Odds and sods: February 2024

Blimey. It’s a news-heavy month this Feburary. Better get right to it because I run out of March to write this up in.

Stuff that happened in February

Oh, my aching hands. Here’s what you’ve kept me busy writing up:

More woes at Brighton Fringe

It turns out I wasn’t connected to all the Brighton Fringe rumour mills. I’d known for some time Caravanserai wasn’t coming back, probably because Brighton Fringe couldn’t run a venue without letting costs go out of control. Now it’s gone public that Spiegeltent and Sweet aren’t being part of Brighton Fringe either. They are still running at the same time in May and June, but they are not registering with Brighton Fringe. (I admit, I did hear rumours of Spiegeltent doing this, but I’ve heard things like this touted so many times I didn’t pay much attention. I’d assumed that with Caravanserai being the focus of so many grievances, the main source of aggro was now resolved. But apparently not.)

This means that Brighton Fringe 2024 is going to be very messy. At close of registrations for programme launch, we have 556 Brighton Fringe registrations. That’s low. This could be an artificially low number, because with no paper programme to meet a deadline for, it’s not such a big deal to register late, but it would have to a big last-moment surge to turn things round. At the time of writing, Spiegeltent have launched their own not-Fringe programme, but I haven’t had time to analyse this yet. I will be analysing this a lot more as Brighton Fringe coverage ramps up, because the implications are too complex to go ito here.

A lot of this is going to ride on how the fringe media chooses to cover a fragmented Brighton Fringe. Will Sweet and Spiegeltent still get the coverage, or will they be sidelined? For my part, my own decision is that, for now, I will treat Spiegeltent and Sweet the same way as if they’d been part of Brighton Fringe proper (a bit like I did with Warren Outdoors in 2020, albeit under different circumstances). However, after this, I expect all parties to make reasonable efforts to resolve their differences. I’m not interested in blaming the other side as an excuse to not make a reason effort yourself – I want to know what you are doing. But we can start having that debate in July onwards. For now, I expect a truce. Get through this, don’t get in each other’s way, and any blame games can wait.

More woes at Buxton Fringe

And Buxton Fringe is hitting venue problems too. Last month I reported that the Rotunda wasn’t coming this year, apparently due High Peak Council playing silly buggers. Now it’s not clear if Underground Venues will be coming either. Nothing to do with High Peak Council this time – it’s due to The Old Clubhouse doing refurbishment. Yeah, I know, businesses don’t revolve small fringes, you’ve got to do refurbishment some time – but for this to have coincided with not getting the Rotunda, it could not have been worse timing. Underground Venues still sound hopeful they can find a way of going ahead in 2024 with an alternative space, but they’d better get a move on if this is going to happen.

Amazingly, however, registration numbers so far haven’t been affected too badly. At close of early bird registrations in February, there was close to 100 registrations, which is only slightly behind numbers in a typical year. (Underground venues doesn’t register most of its programme until March, but there’s normally a good amount of Rotunda programme announced by now.) Once again, the small venues have come to the rescue. Buxton Fringe has dozens of spaces for hire which do a perfectly good job provided you can manage without a sound and lighting rig – which most acts can if they’re versatile enough – at it would appear they’ve taken the overspill from acts determined to make Buxton Fringe work.

I hope other fringes take lessons from this. It doesn’t pay to look down on non-managed venues, nor does it pay to look down on the acts who make use of them – you never know when you lead venue hits problems and you never know when this informal network is going to stand between you and disaster. It came to the rescue of Brighton Fringe in 2022 when The Warren imploded, and who knows, one day it might save Edinburgh Fringe too. Other fringes don’t have this safety net. Pay heed everybody: support and include your small venues – you may regret it later if you don’t.

Edinburgh Fringe’s Musselburgh “participant hub”

Edinburgh Fringe have had their first batch of tickets: 276 shows. This compares to 280 in 2022 and 190 in 2023. Don’t read too much into these – they are very early numbers and there’s too many unknown variable to come to reliable conclusions of a trend. The big question, though, is what solutions, if any, are coming for the impending accommodation crisis.

The Festival Fringe Society’s solution is Queen Mary University. They say they have secured “hundreds” of rooms normally used as University accommodation. I quite like this idea. It’s away from central Edinburgh and so persumably escapes the worst of the demand and high prices that accompany it (prices from £40 pppn is certainly good for Edinburgh), but with a pretty good rail connection it’s the next best thing to walking distance accommodation. They seem to be making an effort to make this a proper participant hub and not just beds, including, their words: “onsite café, free outdoor yoga classes, rehearsal space, printing and wifi facilities”. Hopefully this addresses the ongoing worries over getting to and from accommodation safely.

One small snag: last train to Musselburgh leaves 11:14 p.m. Not everybody finishes that early – hope this is addressed somehow. The big question though: it is enough? This is for “hundreds” of fringe participants. But there aren’t hundreds of participants, there’s thousands. I suspect this will only be a drop in the ocean, and one thing to keep an eye out for is how quickly these are booked up. But – unlike a lot of solutions being touted – this does actually make progress on the root problem of supply and demand. My guess is that it’s going to take a lot more than this to solve the problem, but in conjunction with other reforms we might get somewhere.

The Paul Currie incident

Okay, let’s get onto this one. It’s a censorship issue. It also would have been an institutional racism issue had Soho Theatre not acted. Depending on which version of events you’ve heard, comedian Paul Currie has either been cancelled for expressing support for Palestine or made his event into a full-blown Nazi rally. The first version is a disingenuous version; the second version might have some truth but there’s not enough (public) evidence to prove that. Either way, Soho Theatre who hosted him responded by telling Paul Currie he wasn’t coming back. I have now gone through the claims and counter-claims. It was a horrible situation for the Soho Theatre to be in – but they really had no option but to part ways.

It is important that any responses to complaints of racism are investigated properly, even if an instant response would be better publicity – this means both a fair hearing for the complaint, and a fair chance for the accused to respond. In the case of antisemitism, this is further complicated by dogwhistles. This applies to all forms of racism, but anti-Jew haters has got very good at saying they weren’t referring to Jews when they obviously were. One popular tactic at the moment is to use Israel as a proxy for Jews – I find a good rule of thumb it to try substituting “Israel” or “Zionists” for “Jews”, and if it sounds like a deranged antisemitic conspiracy theory, they probably meant Jews. However, some Jews over-react and assume all criticism of Israel is coded attacks on Jews. Without knowing what was said at the end of the set, I am reserving judgement on whether it was like a antisemitic rally as some people claim.

But that is no excuse for actively picking a fight with members of your audience. Comedians are allowed opinions, and I know what happens when audiences are disruptive. I would have been more forgiving if – as I originally assumed – this was a heated exchange that got out of hand. It was not. He singled out an audience member for failing to show support for a cause he believed in, and whipped up the audience into abuse against him. (Paul Currie has not confirmed this is what happened, but he has made no attempt to deny this sequence of events in subsequent responses*.) In which case, it doesn’t matter what the cause was. What if instead a comedian whipped up a mob into a frenzy against a Russian audience member who showed insufficient support for Ukraine? That would still be unacceptable – and still perfectly reasonable to interpret as racial harassment. So sorry, but Soho Theatre’s response was justified, and Paul Currie only has himself to blame for this. There is a very easy way to avoid to avoid this happening to you: don’t be a twat with a microphone.

*: Also, the excuse of “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” is is just shit. Somebody who quite possibly knows people who were raped, tortured or murdered a few months ago can hardly be considered “comfortable”.

The end of SSD Concerts

This isn’t actually new news: it dates back to November. The only reason I stumbled across this is that for a few months I’d been getting a lot on unexplained traffic to my article on SSD Concerts back in 2021. You can read all about the saga if you like, but the short version is that the Managing Director of Newcastle’s biggest music promoter had allegations of sexual harassment against him. They may or may not have been accurate, but the way he responded to this did a fine job of convincing everyone he was guilty as hell. This culminated in 80%+ of acts pulling out of their headline event Hit the North. I said at the time “I don’t see how they can survive this.”

Well, they held off the inevitable for just over two years. Events scheduled the following year were quietly cancelled, for reasons totally unrelated to what happened last year. “Yeah, right” said everybody. Then they moved out of the music scene and just ran a pop-up bar. Let’s just say I have no reason to believe their reputation improved. But now, it really is over. HMRC placed the company in liquidation over unpaid tax bills.

Is there any wriggle room? Probably not. It’s SSD Events and Marketing that he been wound up, and not the parent company, but that’s not filed accounts since 2021 and that’s lined up to be struck off too. Perhaps Steve Davis might choose to walk away and set up a new company; that has sometimes worked before, but I can’t imagine with working once HMRC have you in their crosshairs. I suppose there’s the option of setting up abroad where no-one knows you, and if that means someone else has to put up with this, that won’t be a good thing. But it really does look like the final end of SSD Concerts in the UK at least. And, quite frankly, I don’t think anyone’s going to miss them.

The return of scratch nights

Right, that’s enough depressing new. Let’s go on to something positive. And the good news from the north-east is that we seem to have a return of scratch nights. In the same week, we have not one but two. I am using the term “scratch nights” loosely here – what’s key is that it’s lots of little pieces from various creatives aimed at letting them try out work rather than a finished product aimed at a big audience. Not that they needed to worry about audience numbers – they both had full houses, and in one case actually moved from their original venue in Byker to Live Theatre and still filled the house.

The two events are Peachplant Theatre’s Greenhouse and Blowin’ A Hooley’s Haddaway and Write. They work slightly differently: Peachplant’s event was an invited list of writers and actors (plus musicians and comedians) over two hours; Blowin’ A Hooley was a more structured format of an open call-out for scripts. Other formats could also have been done, and they all have advantages and disadvantages. But this really is a case of the more, the merrier. I firmly believe we should be heading towards the idea that everyone who knows what they’re doing should get their moment on stage, and whilst none of these events can achieve this single-handedly, the more we have (preferably with a variety of methods to choose who gets picked), the better. The challenge now? Events like these tend to go in a cycle of scratch nights everywhere to nowhere at all. Flushed with the success of these inaugural event, it would be tempting to plan more on the assumption that participation and patronage stays the same, but what you really need to do is plan against long-term demand after the initial enthusiasm has worn off. How do you achieve that? Your guess is as good as mine.

As per standing practice, I don’t routinely review plays in a scratch and/or WIP status. I tend to be pickier than most audience members and my default assumption is that most of them want enthusiasm and encouragement more – if anybody expressly asks me for thoughts I will be feedback that way. What I would say as a general observation is that all the plays were themed on contemporary north-east life. Nothing wrong with this theme, but when all the plays do the same thing it becomes a lot harder to stand out from all the other plays. Honourable exception: Hannah Sowerby’s My Little Princess, where adding a small amount of something out of the ordinary – in an otherwise naturalistic setting – made the story a lot more memorable. My favourite playlet, however, was Arabella Arnott’s Direct Action, where the two laziest housemates in the world have somehow managed to kidnap a Tory MP in aid of a cause they haven’t work out yet – luckily, he can’t remember anything and assumes being tied was a sex game, so no harm done.

Good start for both – now the hard bit begins.

(Also: this is the first performance I’ve seen at The Exchange following the controversial change of management. Will cover that another time as I don’t want that to be a distraction to this.)

Hooky Productions gets an OffFest Award

And finally – and I will keep this quick because I’m suppose to limit this to six items and this is number seven – one bit of good news for Hooky Productions. I’ve only given Experiment Human limited coverage since I teched one of their early shows at Durham Fringe, but ever since they got the Brighton Fringe Award for Excellence it’s been something I couldn’t ignore. Well, they’ve done it again. The Brighton Experiment Human that came off the back of this run got an OffFest nomination. That, I understand, is something that you get automatically if you get enough 4/5-star reviews.

And now Rosa and Maya have gone and won. This is not the first time I’ve covered a Brighton Fringe play that went on to be the overall OffFest winner for the whole festival – last year Underdogs achieved the same. But The Foundry Group are one of the most established groups on the fringe circuit who were always going to be front runners. This one has come out of nowhere. Congratulations, and holy moly. An encore run was already planned, and as soon as I hear something announced, I’ll let you know where to catch it.

Whilst we’re on the subject, I don’t think I’ve yet mentioned Character Flaw. I reviewed this for Edinburgh Fringe and Phillipa Dawson got the same award that Hooky got the year before. I’ll mention this closer to Brighton Fringe, but for reasons too detailed to squeeze into one paragraph, this is work checking out. Come back when I do the Brighton Fringe preview.

Stuff I wrote in February:

Here’s what else I’ve been covering:

Odds and sods: January 2024: Makes me nostalgic now, for the slow new month when not a lot was happening that needed writing up.

Interview with Deborah McAndrew and Conrad Nelson on Claybody Theatre: Took ages to type this up, but really pleased with this one. I had an hour-long interview with the pair behind Stoke’s unexpected success story.

The Nutcracker: a tough nut cracked: Whilst I was in Stoke, I caught their Christmas production that runs into January. It’s a play with ballet in rather than a ballet – and that some up with something quite original.

Should we really be worried about AI in the arts?: I give my thoughts on the worries over AI taking over creatives’ jobs. There’s no chance AI is going to replace work that requires creativity – but there’s a worrying reason why that doesn’t keep us safe.

Finally. Can we make March a slow news month please?