|
|
|
|
|
||
|
Articles
|
||
|
Articles |
My FringePeter Lathan reflects on the 2008 Edinburgh FringeDateline: 20th August, 2008There's no doubt about it - reviewing the Fringe is a young person's job! I was only in Edinburgh to review for four days and three nights; I tried to keep all my shows in any one day either in the same venue or in venues close by; I reduced the number of shows I was doing; I purposely didn't see any late-night shows (and for me nowadays that means shows that start after 9pm, or 21.00 as the Fringe programme has it), and yet I was still shattered. When I look at the number of shows reviewed by Cecily Boys and Graeme Strachan over the full three weeks, or by the slightly less young but nonetheless considerably younger than me Philip Fisher, or I think back to the number I reviewed ten years ago, I am filled with admiration for them now and me as I was. Mind you, the weather didn't help. It was raining when I left Newcastle on Monday morning but Edinburgh was fine. However when I woke up on Tuesday morning the street below my digs was a sea of umbrellas and I walked out into that awful soft drizzle (almost but not quite like the fabled Edinburgh Haar) which soaks you insideously. By the evening it had turned to real rain which continued the next morning. I sat at the breakfast table looking out over the dismal scene and texted a friend: "For the rain it raineth every day..." Raindrops didn't keep falling on my head, however: by late afternoon it was cascades! I went for a meal very late that evening, at the seafood restaurant Creelers, one of my favourite eating places, and proprietress Fran told me they'd had a terrible day. Indeed, that was the first time in all the many years I've been eating there that I actually had an embarrasment of choice about where to sit. Usually you're lucky to get a table. Mind you, they's still run out of monkfish. Fran confirmed what I was already thinking, after just two and a half days in the city, that there weren't as many people around as usual. There were no full houses at any show I went to, no standing in queues to get a table in a restaurant, no crowds at the bar in the pubs (and I never had any difficulty getting a table in a pub either: now that's almost unheard of!), no problems getting up and down High Street (in either week 1 or week 3 when I returned for a day), fewer people around in the Pleasance Courtyard and the eating/drinking places inside and outside the Gilded Balloon. Fringe director Jon Morgan (who announced his resignation on Thursday) says that ticket sales, although still in excess of 1.5m, have dropped by about 10% on last year and he blames the credit crunch and the weather. That may seem like grasping at straws - would the weather really affect an arts festival? - but I think he may well be right. By Wednesday evening every camp site around the city had been flooded out and an awful lot of people headed off home, and many more simply did not want to go out in the pouring rain to sit in wet clothes to watch shows. There is also the possibility that some were put off by the failure of the new box office system, although what effect that might have had will not, I think, be made clear until the independent report is completed. My own feeling is that the majority of people wait to book the bulk of the shows they go to see until the reviews are out and word of mouth has had a chance to do its thing. And as for the credit crunch, a lot of Edinburgh business people I talked to said that, while the number of foreign visitors seems to have held up, there were fewer British people around. For some time there has been concern about the potential for festivals abroad (such as Avignon) and at home (the Manchester International Festival) to steal custom away from Edinburgh - that was the impetus behind the Thundering Hooves report - but there might be some force in the suggestion that not enough effort goes into marketing the Edinburgh Festivals within the UK and that they tend to rest on their laurels far too much. I hope that the Fringe Society and Edinburgh City Council will not take the easy way out and, by blaming external and/or one-off factors, convince themselves that they really don't need to do anything apart from make sure that the box office computer system actually works. If, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer has said (but the PM has denied), we are in for a long downturn in the economy, then the Fringe is going to have to make itself more attractive to the so-called "cultural tourists", especially those from the UK who could find the promise of better weather in Avignon, Barcelona or even Brussels a significant factor in deciding where to spend their time and money.
|
|
|
|