £7m it is spending on its new HQ. Those who see all this as unsustainable look darkly to New York, where five prominent fringe festivals have shut down since 2015, most recently the big-hitting Under the Radar, which was pulled this summer.
Does the same fate await Edinburgh? It has long been predicted. You could point to the increase this year in comics doing shorter runs, or performing works in progress instead of finished shows – or not coming to the fringe at all. Not one of last year’s nine nominees for the Edinburgh comedy award, nor the reigning best newcomer, has returned with a full show – surely a first. Prophets of doom look to the new Roundhouse comedy festival in London, running simultaneously and featuring a host of big names (Sophie Duker, Jordan Brookes, Katherine Ryan), and see the writing on the wall in terms of Edinburgh’s centrality to the comedy world.
They might have had a point, had the Edinburgh comedy award not survived the near fatal loss of its sponsor this spring. But the award – a big draw for comics – is back, baby, thanks to new funders, announced last month. In a swaggering speech on the festival’s opening weekend, the organiser, Nica Burns, promised: “We are here to stay!”
It feels like an open field for this year’s edition of live comedy’s most prestigious prize. Old-timer Frank Skinner, who won the award in 1991, is in town all month. His presence – telling knob gags in a repurposed lecture theatre at 66 – is either an inspiration or a warning to this year’s smooth-cheeked runners and riders.
Who might they be? I expect the American clown act Bill O’Neill to appear, with his spoof circus-daredevil show The Amazing Banana Brothers. Kieran Hodgson, a multiple nominee in years gone by, will feature with his crowd-pleasing show about moving to Scotland – unless his television roles, including his part as Gordon in the BBC comedy Two Doors Down, disqualify him.
The show being spoken of in the most hushed tones is Tragedy Plus Time by Ed Byrne, about the death last year of his brother, the comedy director Paul Byrne. But the Irishman is too well established to qualify for the award; he was on the shortlist in 1998, before several of this year’s contenders were born.
I would look instead to talents such as Julia Masli, the UK-based Estonian whose late-night clown show, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha – an uproarious and tender communal therapy session – has just extended its run by popular demand. At a festival where the hot gossip has surrounded the breakup of comedy’s golden couple Stewart Lee and Bridget Christie, maybe it is time to anoint their inheritors, Masli and her partner, Viggo Venn. Venn recently won Britain’s Got Talent; don’t bet against Masli bagging a prestigious prize of her own. Olga Koch, Ania Magliano, Dan Tiernan, Lorna Rose Treen and Leila Navabi are likely inclusions, too, when the awards shortlist drops on 23 August.
What are these acts talking about? You can pick out any theme you want from the unmanageably vast fringe. Care and caring, in shows such as Ben Target’s Lorenzo and Hannah Maxwell’s Nan, Me and Barbara Pravi. Cancel culture? Not so much – comedians are bored with the topic, for all that rows rage elsewhere on the fringe about the gender-critical MP Joanna Cherry’s booking at the Stand comedy club, or posters subject to puritanical censorship. I have seen a few shows by artists of colour about the burden of representation, which must feel acute in Edinburgh, where audiences skew very white. But the subject feels bigger than that, as if identity politics is starting to buckle under the weight of its internal contradictions.
Elsewhere, trauma-as-comedy – a staple on the fringe at least since Richard Gadd’s 2016 award-winner, Monkey See Monkey Do – is now so dominant that it is a surprise when a comedian doesn’t reveal, somewhere around the 40-minute mark, their suicidal impulses, their struggle with anxiety or the death of their gran.
We are living in the age of “This is me!”, so fewer comics make shows about anything other than themselves. This is certainly true of fringe newcomers, almost all of whom respond to the challenge of making their first solo show by creating 55-minute autobiographical calling cards: this is who I am and what is sellable about me, with a few jokes mixed in.
There is nothing wrong with that, but it comes as a relief to encounter rookies with something else to say, even if it is just Kathy Maniura spending her debut hour charmingly impersonating a variety of inanimate objects (plastic straw, Spanish guitar, Apple AirPods), or Ikechukwu Ufomadu adopting the oblique persona of a slick 1950s broadcaster and revealing nothing whatsoever about himself.
It would be pleasing if the best way to attract attention to yourself – in an environment where everyone is trying so hard to do so – were to talk about something else. But we are not there yet. “This is me” works, as the solo performer Georgie Grier discovered in the opening week of the fringe. Grier’s lachrymose video about her single-digit audiences went viral, retweeted supportively by celebs, and her show Sunsets duly sold out. Edinburgh being Edinburgh, she was later accused of posting the video as a publicity stunt, after armchair investigators discovered Grier had posted an identical video 12 months previously.
In lieu of such persistence, a performer’s best hope of turning one-person audiences into whooping crowds is to be sprinkled with stardust by the Angel of Edinburgh, Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Fleabag’s debt to the fringe is widely acknowledged, not least by Waller-Bridge, a generous supporter of the event. When she turned up at Nan, Me and Barbara Pravi, she was one of only two audience members. One post-show selfie with Fleabag later, Maxwell had a viral tweet and a Daily Mail news story on her hands. Her show has subsequently (and deservedly) bagged five-star reviews, award nominations and big crowds.
This is still, then, the festival that makes novice entertainers’ dreams come true, even if it pays to be strategic about the process – and even if some of them, sleeping on spare sofas, in out-of-town campsites or in underground bunkers, get a bit mildewed as they go about it. Goodness knows the fringe has problems to solve. So far this year, it has been easy to forget them, as artists and audiences meet one another by the thousands, the sun shines – just a little – and the clouds of Covid begin to disperse.
