Chapter 6 - International Theatre Festivals in the UK

Summary

This chapter focuses on the UK’s biggest and most influential festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (EFF), analyzing its benefits and risks. It considers some of the EFF’s advantages: the opportunities for artists to do a three-week run, to build relationships with other artists, and take part in an international hothouse for seeing work, learning, and developing. The chapter also considers the EFF’s pernicious effects: its unregulated labour conditions; environmental impact; lack of integration into Edinburgh’s year-round performance culture; economic and cultural exclusiveness; competitive individualization of success and failure; and pressures on mental health. It ends by proposing ways the EFF and its emulators could improve their social impact by investing in infrastructure, Edinburgh’s performance culture, and performance makers; actively supporting artists’ mental health; offering structural mentoring support; introducing regulations that protect workers; actively supporting more diverse makers, critics and audiences; and advocating for collaboration over competition. The chapter advocates for a vision of the fringe as, not a neo-liberal capitalist market, but a civic sphere.