How I came to love the Fringe

The first time I took a show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed first year with naïve ideas of an artistic Mecca, where thespians would swarm the streets performing endlessly provocative, important and impeccable pieces of theatre. I thought I’d spend my days casually bumping into the most respected and successful in the business (and gratefully accepting their many offers of work experience, internships and professional contacts), ambling around glorious architecture and ushering Lyn Gardner into her reserved seat at our sell-out show. Now, having just returned from my most recent trip to the festival, I can safely confirm once again that this is, of course, total rubbish.
The reality of the Fringe is far less akin to my innocent, Disney-fied dream and much more like the business of theatre itself – impossibly hard work, competitive, unpredictable, hard work, overwhelming, and did I mention hard work? The days are long and the nights are longer (particularly if you happen to be playing the Fringe favourite game ‘How many people can we fit into a flat designed for no more than three?’ Our record was sixteen). It’s mostly raining, always cold, and usually windy enough to keep business booming for the man on the Royal Mile who sells stamp-sized kites. This makes flyering (the bane of every performer’s life) difficult at the best of times, and downright miserable at the worst. Unfortunately it is also absolutely essential to selling a show, since the only thing worse than flyering is the feeling of looking out into an audience and seeing more empty chairs than expectant faces. So rather than enjoying the local sights and attractions, instead your time is spent roaming the Mile braving the various elemental onslaughts and trying to make eye contact with total strangers long enough to push a soggy flyer into their hand and tell them (just like everyone else flyering near you) to come and see your one-of-a-kind, not-to-be-missed show. This would, perhaps, be manageable if you were eating, sleeping and drinking healthily enough to sustain yourself through these long tortuous sessions on the Royal Mile, but the sad fact is that the Fringe is quite terrifyingly expensive. Food and shelter for a whole month don’t come cheaply (hence throwing the idea of a balanced diet out the window and the human sardine tin sleeping situations that usually arise), and once you factor in the fact that you’ll probably want to go and see some of the weird and wonderful shows on offer, you’re looking at a small fortune. Which finally brings me to the Fringe productions themselves: unlike the expectation of my significantly younger and inexperienced self, they are not all innovative, thought-provoking and important – they are often, in fact, terrible, and the only thought they provoke is a loud inward lament at having parted with somewhere between £8 and £12 for the experience.
So sleeping on floors, starvation, bankruptcy, weather that wouldn’t be out of place in ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ and productions that leave you wishing you’d saved your money for a hot meal instead – then why did I go back after my first trip? Why on earth do we do it to ourselves?
Because it’s also just completely ruddy marvellous. The people you’ll meet, although not the famous and successful titans of my innocent imagination, are like-minded and often extraordinary, and despite a vast number of less-than-mediocre productions, there will always be some that are staggeringly good. The gratification of finding these diamonds in the rough before the rest of the world has the chance feels like accidentally finding the final Harry Potter manuscript before it was published – a mad clash between protecting the secret and the urge to tell everyone you’ve ever met – and is secondary only to the gratification of putting on a successful show yourself. I speak from happy experience here as although we didn’t get Lyn through the doors we did have some wonderful reviews and some even more wonderful audiences, and there’s nothing quite like it, particularly when those wonderful people run up to you on the Mile the next day and tell you how much they loved it – which could happen nowhere else. The financial fear melts away into an oasis of satisfied delight, and glowing reviews become more sustaining than a three course meal.
Creating something you’re proud of and putting it on a national (and international) platform is every theatre-maker’s dream, and the Edinburgh Fringe is the ideal place to do it. There are precious few places left where you’ll find such a concentration of mad, enthusiastic and passionate people all working to create something that has artistic value and exists simply to be experienced, and if you have the opportunity to become one of them then jump in head first. Run into the welcoming arms of any of the theatre societies at Warwick and get involved. I guarantee that like me, even if you’re sitting in a puddle outside the Fringe Box Office cursing their extortionate booking fee and with only a Tesco value sandwich for dinner, you won’t regret it for a second.