Why Edinburgh Festival Fringe should always be global in its ambitions

Ed Bartlam and Charlie Wood are two stalwarts of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Their live entertainment company, Underbelly, began with a single venue in the Cowgate in 2000 and has now grown into an international giant.

So what they have to say about the Fringe deserves a hearing. According to them, rising costs are turning it into a “more Scottish festival” with 70 per cent of Underbelly tickets sold to people with a Scottish postcode.

The big reason, they say, is the cost of accommodation. “In order to maintain the brilliance and the diversity of the festival, both in terms of programme and the audience, these things need to be taken really, really seriously,” Wood says.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe would not be the same without shows like Macbeth on stilts, performed by Universal Arts and the Polish Cultural Institute (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell) | Getty Images

The problem of a smaller platform

It is important to say that becoming “more Scottish” could have some benefits (as The Scotsman, we could hardly say anything less). For example, a larger domestic audience might diminish some of the hostility that has grown up towards the Fringe in some quarters. And giving more space to Scottish talent could add weight to the growing success of our homegrown entertainment industry.

However, if the Fringe became a mainly Scottish event, with only a token number of performers from other countries, it would be significantly diminished and unlikely to remain the world’s largest arts event for long. And that smaller platform might actually damage the prospects of Scottish acts.

It would also be less funny, entertaining, moving and thought-provoking than it currently is. We would miss the hugely valuable and different perspectives brought by people from other countries, cultures and backgrounds.

Darwinian competition

One of the reasons why the Fringe has been so successful over the years is that it is a global hive of ideas, all in competition with each other for audiences. This creates an almost Darwinian process in which only the fittest will survive for long.

Laura Corcoran, one half of musical comedy double act Frisky and Mannish, has compared attending the Fringe to undergoing “very intense training”. “Once you get your brain into a place of critical thinking, the wealth of knowledge and research that is here, I would say, is equivalent to an MA [degree] and costs about the same,” she said.

One of the things that makes the Fringe such a marvellous and unique event is its embrace of the rest of the world. Any descent into parochialism would be a huge mistake.