The Fringe is under pressure so does it have a future? Here's my take

Not that you’d know it. I’m up and out of the house well before the churches are open for business – still a decent indicator of time in the capital – and there is hardly anyone about.

Not quite true. There are thick knots of tourists at every bus stop into town, pondering in a multitude of Asian and European languages why the city of Edinburgh persists with a Sunday service when the world’s biggest arts festival is in town. With a little help from Google Translate I would tell them, but the question is unanswerable. Does it cost too much? Or is it just another example of the passive aggressive attitude the city often demonstrates to both Fringe and Fringe visitors – a way of pretending none of this is happening? The Calvinist face Edinburgh turned to the Fringe in its early years was sterner and scowled more. But you can still feel its glare today.

You can hear its voice, too. Hours later, standing on the corner of Chambers Street and South Bridge talking to a guy handing out Fringe flyers for £15 an hour, an elderly Edinburgh woman approaches. “Why are you littering up the place?” she asks. He is doing no littering, as it happens.

American cellist Leah Coloff played this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Image: Colin Hattersley)

But by ‘you’ she means not just him everyone here for the Fringe. And her definition of ‘littering’, I imagine, extends well beyond his flyers and includes the posters on the doorways and the endless rows of mini-billboards fixed to the railings of those city streets which still have such things (quite a few, if you know Edinburgh).

If you’re coming to the conclusion the capital doesn’t deserve its Fringe, you’re not alone. Those in charge of it, and those who have a long association with it, have intimated as much to me over the years. At the very least (that is, in public and on the record) they will say this: it’s possible Edinburgh doesn’t fully appreciate what it has. Or this: more could be done to safeguard the festival’s future. Or even this: become complacent, and the thing will die.

That message, or something like it, could be heard in an impassioned speech from Fringe Society chief executive Shona McCarthy last week. Referring to a recent meeting held in Edinburgh between Lisa Nandy MP, UK Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and her counterpart in the Scottish Government, Angus Robertson MSP, she said: “Surely to God it is not beyond the power of those two politicians to get their heads together, to realise what is all around them in this city at this moment, realise that it is life-changing and life-enhancing, and find a way to bloody well support it properly.”

Cross an imaginary line heading south at about the level of Chambers Street and you are in Fringe Town, the powerful locus of the Fringe. Here you have the various venues associated with Gilded Balloon and The Pleasance Theatre Trust, as well as the raucous tented village in George Square Gardens housing Assembly Festival and Underbelly. They share it like East and West Germany shared Berlin, with a wall down the middle. Slightly further on is my first stop on this final Sunday of the Fringe: Summerhall.

Enter this world, dip into the work which has been made and carried here by artists from all over the world, and you will quickly experience the stuff Ms McCarthy is talking about. The stuff that’s life-changing and life-enhancing.

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I don’t expect my day to start with a one-woman circus show about mental illness, paranoia and sleep deprivation, but it does and I’m glad of it. Margot Mansfield was 19 when she was first hospitalised with a condition known as Brief Limited Intermittent Psychotic Episodes, and her recounting of the experience in her appropriately-named show B.L.I.P.S is deeply affecting.

There are 30 of us in the audience and she receives a standing ovation at the end. I emerge blinking, moved and slightly stunned to find a packed and buzzing Summerhall cafe down one corridor, a pop-up tattoo parlour along another – three people are in the chairs, the only sound the hum of the inking guns – and downstairs an extraordinary exhibition of photographs from the late 1970s Washington DC punk scene. All that and it has only just gone 11 o’clock. Welcome to a day on the Fringe.

Next stop on my tour is The Pleasance for a couple of shows in quick succession. First, a lunchtime variety bill featuring one Cockney MC, two masters (ahem) of improvisation, and three stand-ups. It’s an all male line-up, which is a shame, though the common themes of class and economic struggle are interesting. The best gag comes from Scott Bennett: “It’s not a smart meter, it’s an anxiety portal.” Laugh? I nearly turned the heating on.

That’s followed by a trip to the aptly-named Bunker One for 16 Postcodes, a one-woman show by Irish actress Jessica Regan. It charts her life as a struggling RADA graduate in London across 16 locales. There isn’t enough time for each of the stories in the time allotted, so audience members pick one in turn until the hour is up. Virtually everyone who does lives in London. This is also interesting.

One of Regan’s themes is the cost of accommodation. She tells stories about it, but how does it affect Fringe performers in Edinburgh? On my way to see drag queen Kate Butch perform Wuthering Shites – no prizes for guessing the subject of that show – I meet London-based actress-comedian Camilla Borges. She’s performing in a yurt next to an underpass behind the Old College, a venue which costs her nothing and has a capacity of 25. Last year she paid £1200 to stay in student accommodation for her Fringe run. This year she’s paying £300 to stay in a flat with five other comics. Oh, and she’s sharing a bed with one of them. Does that mean she’ll return to London in profit? It does not.

The Fifth Step. with Jack Lowden and Sean Gilder (Image: free)

Sitting beside me at Kate Butch, meanwhile, is solicitor-turned-actor Abigail Rolling. She’s performing a show called Shit Lawyer, about the existential crisis facing the justice system. But with gags. She’s playing to sell-out houses and does at least expect to cover her costs. As for Kate Butch, she too has cash on her mind. Here’s her parting gift to the couple who walk out after half an hour: “Oh well, I’ve got their money.” Like Margot Mansfield, she’s flogging merchandise outside afterwards to help make ends meet.

So if last year’s Fringe was a culture wars battleground, this year’s big issue is money, funding and resources. Everyone’s feeling it and, where they can, everyone able to help is pitching in. American actor Neil Patrick Harris is in town and records a social media reel in support of closure-threatened Summerhall. Meanwhile, in a co-ordinated response to the news that Creative Scotland is closing one of its main funding channels as a result of a wider Scottish Government funding freeze, statements are read after several festival performances on Sunday.

One comes from Finn den Hertog, director of Edinburgh International Festival show, The Fifth Step. Post-performance he takes to the stage of the Royal Lyceum Theatre to stand alongside the play’s stars, Jack Lowden and Sean Gilder. “Many of the works you have seen during these festivals will have started out as seeds from this fund,” he says. “We need to stop [the cuts] because otherwise there will be no more new Scottish work like the work you saw tonight, and the work you have seen from all over Scotland across the festival.”

Chief Executive, Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, Shona McCarthy (Image: Jane Barlow)

On Monday, as the tourists begin leaving and the tumbleweed rolling in, Shona McCarthy issues an open letter revealing that Fringe tickets sales have hit a whopping 2.6 million this year. But she also re-states the cumulative effect of the ongoing challenges the festivals face, among them the “relentless rise in the cost of everything”, certain “blunt policy changes” (the Creative Scotland funding cut), and the scourge of over-priced accommodation.

She also has a pithier way of saying what Finn den Hertog does the previous evening – “There is no art without artists” – and ends her open letter with the word “peril”.

The Fringe is still the Fringe. Hold it annually, pronounce it open for business, and they will always come, performers and audiences alike. Every show I attend is near to capacity, yet talk to the makers of the work and underneath it all the signs of distress are there – and if the warning bells from the top are as significant as they seem, then the danger is real.

Edinburgh may find it only really comes to terms with its Fringe when the potential is spent and the glory years a memory. But Scotland will be as big a loser.