The Stage

Protests rise against Edinburgh Fringe Office’s venue ratings

Published Wednesday 29 December 2004 at 13:45 by Jeremy Austin

Edinburgh Festival Fringe venue operators including the Pleasance and Hill Street theatres have joined in vehement opposition to plans by the Fringe Office to publish a series of ratings for services offered by their theatres to visiting companies.

Following interviews with performers at the 2004 event, the list rates the venues on subjects such as technical support, marketing, PR and administrative service. These were to be printed in the Spaces book, which lists venues for hire. In response to the opposition, the Fringe office will now only print them on the password protected section of its website this year.

Even so, many operators are claiming it is unfair to base a score on only one year’s research, that the figures are meaningless and do nothing to help, only hinder, the relationship between operators and producers. Some even claim that the survey “could be the final nail in the coffin not only for small venues but for the festival itself”.

Anthony Alderson, who will take over the running of the Pleasance venues in London and Edinburgh from founder Christopher Richardson after this year’s event, said the venue will not object to having its ratings published if those of other venues are.

However, he added: “The important issue is why does the Fringe think it is necessary and what assistance is this really going to give the visiting acts, because I think it is confusing.”

The issue of rating venues has been discussed for more than a year. By far the biggest expense for producers is venue hire and it is felt by all concerned that everything must be done to protect them from unscrupulous venue operators and to give them some indication of what their money will buy. What has shocked operators is the speed at which events have occurred.

One venue operator has written to Fringe director Paul Gudgin and sent copies to other operators, writing: “Publishing your survey in this form could be damaging to everybody, with disastrous consequences… The survey done by the Fringe Society could be the final nail in the coffin not only for small venues but for the festival itself.

“With the development of the Manchester Festival and Fringe and the goal of other European cities to build their own variation of international festivals, the Edinburgh Fringe and the city with its image of greed, where everybody tries to make quick buck, will slowly but surely be diminished on the international stage and finish the notion of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as the best and biggest festival on earth.”

Gudgin has defended the move, claiming that something has to be done to protect the visiting companies, although he admits the Fringe Society is in an invidious position, caught between serving the venues and serving the performers.

He said: “The reasons for doing it are reasonably obvious because people spend on a venue what they spend on a car. It is a lot of money and at the moment, particularly new people to the Fringe, all they have to go on are the brief descriptions about the venue hire. So we think, in some ways, it is vital we let performers talk to performers about their venues.”