The Stage

Beyond the Fringe - Edinburgh International Festival vs the Fringe

Published Friday 14 July 2006 at 16:50 by Mark Shenton

The Fringe may have long overtaken Edinburgh International Festival in terms of size but not necessarily prestige, says Mark Shenton

For 60 years now the Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, that was born in its shadow, have co-existed mostly in a kind of an uneasy truce.

Occasional outbreaks of hostility have been registered however that led a few years ago to the Fringe unilaterally moving its dates a week earlier than the International to finally drive a significant timetabling as well as psychological wedge between them and it continues to throw the festivals out of synch today.

But Brian McMaster - who is hanging up his hat as director of the International Festival after this year’s festival - is still determined to build bridges between them rather than put up a fence.

“Edinburgh as a whole is a unique experience,” he says. “Every part of it is a constituent part. The International Festival, the Fringe and the Film Festivals all play their part, along with the other festivals. People are always trying to drive wedges between us and the Fringe and make distinctions but I think that though the juxtaposition may not always be comfortable, this is a wonderful challenge for programming.”

In other words, McMaster looks at the gauntlet thrown down by the ever-expanding tentacles of the Fringe (this year stretching to 1,800 shows) and seizes it to do something different.

“The great thing about the Edinburgh International Festival is that it has always been one man’s taste. It’s not a committee job - it’s absolutely what you want it to be.”

It’s defiantly an autocracy, working as a cross between an old-fashioned home of arts patronage and a modern day artistic production house in its own right, based on the personal taste of the man who is charged with holding the purse strings.

The Fringe, by comparison, is absolutely anything anyone at all wants it to be. It’s a more democratic arena but it’s the democracy, not of taste but of capitalism - anyone who can pay their way can set up their stall here. Individual venues may have programming directors but their decisions on what to host will be based as much, if not more, on commercial hopes as artistic considerations. The Fringe therefore has no governing vision, with the Fringe Society merely acting as a clearing-house - and providing a centralised box office and publicity service - for all the companies who wish to appear there, to co-ordinate their activities through.

According to this year’s Fringe programme: “There were three defining features of the first Fringe - none of the performers were invited to take part, they used small and unconventional theatre spaces and were obliged to take all of their own financial risks, flourishing or failing according to public demand.” It then goes on to say that these remain the same three defining features of the 16th Fringe.

It’s a giant free-for-all - except of course that it’s far from free, whether for the participants (who spend and many lose a great deal of money putting on a show there) to the audiences. With ticket prices skyrocketing to £20 for fringe plays such as Midnight Cowboy at the Assembly Rooms this year, the price gap is even closing against the International Festival, which - with prices as low as £7 in the upper circle for their flagship productions of Troilus and Cressida and Three Sisters - is arguably more accessible now than the Fringe.

And while the financial risks have made many on the Fringe get safer and safer - hence the seeming dominance of crowd-pleasing comedy - the International Festival has, paradoxically, grown riskier.

McMaster says it is important to take risks in all sorts of areas, even if, as it has in the last few years, led to the running up of an operating deficit.

“That’s not a good thing but what’s good is to take the risks that sometimes can lead to it. I think I have taken those risks in every one of my 15 years.”

Balancing the books is obviously not his first priority. Creating artistic excitement is. And during his 15 years at the helm, McMaster has provided a regular British home for international directors like Peter Stein from Germany and Calixto Bieito from Spain (both returning this year), as well as choreographer Mark Morris, the effect of whose visits have reached far further than their Edinburgh runs.

“We had Peter Stein’s production of a Botho Strauss play, Die Ahnlichen, a few years ago, which is not an easy play but an interesting piece of intellectual theatre. Where else in Britain would you see something quite like that? So I thought we should do it.

“Very few people came but months later I was on a train with Stella Hall, who was then running the Warwick Arts Centre and she mentioned that she came from there specially to see it and found it just seminal.”

Last year, McMaster paired Stein with Scottish writer David Harrower for the premiere of Blackbird - a production that subsequently transferred to the West End.

Similarly, this year sees the return of Polish director Krystian Lupa, working with Boston’s American Repertory Theatre on a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, as a result of a production that Lupa did in Edinburgh in 1999 of The Sleepwalkers, a three-part epic saga from the First World War.

“It was not the most popular piece of theatre ever staged in Edinburgh but the assistant director of the American Repertory Theatre saw it in Edinburgh and phoned his bosses in Boston and told them they absolutely had to see this show and they flew over and did. Afterwards, in the pub next to the King’s Theatre, was born the idea of Lupa going over there to direct something and I said that if he did, I would have it.”

In this way, the International Festival doesn’t just build regular relationships with artists but also helps to forge them with others. And in the midst of the violent clamour of different voices seeking to be heard in Edinburgh, the International Festival continues to offer a reliably provocative respite and refuge for genuine originality to be pursued, free of the purely commercial demands of the box office.