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The Edinburgh Fringe: Reviewing the VenuesDateline: 17th October, 2004The Edinburgh Fringe has, the Scotsman reports, hired arts research company The Audience Business to contact companies which played at the Fringe this year to get their reactions to the venues in which they played with the object of giving them the same kind of star review that shows get from many publications, including the BTG. The ratings will be based on how companies rank the venues for technical support, publicity and PR, atmosphere, value for money and so on. According to Fringe director Paul Gudgin, "The aim of the research is to help companies choose their venue and that choice is one of the most important for performers at the festival." However that has been major opposition from venue managers. The Gilded Balloon's Karen Koren told the paper, "Some performers will have had a bad experience, but it doesn’t mean the venue is badly run. and Ed Bartlem, co-director of the Underbelly added, "Some companies come up, get a two-star review and then blame it on the press and marketing department." Gudgin, however, is at pains to emhasise that "It is not the Fringe's opinion." That is surely a remarkably naïve comment. If the Fringe publishes the results of the survey - and what would be the point of commissioning it if they don't? - then no matter what disclaimers may be added, people will take them as official Fringe pronouncements. We all know how people will react: "Not an official rating? Well, they've got to say that, haven't they? But..." There are three points that should be made here. First, the Fringe Society has always been an enabling organisation, making no judgements about venues or participants but simply providing the organisational framework for the whole thing to happen. This is the great strength of the Edinburgh Fringe and what separates its from every other arts festival in the world. It is open-access: anyone can set up a venue and anyone can perform, if they have the resources to do so. Once the Society starts to intervene and assess quality, one of the main planks of the Fringe goes. Indeed, many will see it as the first step on the road of restricting participation. It is strange that this idea surfaces in a year when people have started to question whether the Fringe has grown too big. Then, how can one compare the Assembly or the Pleasance, with their large (and, in the case of the Pleasance, ever-increasing) number of performance spaces and their massive budgets, with, for example, the Holyrood Tavern, which boasts one small back room? And of course there are those companies which go to Edinburgh with totally unrealistic expectations - and, in a lot of cases, totally unrealistic assessments of the quality of their work. The natural tendency - for who likes to admit they are at fault? - is to blame the venue. I am told that the average house for a Fringe show is now seven (it used to be six). As there are shows (such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at the Assembly or XXX at the Pleasance Grand) which play to capacity audiences in large houses for their whole run, it is obvious that other shows are going to have houses of one or two or even, in some cases, none! With the best will in the world on the part of the venue PR people, the Joe Bloggs Theatre Company is never going to attract the interest that Christian Slater does, nor is a one-woman play about Shakespeare's auntie (a fictional show, I hasten to add!) going to compete with full frontal nudity and simulated sex! The wonderful thing about the Fringe is that word does get around. A couple of years ago I was the first reviewer to celebrate Hamlet the Musical - if only because I was the first one to see it! - but the audiences were piling in: that best of all advertising, word of mouth, had seen to that. This year I came across two very different companies, both of which were getting audiences of around ten but which had very different responses. One was delighted that they got anyone at all and were pleased when a reviewer turned up, even if the star rating they got was only two (I gave them three!), whereas the other (whose show I didn't see) were full of complaint against everyone from critics to venue because their brilliant show was not getting the audiences it deserved. I was vilified because I didn't turn up: my point that there were more than 600 shows and I had only six days being dismissed out of hand. But this proposed star rating for venues will only give poeple like that company an opportunity to do down a venue which had probably done its best for them. Sorry Mr Gudgin, but I reckon this idea has all the usefulness of school exam league tables. But don't get me started on that one! Articles Indices:
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