Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Is the problem it's too big or just too expensive? – Susan Dalgety

Theatre supremo Sir Cameron Mackintosh is not the first luvvie to say that the Edinburgh Fringe has grown too big for the city.

The man who is bringing the hit musical Hamilton to the Festival Theatre next year, said last week that there are“probably too many shows chasing an audience”. More than 60 years ago, less than two decades after the first shows performed on the ‘fringe’ of the inaugural Edinburgh International Festival in 1947, director Gerard Slevin put forward a similar argument, albeit on a different scale. Remarkably, Slevin said he thought the annual arts festival would be “much better if only ten halls were licensed”.

Changed days. Last year alone there were nearly 50,000 artists from 58 nations who performed in 3,171 shows. And these are just the Fringe’s official statistics. They don’t take account of the hundreds of street performers who rock up every year, some armed only with a few balloons, to entertain the throngs in the High Street and elsewhere.

There is some truth to Mackintosh’s claim that the Fringe is too big. As well as too many shows, he cited the high cost of accommodation for performers and visitors as a problem. And he pointed to a change in travel patterns since the pandemic. “We’re in a different era now,” he said. “None of us quite know what is going to happen. I don’t believe that all the pressures on the planet and the cost of fuel are going to go backwards…There's just not as many people travelling now.”

He is not alone in making dire predictions for the future of the Fringe. Ticket sales in 2022 were down by half a million compared to 2019, and several of the festival’s biggest promoters blamed the high cost of temporary accommodation in August for the drop. They warned that unless a solution was found, the future of Fringe was “in very real danger”.

The curtain is not about to come down on the Fringe. The city’s international reputation and its civic pride are too tightly bound up with the arts for that to happen. None of the major funders – both in the public and private sectors – could countenance the prospect of a quiet August in Edinburgh. But as the recent collapse of the Edinburgh International Film Festival and last year’s “brutal” 40 per cent drop in income for the Book Festival shows, there is something amiss.

It is possible that the Fringe peaked in 2019. I paid to watch Hamilton live on screen during the pandemic, from the comfort of my sofa, so I am less likely to fork out for a ticket to see the show at the Festival Theatre – even if I could afford it.

While nothing beats the thrill of a live performance, the cost is often prohibitive. I only went to a handful of shows last August, but managed to spend a couple of hundred pounds. There was plenty more I wanted to see, but simply couldn’t afford the tickets. Perhaps the challenge facing the Fringe is not, as Sir Cameron says, too many shows chasing an audience, but an audience priced out of too many shows.