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A Short History of the Edinburgh FringeDateline: 7th May, 2006 The sixtieth Edinburgh Fringe runs from 6th to 28th August this year. It's appropriate, then, to look back to those dim and distant post-war days and see where this phenomenon - and no other word better describes it - comes from. Some facts:
In 1947, in a spirit of optimism and international cooperation, the EIF was founded with the object of providing "a platform for the flowering of the human spirit." The aim was to bring the best of the performing arts throughout the world to Edinburgh in August. Theatre and dance companies, orchestras and opera companies were invited but so did eight companies which hadn't been invited. They arranged their own venues, organised their own publicity and, as it were, were carried along on the coat-tails of the Festival. The following year more came and Robert Kemp of the Evening News wrote, "Round the fringe of the official Festival drama there seems to be more private enterprise than before" and so, for the first time, the term "fringe" was used. By 1951 students from Edinburgh University got in on the act and established a drop-in centre which provided cheap food and accommodation and over the next few years the student element grewin importance, with companies from Durham, Oxford and Birmingham universities joining the Edinburgh students. Worried about, as one producer put it, "cutting each other's throats", the first joint meeting of fringe participants took place in 1954 and a year later, thanks to the Edinburgh students, a joint box office and cafe was set up. 1958 saw the foundation of the Festival Fringe Society, with a proper constitution. It made the decision which is still central to the ethos of the Fringe today: there will be no vetting or censorship of productions. A year later the Fringe Club opened and nineteen groups took part. The growth continued: 28 in 1961, 34 in 1962 and 57 by 1969. The Fringe had already seen its first major world premiere when in 1966 the Oxford Theatre Group presented Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. A year later the first of many controversies occured: La Mama Theatre Company presented Futz by Rochelle Owens, a play about bestiality which led to a reporter from the Scottish Daily Express to call for its banning - in spite of the fact that he hadn't actually seen the show. 1969 saw the Fringe Society set up as a limited liability company and two years later the first paid administrator, John Milligan, was appointed. The following year saw the beginning of the Fringe First Awards set up by The Scotsman under Arts editor Allen Wright. That year 45 new plays were eligible. Central to (and parallel to) the development of the Fringe was the growth of the Traverse Theatre. The work of John Calder, Jim Haynes and Richard Demarco were central to both, with the latter being particularly active for decades in bringing foreign (and, in particular, Eastern European) companies to the Fringe. By 1981 the number of groups taking part had grown to 494 and in 1988 the Fringe Society moved into its current headquarters at 180 High Street. In the ninteies the Fringe continued to grow and in 1998 it broke the link with the EIF by beginning a week early because companies were finding that in week three, the first week of September, audiences were falling dramatically as most people take their holidays during August. This strained relationships between the two. In 2000 the Fringe became the first arts organisation in the world to seell tickets online in real time and over 4,500 internet bookings were made. In 2003 ticket sales topped the million mark and by 2004 had a 75% market share of all attendance at Edinburgh’s festivals. By the 59th Fringe in 2005, 26,995 performances of 1,799 shows were presented in almost 300 venues, with around 16,191 performers taking part, and 45% of tickets were sold online. And this year these firgures are confidently expected to increase!
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