Changing Rooms - Assembly Rooms

Published Friday 22 July 2005 at 12:55 by Mark Shenton

William Burdett-Coutts first came across Edinburgh’s now-legendary Assembly Rooms by accident as a 25-year-old producer. A quarter of a century on, it is thriving, and he tells Mark Shenton how he is now adding a fourth venue to the portfolio that he runs each summer

It is an amazing fact that the Assembly Rooms is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year as one of the pre-eminent venues of the annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe, not so much because it has survived so long in the fast-changing world of the biggest arts festival in the world but because it is now so much a part of the fabric of what we know of as this festival that it is impossible to think of the place without it.

It seems, like the grand old building that it is housed in, to have been here forever. And it has set a benchmark of standards and aspiration - both in the professionalism of its programming and the conversion of its myriad spaces into perfectly formed theatrical venues - that make it less like the fringe than a fully-fledged professional theatre that happens to lie dormant for 48 weeks a year, before springing into life for only four weeks.

I have sometimes felt, standing in the middle of the grand entrance hall as crowds queue for one of the five rooms and push past to the various bars, that it is like being in a giant theatrical airport terminal, with departures to variously enticing destinations taking off while other shows are preparing to come into land in some kind of intricate holding pattern over George Street. The air traffic controller keeping an eager eye over these proceedings is the affable and indefatigable William Burdett-Coutts, who discovered it quite by accident as a 25-year-old producer and has never left since.

“I was trying to direct plays at the fringe,” he tells me, “and I was given a number of venues to look at, one of which was the Assembly Rooms. I went around to look at the Wildman Room, thinking I’d use just that but I was offered the whole building by the director of recreation for the council, so we came to an arrangement and I set about making plans.”

That was at the end of February in 1981. By August, the Assembly Rooms was reborn as a fringe venue. “We had full seating and lighting systems but it was fairly rudimentary otherwise - we ran it with 14 people, whereas now I employ about 140.” Burdett-Coutts was already working in the theatre. His day job then was working as the production manager for a touring show from Canada that was playing at the Old Vic, and he tells me, “I booked shows into the Assembly Rooms from a backstage office.”

He continues: “All I did was pick up the model of how other venues were being run and extend it to the Assembly Rooms, where we had five venues under the one roof then.” A sixth, the Drawing Room, has since been added in what used to be the late night performers’ bar. In the process, it became the fringe’s first megavenue - a formula subsequently copied (and amplified) by the Pleasance and Gilded Balloon in particular.

“The fringe has changed enormously over the time we’ve been here. It was a fairly small event then by comparison to what it is now. In our first year we played to about 50,000 people. Last year, we played to 180,000. It was said that the fringe was the bit behind the train that was the international festival. That isn’t the case any more. The fringe has taken over much of the media interest and in terms of numbers, it is extraordinary what it does.”

The Assembly Rooms has also been instrumental in upping the festival’s professional content. “A lot of the fringe used to be amateur work, by schools, universities and so on. That’s still there, but now a large degree is professional. We’ve always seen ourselves as the mid-ground between the international festival and the amateur fringe.”

Unlike other fringe venues, which are purely for hire to anyone who can pay the rent, the Assembly exercises a rigorous artistic policy, albeit one sometimes driven by commercial considerations. “There’s a balancing act for us between commercial work and doing interesting work. We work incredibly hard to be decisive about what’s good and what isn’t, and how good we are at making those choices determines whether we’re good or not. It’s a very difficult exercise to balance up the range of work out there and find the best in a very competitive environment. The thing that’s most exciting about the fringe is that it’s always breaking boundaries.”

This year, the youthful independent producer Louise Chantal has been charged with producing the theatre programme, while Rebecca Austin is responsible for the comedy content and Burdett-Coutts says: “my brief to them was to go and find me the best shows.”

This year their job is even bigger than usual. In addition to the Assembly Rooms, Assembly Theatre is also producing the season at the St George’s West Church at the end of Princes Street, as it has done since 2003. It is also adding the Queen’s Hall on Clerk Street and the Assembly Hall - the venue for the annual General Assembly of the Church of Scotland that saw temporary service as the home of the Scottish Parliament from 1999 to 2004 - to its portfolio.

“Both of them happened almost by accident. At the end of the last festival, the fringe director Paul Gudgin rang me up and said [the Assembly Hall] was available. I wasn’t too keen. My recollection of it from when it had been used by the international festival in the past was of a very big and very uncomfortable space but actually when I went in I was bowled over. It’s an absolutely beautiful room and I fell in love with it, so I had to have a go.

“It seemed to be an obvious thing to do - and for another thing, I didn’t think we could see someone else running a building with Assembly in its name. But also, the way the fringe is evolving, there is a need for big spaces, so it’s the logical thing to try.” It will be the largest fringe venue, with a seating capacity of 790.

As for the Queen’s Hall, which is used by day as a concert venue for the international festival, Burdett-Coutts was asked to look at programming it for the evenings. “It fits in with the rest of our venues well. They’re all classical buildings that we’re using in a different context. Instead of working in windy church halls, we’ve always taken on old buildings and made them run to the highest standards.”

The risks are high and don’t always pay off. “There’s a theory that you go bust every seven years, and it’s happened a number of times in our history. We’re a purely commercial operation, and the entire basis we operate on is that it’s a shared risk with the companies that come to us. We each take a risk and if it doesn’t add up, we both end up in trouble. So we rely on producing an exciting programme that the punters keep coming to. And thankfully, over the years, there have been a lot of them.”

But now that Burdett-Coutts has been at it for 25 years, can he ever see himself giving it up? “I enjoy what I’m doing. I’ve just turned 50 so I’ve got a good many years left in me, I hope. The pleasure of this is working across such a wide range of shows - it’s a great way of life.”