Author Allan Foster has been running the Edinburgh Book Lovers Tour during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for 17 years.
Still hale at the age of 72, Foster is beginning to feel the pressures of working at the notoriously frenetic Fringe as the event moves into its final weekend. “The last weekend is traditionally the weekend when the skies darken and the locals throw themselves out the windows, because they can’t take it any more,” he quips.
Two years on from the pandemic, the Fringe returned in 2022 to something approaching its previous scale, with 3,171 shows. Although this marks a decline after years of seemingly exponential growth—in 2019 the Fringe included 3,841 listings—the chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, Shona McCarthy, described the event’s historic re-staging as a “small miracle.”
Foster is certain that, despite the outward appearance of a return to previous levels of attendance, the reality is much diminished. “It doesn’t seem back to normal to me, but if you stand on the Royal Mile and the Lawnmarket, it will look its usual abnormal,” he says.
The six festivals that take place in Edinburgh in August, often referred to collectively as “the festival,” have long been the envy of other cities eager to replicate the immense cultural prestige and tourism revenue that it brings to the Scottish capital. Prior to the pandemic, Edinburgh’s civic leaders could boast of a pre-eminent global event rivalled only by the Fifa World Cup and the Olympics in terms of profile and numbers.
But even this most reliable of spectacles has been upstaged by the city’s cleansing workers, whose 12-day strike has provided a ubiquitous reminder of the wider cost-of-living crisis. An abiding image of the Fringe’s 75th year will surely be the sight of bins overflowing and many of the city’s ancient and iconic streets strewn with rubbish. “If you’re working in the street you have to accept what’s happening in the street,” as Foster says.
However, the impact of the cleansing strike is just the most outward sign that all is not well with the material base of Edinburgh’s cultural economy.
The return of full-scale festivals has seen long-simmering discontent about the footprint that this vast event leaves behind in such a relatively small city, one already grappling with a chronic shortage of affordable accommodation and years of council budget cuts. The Fringe Society, famed for its open-access policy, has also faced sustained criticism for failing to provide some of the backroom infrastructure that supports less established artists, many of whom make a loss in the hope that their work will catch the eye of reviewers and promoters.
An open letter signed by hundreds of agents and promoters drew attention to the lack of key facilities previously provided by the Fringe, including the Half Price Hut—where punters could pick up discounted tickets—and a mobile app.
The letter also claimed that press were struggling to attend events due to accommodation costs: reviewers are a crucial part of the Fringe’s cultural ecology and are particularly valuable to up and coming acts.
For Cara Rowland, a student from Inverness and director of Average Joe, a comedy about the yoghurt industry, the lack of reviews has been one of the most significant issues. “It’s something we’ve really struggled with,” she tells me.
“It is such a big festival and it can be quite overwhelming if you don’t have infrastructure and you don’t have people saying ‘this is how you do X, Y, Z.’” Rowland is grateful that her troupe were able to draw on a mix of funding, including a crowdfunding campaign, to perform in the city for a week. “It’s a lot of money. We definitely couldn’t have done it with our own money,” she says.
A perceived decline in the number of reviewers being able to attend marks a significant breach of the informal contract that many performers enter into when coming to Edinburgh. Edinburgh-based critic Neil Cooper, who first reviewed shows at the Fringe in 1986, recalls a time when publications would endeavour to cover every single event at the festival.
“One of the interesting things about the Fringe is that it has always been a microcosm of what is going on in the world around it,” he says, but suggesting that is not always a good thing. Nowadays, “only those with some kind of financial safety net can afford to put on work,” he says, “with the long-term result being that working-class artists with no money are squeezed out, and the Fringe becomes the poshos playground it arguably always has been.”
Despite these long-running systemic problems, there is a palpable sense of relief that the Fringe did manage to return in 2022. “It’s a testament to all the venues, but also the artists, because they brought shows against all the odds, in the face of extraordinary pressures,” says one artistic director who did not wish to be named.
The festivals have always relied on a certain critical mass: the fear now is that rising accommodation costs, combined with inflationary pressures, could mean we are fast approaching the end of the 75-year-old Fringe. “There is something to celebrate, but the real feeling is that there is going to be a reckoning,” the artistic director says. “If people start deciding it is not economically rational to come to the festival, even if 20 per cent of them don’t come next year, then the talent scouts, bookers and journalists won’t come and the thing will collapse like a soufflé,’ the artistic director tells me. “I am very worried that the golden goose is being strangled.” City of Edinburgh Council and the Fringe Society were approached for comment, but neither replied.
