Edinburgh needs to become evangelical

Vice-Pope Eric explaining the true meaning of the Edinburgh Fringe, yesterday.

COMMENT: The Edinburgh Fringe’s renewed commitment to open access is welcome – but they badly need to sell this benefit to other festivals.

In the legendary Brand New Monty Python Papperbok, there’s a panel discussion where Vice-Pope Eric explains the Catholic Church’s current position on sex and marriage. He explains that whilst their stance on sex outside marriage is well-known, what currently concerns them is the uncontrolled prevalence of sex within marriage. That’s not to say they oppose it outright – like it or not, it remains the best method for procreation; whilst they prefer Immaculate Conception to be used wherever possible, the Vatican has been forced to turn a blind eye to this matter, but only for outnumbering purposes mind, never for fun. When queried about where this was mentioned in Jesus’s teachings, however, his Vice Holiness admits that it wasn’t in his teachings as such, but it was an oversight they were quite happy to correct, by using St. Paul’s later writings and passing that off as Jesus’s own words quite successfully.

The relevance to the Edinburgh Fringe might not be immediately relevant here, but bear with me.

When Shona McCarty took over as the new chief executive of the Edinburgh Fringe, the first thing she did was stress her commitment to keeping the fringe open access. One year on, and it looks like she means business here. I’ve been a little sarcastic over the catchphrase “Alliance of Defiance” (a bit difficult to portray yourself as anti-establishment when you are the establishment), but I fully agree with the sentiment behind it: the true roots of the fringe is those original eight groups who turned up to Edinburgh in defiance of the International Festival who wouldn’t programme them and expected them to stay home. This story, along with the bit that these eight groups received no encouragement from the rest of the arts world, even appears on the website to all new visitors.

What’s worth watching: Edinburgh Fringe 2017

Skip to: Bite Size, Call Mr. Robeson, The Jurassic Parks, Police Cops in Space, Replay, Izzy’s Manifestoes, The Friday Night Effect, Gratiano, The House, Mars Actually, No Miracles Here, The Empress and Me, Labels, Your Ever Loving, Give Me Your Love, The Writers’ Room, You, Me and Everything Else, Boris and Sergey, Imaginary Porno Charades, The Dark Room, Doktor James’s Academy of Evil, Knightmare Live, Morgan and West, Murder’ She Didn’t Write, Notflix, The City, The Divide

Edinburgh fringe has already started, and I still haven’t written up these recommendations. Let’s get started then. Here’s a list of things coming up at Edinburgh which I can recommend seeing for various reasons. You can find the full rules for how I choose what to endorse in my Recommendations Policy, but the main thing to remember is that is a cross-sections of good plays, not an exhaustive list. In particular, for Edinburgh I have a rule that recommendations are only given to groups I’ve seen before. I’ve heard a lot of good things about other groups, but if I was to include them the list would get unmanageably long.

No major changes since previous fringes to report this time, so let’s get straight to it. All plays run the entire length of the fringe unless otherwise noted.

Edinburgh Fringe 2017 – as it happens

REVIEWS: Skip to: Richard Carpenter is Close to You, La Vie Dans Une Marionette, The Friday Night Effect, Victim, Love+, Cockroached, Lists for the End of the World, Replay, Was it Good for You?, The Big Bite-Size Breakfast Show, Izzy’s Manifestoes, Penthouse, Just Don’t Do It, You, Me and Everything Else, Boris and Sergey, Goblin Market, One-Man Apocalypse Now, Mimi’s Suitcase, No Miracles Here, The City, BlackCatfishMusketeer

Thursday 31st August: And that’s all folks. It’s the end of my coverage for yet another fringe, and with it all coverage of festivals for 2017. Coverage of festival fringes will resume in April 2018 when I look ahead to Brighton Fringe, or if you can’t wait for that, the Vault Festival some time between February and March.

I’m not quite done on the Fringepig fallout, because there have still been developments since I last wrote about this, but I’m getting too  bored of this to sum this all up right at this moment. But I will. Oh yes.

So attention now turns back to local theatre, especially local grass-roots theatre, which makes it very good timing for the new Alphabetti Theatre to open its doors tomorrow. And my first recommendation there is Overdue which I first saw at a scratch night last year and looked very promising. It runs on the 5th-16th September. But for the majority of my readership who aren’t based in the north-east, goodbye see you at the next festival.

Wednesday 30th August: Before we go, there’s news on the ticket sales at the Edinburgh Fringe. The headline figure is an increase of 9% from 2016. As always, the most important number to compare this to is the growth in registrations, which was up 3.9%. Ticket sale growth higher than registration growth, the conventional wisdom suggests, will help drive further growth next year, as revenue per act increases, at least in theory. Richard Stamp of Fringeguru reports that this works out as an increase from 62.8 tickets per performance to 64.4 tickets per performance (subject to some caveats for how this was calculated.)

Of course, the mean average doesn’t tell the whole story. 64.4 is more than the capacity of most fringe spaces – this figure is only possible because of some huge spaces with hundreds of seats. So where are the extra sales going? That we don’t know. It is possible that it’s a top-heavy increase where the sole beneficiaries of the increases and the biggest acts in the biggest venues – if that was the case, the 9% increase would be useless to most acts thinking of coming. Or it could be a bottom-heavy increase. Without knowing more information about sales, we don’t know. Go on Edfringe. Give us some more numbers to crunch. You know you want to.

Whatever the details, however, it’s a considerably better year from Edinburgh Fringe than that last one. In 2016, it just about became a possibility that Brighton might catch up if the trends that year continues. This year, however, it now looks like Edinburgh’s place at the top of the pile is safe indefinitely.

Tuesday 29th August: Enough waiting. Let’s get to it. I have listed everything I’ve seen. It was a list with a high standard so I’ve had to get choosy, but here it is:

Pick of the Fringe:

BlackCatfishMusketeer
No Miracles Here
Mimi’s Suitcase
The Big Bite-Size Breakfast Show
Izzy’s Manifestoes
Replay
Cockroached
The Friday Night Effect
Richard Carpenter is Close to You
(Call Mr. Robeson)

Honourable Mention:

One-Man Apocalypse Now
Goblin Market
Boris and Sergey
You, Me and Everything Else
Love+
Victim
La Vie Dans Une Marionette
The House
Police Cops in Space
The Wedding Reception
(Mars Actually)
(The Dark Room)
(Gratiano)
(The Empress and Me)

Plays marked in brackets are plays I’ve seen in the year before the Edinburgh Fringe, including Brighton and Buxton Fringes and the Vault Festival – this is because I don’t have time to see plays again, so this means plays I’ve seen before get a fair chance against those seen at Edinburgh for the first time.

Wow, I think this is the toughest list to pick winners ever. Keep up the good work.