Burdett-Coutts: Ticketing crisis is the biggest problem the fringe has ever faced

Published Tuesday 5 August 2008 at 15:30 by Thom Dibdin

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Assembly director William Burdett-Coutts, one of the leading lights of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, has branded the event’s ongoing ticketing chaos as the biggest crisis it has ever faced.

He has also claimed that the problems with the fringe’s central box office were created right at the top of the organisation.

Burdett-Coutts set up Assembly, the first of the fringe’s super-venues, 30 years ago and has been at the vanguard of moves to set up a separate comedy festival at the fringe this year.

He told The Stage: “In recent years the fringe has been behaving like it is in charge of us all and it is not, it is the central linking body that brings us all together. It is an association of interests, not one where the parent is talking to the child. They have been getting very dominant in recent years and that has very much come out of the egos of the directors that have run it.”

He explained that while he thought the crisis was the biggest ever to have confronted the annual arts festival, some good would come of it.

He added “There are always problems at the fringe and this is the biggest one the fringe has had to face. It was a really significant issue. For all the arguments of the Edinburgh Comedy Festival divorcing from the fringe, I think the one good thing that has come out of this whole crisis is it has brought us back together again.”

According to Burdett-Coutts, the crisis can be traced back to a meeting of five years ago when the decision was taken for all the large venues and the Fringe Society to find a new box office system.

While the venues thought they were working towards a unified system, they discovered just before last year’s festival that the then director of the fringe, Paul Gudgin, was attempting to set up a federated system of box office ticketing.

Burdett-Coutts explained: “The fringe developed their system separate to the system that we had all been developing. Essentially, the two were going their separate ways. And in some ways, the fringe and the comedy festival were going their separate ways because of the box office systems.”

Speaking to The Stage, current Fringe director Jon Morgan agreed that the big lesson of the crisis has been what he calls the ‘mutuality’ of the fringe - whereby if one part fails, be it the central organisation or a big venue, it affects the rest of the event.

While expressing relief that the worst of the ticketing crisis was over - although there are still some ongoing problems - he said that the decision to move to a new system had been taken before he became director.

He said: “I arrived six weeks before the festival to find that we were running a system that wasn’t supported [technically] because we hadn’t made the decision about what system to get. My first job, as soon as the festival had finished, was to start a process of deciding. There was no choice but to make a change, and to make it in one year.”

When the crisis came, it was because the fringe did not have a back-up if the new and untried system failed. When it did, Assembly and the other major venues had to step in and install their box office system.