Tim Cornwell: Magic of the Fringe is not all an illusion

Published on Wednesday 1 September 2010 21:44

RECORDS are broken so routinely by the Fringe it's almost mundane. Figures released this week show that in 2010, Fringe ticket sales in August rose to a record 1,966,913, an increase of 5.2 per cent on last year and more than double the 2002 figure. The sales were spread over 2,453 shows, a number which was itself a 17 per cent increase on last year. The Fringe is said to generate £75 million for the local economy.

Edinburgh at Fringe's end – the International Festival continues until Sunday – looks over its shoulder with its annual sigh of regret and relief. The travelling circus has left town, and we'll get back to living dourer lives in our Jekyll and Hyde of a city. The visitors relish Scotland in August; we grimace and bear its winter winds.

Those who have worked non-stop through it often spend the final weekend seeing some of the hits they've missed. It's too late to care about reviews or publicity – heck, the thing's over for a year – but I was lucky enough, on the Fringe's last Monday, to see Ovid's Metamorphoses.

No secret in this – it's won all the awards it needs – but if you're anywhere near Croydon in the next month, it's at the Warehouse Theatre, and you'll see more pure theatrical invention than you could imagine packed in the space of an hour and 15 minutes. It goes there advertised as a prize-winning Edinburgh show, one of many artistic exports carrying the Fringe name.

The Fringe is an open-access festival, a quality cherished by its chief executive, Kath Mainland. Pay for your listing, find a space to perform, show up, and you're in; the explosion of free Fringe shows in recent years underline that trend.

Its energy defies any attempt to control or or analyse it. It's also a miracle. The Pleasance Dome, where Ovid's Metamorphoses was performed, is one of the stages that appear in buildings all across Edinburgh, as if put there by elves.

But the soaring statistics also beg some questions. The average Fringe audience is 48; that's actually down from 54 a year ago. Large advance sales, principally for major names of stage, television, or comedy, with skilled publicity machines in place, could be front-loading audiences who increasingly pre-plan their festival. Is there a Tesco's effect by the biggest acts and venues, squeezing out the Fringe corner shops?

The Scotsman this week devoted extensive coverage to the latest effort to tackle Scotland's "excessive drinking culture", apparently of growing concern to the politicians and the public because of social and medical costs. Clearly sponsorship – particularly in the current environment – is vital, and drinks conglomerates appear a major source of it at the Fringe.

Festivals are meant to be fun, and in our culture that means a drink or two. Like popcorn at the cinemas, the drinks can help finance the show. But as we tout the ticket sales, or the festival's economic value, it's perhaps worth being honest about the fact that bar revenues in August account for millions of pounds of that figure.

There's the perennial quest for quality and value. If you come to the Fringe for serious theatre, where do you go, beyond confines of the Traverse, for curated, quality drama? How to arm yourself with "trusted content" in the face of the slew of reviewers on the web?

In the festivals' economy, the relationship with the University of Edinburgh remains the elephant in the bathroom. The university, or the Edinburgh University Students Union, owns many of the major spaces used during the festival. Tourism and festival promoters come here from all over the world to try and figure out how to recreate some of the same magic. Here's one ingredient: central large-scale accommodation and venues, vacated during the summer.

The university was one of the founding supporters of the Edinburgh festivals, historians of the event have noted, and one of the reasons was a canny eye on the potential for summer revenues. The relationship between the university and the other key players in the modern growth of the Fringe – the venue managers, some in place for three decades – has been and continues to be vital to its health.