The Edinburgh Fringe Festival

There is something overwhelmingly strange about the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (and indeed the many other festivals that take place at the same time) and for once I’m not talking about the performers. For the month of August every year, Edinburgh is the kind of place where no matter what ridiculous costume you are walking down the street in, you fail to register any kind of shock factor.

No, what I find strange about the festival is how concentrated the programme is across what is quite a large period of time. I remember hearing a great quote about Edinburgh that if there’s any empty room in the city that it will be booked out to a performer within minutes. Doesn’t matter what the space is – public toilet, residential house or any other extreme places where performers might want to put a show on at.

Having spent the middle weekend in Edinburgh – my first time there during the famous Fringe Festival – the fantastic wealth of the programme strikes you almost instantly. With over 2,000 shows taking place in 265 different venues and many big name shows and comedians to go and see, it is clearly a great draw that brings visitors from all over Europe to Scotland’s capital city.

My problem remains that while there is so much choice for visitors to see, it is all done at an unrealistic pricing structure. For small shows, the average price remains around £10 and this is often for only 45 minutes of performance. At that rate, it doesn’t matter how many shows there are going on because the majority of people won’t be able to afford to see more than a few shows a day. Any more than that and a few days at the festival becomes more expensive than a foreign holiday.

With that in mind then, you would think that ticket sales would be badly down. However, this year’s Box Office has been extraordinarily successful. According to Wikipedia, Fringe 2009 sold 1,859,235 tickets for 34,265 performances at an average of 1,300 performances per day. There were an estimated 18,901 performers, from 60 countries.

My previous comments about ticket prices don’t really take into account the top name performers, who – as you would expect to pay in an open market – tend to cost £20-£30 in price. These shows, even without the festival banner, would make money in a city like Edinburgh and it adds a distorting effect to the box office. It is one thing putting on thousands of shows if only a few hundred make any money.

Despite all that, the figures do suggest a great appetite for the festival and a great appetite from the many performers who get involved. The problem is that putting on a show at the Edinburgh festival is notoriously difficult to make any money from. The smaller shows routinely make losses, even with the relentless promotion that goes on around the Royal Mile and in bars up and down the city. As a result, the only way to really recoup any kind of money is by charging unrealistic prices.

The festival is a fantastic thing, of that there is no doubt and there is a great argument for that scale of diversity. To my mind though, it dilutes the overall impact of the festival and creates such a hit and miss result with performances that it becomes less of a cultural epicentre and more of an unedited and unstructured mess of a festival. Quality always wins over quantity.