Odds and sods: January 2024

Right, it was really embarassing how late the last one was, so I’m going to get a move on with this. This time, it’s one of the slowest news months around, so I should be able to do this quickly.

Stuff that happened in January

Unfortunately, most of the news I have is bad news. There is some news coming from Edinburgh that might be better, but that news has only just broken, so I’m going to leave that till the next odds and sods when we might know more about how this went.

Apart from that, here’s what’s been happening, and it’s not great.

Caravanserai not come to Brighton

This isn’t actually January news as such. Nothing has been announced in public yet. I’ve known about this unofficially for some time – however, it is also possible to work this out from publicly accessible information. So anyone who has an active event on Eventotron will notice one notable omission: Caravanserai is not available as a venue. Caravanserai was also not mentioned at the registration launch in spite of it getting lots of coverage last year. It therefore seem very likely that the rumour mill is correct and Caravanserai is not coming to Brighton Fringe 2024.

Oh dear, what went wrong there? Caravanserai was supposed to be the answer to Brighton Fringe’s cash flow worries. We are increasingly moving to a situation where the major fringe venues make most of their money not from performances but from ancilliary income on the bars and food outlets. This is why I didn’t join in the complaints of food/drink prices there – I’d rather they made the money from something you didn’t have to buy from something that you did. Anyway, they did a lot of business and it seemed that it’s money-making objective was working. But it seems I spoke too soon. Even if you have excellent income, you can still make a loss if you lose control of expenses. That was part of the reason for The Warren’s downfall, it’s happened elsewhere, and now it seems it’s happened here. Ouch.

The most obvious effect for fringe performances is that they won’t have Caravanserai to flyer at. Luckily, Brighton City Council has been persuaded to relax rules on city centre flyering, so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue as long as you’re organised (although I have my doubts on the value of flyering outside of fringe venues). As of yet, it’s not clear what’s happening to Fringe City. Hopefully this could move back to New Road or Jubilee Street, but I’d be a lot happier if this was confirmed as sorted. What I’m concerned about more is money. Was the income from Caravanserai needed or not? Because if it is, we’re going to have to find a different plan very quickly. Last year there was grumblings that Caravanserai was going to take over Brighton Fringe. I hope I’m wrong, but that could turn out to be the least of the problems.

Rotunda not coming to Buxton

The other venue news, however, is something I find a more bitter disappointment. Until now, Buxton Fringe has been largely spared the post-pandemic struggles that has plagued the two bigger fringes. The year, however, we’ve lost the second biggest venue. Whilst The Rotunda is going from strength to strength to Brighton Fringe, it won’t be at Buxton at all. And I do believe Buxton Fringe is going to be poorer for it.

I should declare an interest at this point: I am doing a co-production with The Rotunda that was going to be Brighton and Buxton; it’s just Brighton. So I more reasons than most to be displeased with this. I also know a more blow-by-blow account which isn’t out in the public. What I think I can safely say, which doesn’t give away anything that’s not already public knowledge, is that lately High Peak Borough Council has been getting difficult. The warning sign was last year when The Rotunda could only do part of Buxton Fringe due the Council wanting the land for Buxton Carnival in the first weekend. Anyone who’s been to Buxton knows that the carnival is a vast event that takes up the whole town, and they absolutely did not need that particular bit of Pavilion Gardens to function. Now it seems they’ve got more unhelpful to the point where it’s no longer worthwhile.

If it really is the case, that’s insane. The fringe, festival and carnival are the three biggest events in Buxton, and there was no need to pit the fringe and carnival against each for the same space. Okay, Buxton Fringe has a lot of small venues that can bandy together if the worst comes to the worst (Brighton Fringe made it through a crisis in 2022 for a similar reason), but the combination of Underground Venues, Opera House and Rotunda has been a great focal point for the festival month – and yet High Peak Borough Council does not seem to value this. The obvious defence? Local authorities are currently strapped for cash – but you’re not going to make any extra money by overcharging on ground rents and end up with no takers.

Unfortunately, there was a development halfway through writing this that is possibly going to make a bad situation worse. So I’ll stop writing here and see where we are in a month’s time. In the meantime, I really have to wonder what the Council is expecting to achieve. So far, everybody is losing.

The Ticketsource censorship row

The last thing is an obscure footnote, but as this is an anti-censorship blog and this has become a censorship issue is needs addressing. The story here was that a couple of plays called Sauna Boy and Self Tape went on sale with Ticketsource, only for them to be vetoed by Stripe, the payment processing service that Ticketsource uses. Stripe has a lot of terms and conditions in what its service can’t be used for, such as illegal drugs and counterfeit goods, but it also has one of the stricter policies around adult content, including no nudity. And, as you might have guessed, plays with the names of “Sauna Boy” and “Self Tape” contain that sort of thing.

I do actually have some sympathy with the situation Stripe was in. Online payment processors is one of the latests battle lines in the endless culture wars. A frequent excuse used is “You’re not being censored, it’s your just your venue/producer/agent/webhost/crowdfunder/etc. deciding not to do business with you.” One option open to controversial acts is to just find their own venue/producer/etc. But it’s near-impossible to do business without a third-party payment processor, hence some more censorious types lean on payment processors. But regardless, it’s difficult to run a payment processor on an “anything goes” basis. You do not want your brand to be overrun by bootleggers or extremists using your facility as their go-to for business. A “anything goes” basis for adult content isn’t much better. No-one wants their business to be dominated by borderline illegal porn. Rules have to be drawn up, and something well-intentioned rules have have nonsensical outcomes.

However, I’m putting 80% of the blame with Ticketsource here. They really should have seen this one coming. We can debate the ethics of payment processor terms and conditions all we like, but Ticketsource could at least have read them. Of course a clause reading “pornography and other mature audience content (including literature, imagery and other media) depicting nudity or explicit sexual acts” was going to be an issue sooner or later. We’ve come to expect ticket retailers to have a largely hands-off approach when it comes to policing adult content, and the moment it was clear that Ticketsource could not do its job under Stripe’s terms and conditions they should have recognised there was a problem. The choices were reneogitate/clarify the terms and conditions, switch to another payment processor with better terms and conditions, or make it clear to customers when you can and can’t deliver.

Fortunately, this particular row has been resolved with some common sense. It’s pretty clear that these plays weren’t going to bring Stripe into disrepute or cause Stripe to be overrun by porn-selling accounts. Hopefully ticket sites and payment processors will now talk to each other a bit more and make something like this doesn’t happen again. But we maybe need to be a bit more wary about the power of payment processors in the future. Could they really close ranks and censor voices they don’t want to be heard. I hope not, and it does sound a bit far fetched – but it’s not the thing you want to be wrong about.

And finally …

I don’t normally write about what I’m up to here. As I’ve said repeatedly, I have my own website for that. Except that I stopped getting round to keeping it up to date in 2018. Now that I’ve got a lot of projects on the go, I really need to have somewhere to put all of this. But setting up a better website required my undivided attention and I never got round to it.

But as luck would have it, in my day job I’ve suddenly been tasked with looking after a WordPress site, and as I’m the only person who knows how to do WordPress (thanks to this site), I’ve largely been able to take the lead on this. And I spent two days in preparation setting up a new site from scratch under to pretence of training. As a result I now have a new playwriting site. Turns out I can do it in two days id I can really put my mind to it.

It’s not quite finished, and I need to get some more stuff over before it’s ready to launch properly, but in the meantime you’re welcome to take a look.

Things I wrote in January …

I won’t list what I wrote in December because that was already in my last Odds and Sods. A quick run-down on January:

Odds and sods: November 2023 (and a bit of December): The last article that was an embarassing five weeks late. Hence my hurry to get this one out on time.

Announcement: change of priority for Edinburgh Fringe reviewing: From now on, I’m prioritising things at Edinburgh Fringe that have started off at the smaller fringes. This is in response to the issue of rising expense of Edinburgh, and this post explains why.

No, self-production is not exploitation: A long read from me. It increasingly feels like people who create theatre off their own backs are being sidelined as not doing it the proper way. This is my case why it is valid, and why we should trust the people doing this to decide for themselves whether to do it.

What’s worth watching: winter/spring 2024: My look at what’s coming up monthly in the months ahead that I recommend.

As is often the case, I didn’t see any theatre over most of January. Reviews will be resuming shortly – along with something I’ve quite excited to share with you. Bye for now.