How Edinburgh festival’s ‘Fringe Monster’ may be reshaped by powerful forces – John McLellan

Edinburgh City Council could be tempted to blunder amid ‘new thinking’ about the city’s festivals, writes John McLellan.

Fergus Linehan wants to use the time in lockdown to come up with some new thinking about the International Festival (Picture: Alistair Linford)

International Festival director Fergus Linehan probably struck a chord with many readers this week by suggesting Edinburgh should use the coronavirus lockdown to ensure the arts are not “all about tourism and never-ending growth”.

Mr Linehan speaks from a position of some strength because that’s something of which the International Festival cannot be accused, with a tightly-controlled programme of high culture which rarely aims at the mass market. If anything it’s Mr Linehan who has dipped his toe into popular entertainment with such shows as Franz Ferdinand and Sparks in 2015.

“Over the last 30 years or so, it’s been easy to be drawn into a world in which the arts are framed as part of a wider economic regeneration agenda that’s all about tourism and never-ending growth,” he said.

“I think that after a year in which, for once, we don’t have to produce a festival on a tight schedule, none of us are going to have any excuse for not coming up with some brilliant new thinking about what an international festival might look like, in those new times.”

Whether this means no more LA Philharmonic or Mariinsky Theatre remains to be seen, but on the basis that some sort of normality returns in 2021 when we are all vaccined up to the oxters, reshaping Edinburgh’s festival season is, as he is no doubt aware, simply not in his gift.

The scope of the International Festival changes relatively little from year to year, adding and subtracting venues like the Royal Highland Showground and the Forrest Hill Drill Hall, but the core remains the main concert halls and playhouses.

The key was and is the Fringe and the Fringe experience, which is tied to the availability of accommodation and attractive shows. The Fringe Society has proved impervious to persuasion that its founding principle of free access is in need of reform and any suggestion the programme should be limited to control numbers is rejected. Even if it no longer resists pressure to scale back, off-programme performers could still set up and form a Fringe-Fringe and this month it admitted it had no power to prevent shows opening in August should restrictions be eased.

Veteran West End publicist and promoter Kevin Wilson agrees, telling Liam Rudden of this newspaper that: “The Fringe has become an all-consuming monster... If you were to propose a new festival in any UK city with almost 4,000 shows a day over four weeks in venues as small as a living room, you would not get permission on so many levels – health, safety, public order, environmental impact.”

No-one can force the Fringe Society to change its rules so it falls to the council’s licensing system, but to be consistent how could different criteria apply to a visiting Fringe play than local amateur dramatics in a church hall in November?

The Fringe Monster has taken 70 years to grow but even if a reduction is possible, the effect of scarcity could just be to push up venue hire costs and therefore ticket prices, handing even more power to the big four promoters, all of whom use public or university spaces.

And that’s the next problem. Is Edinburgh University going to rein back lucrative Fringe rentals when its student fee income has been destroyed by the pandemic? Or any other venue owner desperate for recovery revenue?

Maybe an accommodation shortage is the solution, with the short-stay market in free-fall and landlords switching to long-term lets which new legislation will make much harder to terminate than before. If people can’t find somewhere to stay, or shortages push up hotel prices, or if the travel market has not recovered, performers beyond the high-profile shows won’t have audiences.

The Festival season is a complex organism and no one thing is going to bring about a permanent transformation, but as many bar and restaurant owners have pointed out, a successful summer is what keeps them going all year round and allows locals to enjoy what they offer in the quieter months.

The council could be tempted to blunder in to control markets it doesn’t understand, but the markets might already be deciding.