Conclusion

In the past, it has been a kind of annual tradition that some journalists will write features about how the Fringe has become ‘too big’, whatever that means, and that something needs to be done about it—they don’t ever suggest what or why.

I asked Joyce McMillan, lead critic for The Scotsman, about this when I interviewed her for the BTG podcast back in 2016. Her response to this was, “people talk about it being too big, but the brute fact is, what are you going to do? What is your plan for making people not to come to the Fringe?...

“We live in such a control freak society that people don't grasp this idea of an open festival. They think somebody must have invited everybody, or somebody must be controlling the size of it, or somebody must be deciding that it should be this size or that size or this shape or that shape… the whole point of the Edinburgh Fringe is that nobody decides that, it is organic...

“Short of taking a much more controlling and top-down attitude to it, there is not anything to be done. As long as people can find a space that they can afford and somehow get themselves somewhere to stay in Edinburgh for the three weeks, they will come and they will do their thing. And I think that's what's wonderful about it.”

While there weren’t the same complaints about how big the Fringe was this year, Joyce’s concerns about the festival will still seem familiar.

She said, “the worst thing about the Fringe is the element of it being so white and so privileged. I mean, obviously you need money to come to The Fringe and if you're not lucky enough to be in some part of England or in some other country which is willing to subsidise people to come to The Fringe, then, you know, the bank of mum and dad is often the source of money for the enterprise and that means that the whole thing is skewed towards people who are quite economically privileged… That's the worst thing about the Fringe and in that sense it is like any free market that favours the rich and the already privileged.”

That was in 2016; the problems since then have only exacerbated this situation. Most of the voices I heard in the performers and producers areas of venues and even those checking tickets in the queues were young, white and with RP English accents. If the cost of attending the Fringe even for audiences continues as it is, these diversity issues will only get worse.

There was certainly a lot of enthusiasm for the live experience amongst those who had made it to Edinburgh, whether to perform or to watch or both, but the inflated costs of getting and staying there, on top of the highest inflation in decades affecting how much money most people have to spend on non-essentials, must have been a major factor in preventing 2022 getting anywhere close to 2019 for visitor numbers.

But the Fringe will go on in some form, the Book Festival will be back at the same venue next year before moving over the road and the International Festival will continue with its curated programme of performing arts from around the world. It’s still a unique time in a beautiful city that I hope to return to many times in the future.