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The UK and Ireland![]()
CHAPTER ONE
I. WHAT IS THE STORY?
A shouted warning for the audience to stand back and a burst of fire from a human flame-thrower surges towards the crowd of onlookers on the Mound. A troupe in silver body-paint hands out leaflets for the nightās performance. Down the High Street, a jazz band bangs out the sounds of New Orleans. It is clamour, clamour-ācome and see us, the most brilliant act everā-as every group of talent demands your attention. For it is August in Edinburgh and the prim grey capital of Scotland is once again home to the largest arts show in the world.
As the International Festival guide puts it: āThere is no place on earth like Edinburgh in August.ā
Nothing, but nothing, prepares the first-time visitor for the scale of what is on offer. You could in theory set to work every morning at ten, jam-pack the day with visits to shows and go all the way through the wee hours to 4 a.m.-and still see only a tiny fraction of what is available. There are more shows, more world premieres, more tickets, more new talent, more critics, more media moguls, more authors and playwrights-in short more talent on display-than at any other arts festival anywhere. What have Rupert Murdoch, Billy Connolly and J. K. Rowling got in common? They have all, in one way or another, appeared on a stage in Edinburgh in August.1
In fact, so, too, has just about everyone involved in the British arts or media scene. Every student theatre troupe in the land wants to put something on there; a dear friend commissioned a new piano composition that had its world premiere there; other friends have done book readings or shows; one of my cousins puts on or acts in a play there most years. And my own modest contribution was once to go on stage as a panellist for a TV event.
There is a host of other arts festivals around the world but Edinburgh is three times the size of any of them.2 It is an extraordinary, if improbable achievementxd-and one that many other cities would love to emulate. How has Edinburgh done it?
The short answer is slowly. This is not one festival but-depending what you include-ten. Each reinforces the others, giving the city an artistic critical mass that makes it impossible to topple.
There is the original arts festival,3 organized like so many others by the city authorities. There is a jazz and blues festival,4 Europeās largest, bringing in groups from all over the world. There is the book fair,5 the largest of its kind on the planet. There is a film festival,6 the longest continually running one in the world, for Cannes had a break during the Second World War.7 There is a television festival.8 In 2003, a video games festival joined the clutch;9 Scotland is one of the key world centres for creating new video games.10 There is the Mela,11 a celebration of life in the Indian sub-continent, run by Edinburghās Asian community. In 2004 the city added a visual art festival for the first time,12 though actually modern visual arts had been celebrated since the early years, with local galleries putting on individual shows. In a slightly different category from all the rest, there is the Edinburgh Tattoo,13 where military musicians-again from all over the world-put on a show on the forecourt of Edinburgh Castle. The Tattoo is actually the second-largest of all the shows in terms of ticket sales, offering more than 200,000 seats through its three-week run, and military visitors come from all over the world to see how it is done.
And the biggest of all? That honour goes to the Fringe. Edinburghās special feature, the thing that distinguishes it from every other celebration of artistic endeavour, is the Fringe-the open access given by the city to the thousands of events that take place in August. Others have tried to copy it. None has really succeeded.
The story, though, offers a lesson for anyone wanting to run an arts event. Back in that drab aftermath of the Second World War, many cities sought to recapture the life and joy of pre-war Europe. Thus Cannes restarted its film festival-it had opened for just one night, on 1 September 1939, before Europe was plunged into war. In 1946 and 1947, respectively, Avignon14 and Edinburgh both started arts festivals15-the pattern being the classic one where a group of civil and artistic leaders invite companies to bring their acts, organize venues-and usually offer subsidies to get them to come. The original Edinburgh International Arts Festival was exactly that. But in the very first year something happened that changed Edinburgh and the arts world for ever.
Eight groups that had not been invited, six from Scotland and two from England, decided to gatecrash the show. They found their own venues, stumped up their own money and put on a performance.16 That first Fringe has defined the movement ever since: no performers are invited-there is complete open access; they use unconventional theatres; and they carry all the financial risks themselves. More came the following year and an Edinburgh journalist pointed out that interesting things were happening on the fringe of the main festival-and so coined that expression to describe them.17
Since then, the Fringe has gradually acquired a modest infrastructure. The first programme to bring the various independent acts under one loose umbrella, rather than have them compete against each other for spectators,18 was put together on the initiative of a local printer in 1954. A box office run by Edinburgh students followed in 1955 and the Festival Fringe Society in 1958.19 One of the key aims of the society was to help would-be performers put on shows, a theme that continues to today. The event became famous across the UK in 1960 after the success of the comedy show Beyond the Fringe20 (ironically part of the main festival, not the Fringe), but the first full-time paid employee was not appointed until 1969.
The Fringe raced on, getting into the Guinness Book of Records as the globeās largest arts festival in 1992 and becoming the first arts organization in the world to sell tickets online in real time in 2000. In 2009 an estimated 19,000 performers took part in more than 34,000 performances at more than 2,000 shows in 265 venues. Nearly 1.9 million tickets were sold and the event generated Ā£75 million for the economy. Those figures beat all records by a huge margin. Indeed the Fringe had doubled in size over the previous six years.21
Then finally there are the shows that are literally āBeyond the Fringeā. The Fringe is an enabling organization that aims to help would-be performers. No one needs to use its services to put on a show, though, in practice, it makes life easier to go through the central ticket office and benefit from the publicity associated with the Fringe programme. But lots of performers simply turn up. Most busk in the High Street or on the Mound, the public space by the National Gallery of Scotland, but some simply put on a show in friendsā flats. You may not get noticed by the critics, but if you want the experience of performing before a huge and interested audience, Edinburgh provides the ultimate opportunity. Edinburgh in August is the worldās stage and anyone, but anyone, can be a player.
But how? How has one medium-sized city managed to achieve this position?22 To relate the chronology helps explain a little, for the burst of energy that the Fringe brought from day one has been the catalyst driving the growth of the other elements of the festival. Critical mass matters. Once the Fringe was established as the premier showcase for British, later world, theatrical talent, it was natural that Edinburgh in August should attract other festivals too. The market was largely ready-made, for people who are interested in new experimental theatre are probably also interested in more conventional drama, in classical music and jazz, in new books-in all the other experiences that Edinburgh offers. But Edinburgh is not just a retail show for interested individuals; it is a wholesale show for the different artistic trades. For a young performer to get noticed at Edinburgh can be a life-changing experience. Win one of the top awards and nothing will ever be the same again.
So for the (mostly) youthful performers and producers at the Fringe, it is a career tool. āI am here,ā a friend who put on a show there explained, āto invest in my future.ā And for the more mature critics and impresarios, as well as the ordinary punters, it is āthe chance to see it before it happensā.
2. WHAT ARE THE LESSONS?
Edinburgh has long had a lot of things going for it-things that would naturally make it the ideal backdrop for an arts and entertainment festival. It is, physically, the most beautiful city in Britain, with its castle, its gardens, its medieval Old Town and its Georgian squares. It is a capital city and-important in the entertainment world-an English-speaking one. But none of this, of course, would have been enough. There are at least three special features about the Edinburgh Festival that carry a message for other cities seeking to develop their own special face to the world.
Lesson one is the willingness to create and permit a completely open marketplace. This means accepting that what happens cannot be controlled. Edinburgh has tended this marketplace wisely, not by piling in huge amounts of money or building infrastructure, but rather by clearing bureaucratic blockages that might stifle it. For example, one of the keys to the Fringeās success is the use of unconventional performance spaces, often in old buildings designed for another purpose.23 That means applying sensitive fire and access regulations-to make sure audiences really are safe-rather than insisting that venues fit box-ticking requirements.
It also means accepting that the city will, for one month, be a quite different place from what it is during the rest of the year. Residents and businesses alike in effect lose control of the centre of their city. It is business, of course, but it is also disruption. Were it badly managed, the disruption could damage the core activities that drive the city through the rest of the year. All tourist centres have to cope to some extent with surges of visitors with different values to the locals, but this is extreme stuff. The lesson therefore is not just to permit the creation of a market but also to relish it.
Lesson two is to blend top-down and bottom-up. There is no single mind planning what happens in Edinburgh; there are and always have been lots of minds, which work in different ways. Some of these, such as the director and governing body of the International Festival, have to exert a top-down discipline. The companies performing have to be invited. Funding has to be found, venues secured and the events publicized. To get the right mix, there has to be some artistic direction.
At the Fringe, by contrast, the minds have to focus almost exclusively on logistics. They do not concern themselves about the artistic merit of the performers; all they have to do is make sure that anyone who fills the basic requirements is able to set up a show, for this is entirely a bottom-up exercise. There is, however, one crucial function that the Fringe performs beyond logistics. This is teaching.
Every year it holds a series of seminars to show would-be performers and promoters how to put on a show. These include: how much the different venues will cost; how to manage publicity; the timescale for decisions; the need to go for as long a run as possible to cover costs, and so on. It is in the interests of everyone that people go into the project aware of the costs and how to budget for them. Even performers have to eat.
The trick, which the various organizers of the Edinburgh festivals have managed to pull off, is to achieve balance-to plan but not to over-plan, to lead but also to follow the demands of the market.
That leads to the third lesson: the need to listen. This has been central to Edinburghās development at three stages.
First, what started as a conventional arts festival, and might have remained so, was swiftly transformed by the demands of the market into something much bigger. Had there been no uninvited guests at the first party, the Fringe might never have taken off.
Second, in the middle years, Edinburgh allowed market forces to develop the Fringe, rather than trying to stifle it. Technically, the Fringe has become extremely innovative, from the first comprehensive programme to the centralized ticket office and, later, to internet booking.
Third, whenever a new festival wanted to tag along, it was welcomed. So films and TV, jazz and books were all grafted onto the official and Fringe core. This tradition continued into 2004 with the formal addition of the art festival-though as I noted earlier, the visual arts had been represented at Edinburgh for many years in an informal way.
By chance, on a visit to the festival in 2007, I met the key person in bringing modern visual arts to Edinburgh-a man called Richard Demarco,24 who grabbed me by the arm and taught me something else. A tiny, mercurial Italian Scot in his late seventies, he had gone as a 17-year-old to the very first festival-and been so enchanted that he decided to devote his life to bringing art to Edinburgh.
And so over the years a string of European and Scottish artists had their works exhibited in Edinburgh at Richard Demarcoās gallery, and in 2007 his archive was put on display at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Queen Street. It was an amazing jumble of stuff, bringing together the work of renowned artists such as Joseph Beuys25 and Richard Demarcoās role in the whole festival scene. (He had, for example, co-founded the Traverse Theatre26 in 1963.)
As we talked, two things became clear-two things at the core of the spirit of Edinburgh. One is that it is vital for the different aspects of art to commingle; theatre should not be separate from the visual arts-it is all part of the whole. And, of course, Edinburgh mixes everything together. The other is that you need failure; people need to be free to fail. Richard Demarco himself always maintains that he set out on his career in the arts because he had failed his exams at school, but the point is much bigger.
What I think Edinburgh does is to create a platform not just where people can feel free to experiment but also one where they do not need to worry if it does not work. There is surely a wider message there: individual failure is an essential part of the wider success of almost all enterprises-and absolutely to a venture as huge and amorphous as the Edinburgh Festival.
ā¢Create an open marketplace
ā¢Blend top...
