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Legal Eagle

Scottish Law

Q: Compensation from venue

I arranged to put on a fringe show in Edinburgh this year but the host management lost control of the venue. Can I claim compensation and is my agreement covered by Scottish or English law?

A: The answer to both your questions is that it must depend on the terms of the contract. There are, as you will know, numerous venues and numerous host managements involved in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The largest and the most reputable 'managements' will have proper professionally prepared contract documents, detailing the rights and obligations of the parties.

For example, the standard contract of Assembly Theatre Limited, supposedly one of the biggest and best of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival managements, contains an obligation on the part of the management to provide the theatre or other venue at the specified dates and times subject only to being relieved of this obligation in the case of force majeure, such as; war, fire, accident or other circumstances beyond its control, and also contains a stipulation that the contract is to be governed by Scottish law. Accordingly any breach of such a contract would give rise to an action for damages under Scottish law.

However, not all host managements who operate at the Festival are as businesslike and straightforward as that, nor are they all necessarily of sufficient financial substance to be worth suing.

What you need to do is to look at your contract and see whether it contains an obligation to provide the venue for you and whether there are any applicable exclusion of liability clauses, and whether it specifies which law governs the contract.

Your contract does not need to have been in writing if there was a clear commitment about the venue, which will be a matter of evidence.

If there was no agreement on governing law then the governing law will very likely be the law of Scotland, being the place where the contract was to be performed, unless both parties were resident and entered into the contract elsewhere, in circumstances from which a court might infer an intention that the contract should be governed by their local law, which I would think unlikely in your case.

If you get as far as establishing a right to compensation the amount of this will be difficult to assess. You will need to show what, if any, financial loss you have sustained as a result of the breach of contract, bearing in mind your duty to mitigate that loss by seeking a replacement venue.

You may also find it difficult to persuade a court to award you damages for loss of opportunity to enhance your reputation in circumstances where your production might not have been as well received as you expected, assuming Scottish law to be the same as English law in this respect.

To sum up, it depends on who the host management is, and on the terms of its' contract with you. A reputable management would in such circumstances try to find you an alternative slot in another venue.

First published August 1995