Fringe theatre is in crisis. Can anything be done?

“Everyone going up to the Edinburgh Fringe thinks they’re suddenly going to have this Phoebe Waller-Bridge moment,” theatremaker Kat Cory tells me.

The Edinburgh Fringe festival — known simply as the Fringe — was founded in 1947 as a side-event to the International Festival. It has grown into the world’s largest performance arts festival, a true monster — at its peak in 2019, it spanned 25 days, with more than 59,600 performances of 3,840 different shows in 323 venues.

The Fringe has long been considered the UK’s most significant conduit for new talent. Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag is one success story that encapsulates the festival’s potential, as it soared from a 2013 one-woman show to the London stage, then to a massive TV hit.

Cory’s own trajectory has been a little different. When I last saw her, she was eight months pregnant, mostly naked, telling a shocked room full of Edinburgh Fringe-goers that she had just £20 left in her bank account. She wasn’t joking. Like so many artists over so many years, she’d drained her finances to appear at the festival.

Cory is part of In Bed With My Brother, an all-female trio of artists who performed 2019’s Tricky Second Album, a furious, brilliant experimental performance in which they declared that the pay-to-play model of the Fringe was an exploitative nightmare for artists, one that they no longer wished to be part of. Although they won rave reviews, few viable commissions from theatres have materialised since then.

Cory and her colleagues are far from alone. A 2018 survey found that performers at the Fringe lost an average of £812 each over the month, and costs have soared since then. Artists who come to Edinburgh have always made work on a shoestring; as the cost of living crisis continues, that shoestring has frayed to breaking point.

Artists have always swallowed these extortionate costs because the potential rewards are huge: awards, reviews, the possibility of landing lucrative touring gigs or even West End transfers. But those rewards are in jeopardy too. The Total Theatre Awards and The Stage Awards, both key platforms where emerging talents are discovered, have announced they can’t afford to run this year.

Still more dismayingly, senior industry figures who’ve typically used the Fringe as a hunting ground for new talent are being forced to scale back. The British Council Showcase, an event that helped international venue programmers discover new shows, was a casualty of the pandemic.

If you don’t support artists early in their careers . . . you end up with a creative industry dominated by people who can afford to work in it’

Producer Jo Crowley works with theatre company 1927, whose multi-award-winning success at the 2010 Fringe propelled them to shows at London’s Young Vic and the Sydney Opera House. That trajectory looks tougher now, she says. “Arts funding has taken a significant cut post-pandemic, so producers and programmers literally don’t have the money to go to Edinburgh to look at new work.”

Sonia Friedman, a London West End producer, counters this saying: “As long as exciting and daring artists are taking work to Edinburgh, curious producers will follow eagerly along — but as the costs rise for everyone involved, there’s no doubt it’s getting harder.” And Stewart Pringle, senior dramaturg at London’s National Theatre, reinforces the message, adding: “If Edinburgh is a shop window for artists to pitch their work to venues, I’m worried that there are fewer customers than ever before.”

Last year, 1,600 performers, agents and producers signed an open letter to the Edinburgh Fringe Society, which administers the festival, criticising it for failing to combat soaring accommodation costs. They also urged it to campaign for better train services to and from the city, and to provide a Fringe ticketing app to make it easier for audiences to discover new shows.

“From the outside it seems so easy, like anyone can perform at the Edinburgh Fringe,’ says 24-year-old London playwright Sabrina Ali. But without crowdfunding via GoFundMe, and winning an Untapped Award, which helps early-career artists travel to the Fringe, it would have been “very difficult for us,” she says.

The play Ali is bringing, Dugsi Dayz, is a “love letter to Muslim girls” set in the Somali community — a rarity at a festival dominated by white artists. She’s excited about the opportunities for the company in Edinburgh, but says the experience is “bittersweet. Are the people I’ve written this play for going to be able to afford to go?”

Andy George is co-director of the Vault Festival — whose own future looks uncertain after being kicked out of the former rail tunnels under London’s Waterloo Station to make way for a more lucrative immersive Batman experience, Arkham Rises. “Organisers are in a difficult place at the moment,” he says. “We’ve lost a lot of festivals over the past 10 years. It’s hard to make money and it’s hard to make them sustainable. Something needs to change or we’ll continue to lose more and more.”

Some have even begun to question the whole model. But as Crowley explains, “as venues elsewhere become increasingly resistant to programming new work, [the Fringe] is one of the only platforms where physical theatre, experimental theatre, and anything that sits outside the classical canon can break through.”

Back in London, this year’s Vault Festival provided glimmers of hope for a more localised model. Tatenda Shamiso’s debut solo show No ID transferred to Royal Court Theatre after just a week at Vault. Other shows took off too, including It’s a Motherf*cking Pleasure, a burning satire on identity politics that landed a transfer to Soho Theatre.

Still, this success feels bittersweet when it’s still unclear whether Vault Festival will return for 2024. Over in New York, the theatre scene is a warning sign of what could follow: the city’s once thriving array of January festivals has been decimated, with five shuttering since 2015, including Under the Radar, the scene’s biggest and best-known platform for new talent. “There is no longer a robust avant-garde in NYC,” playwright David Adjmi tweeted on June 2.

Whatever their flaws, fringe festivals provide pretty much the only platform where new and experimental performance can thrive and find an audience. It’s too soon to mutter prayers at the graveside of radical new theatre, but conditions are certainly more challenging than ever.

Says Andy George: “If you don’t support artists at the early stages of their careers, you don’t get new ideas coming through, and you lose people who could be on the main stage at the National Theatre in five years’ time. You end up with a creative industry dominated by people who can afford to work in it.”

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