"I remember going over South Bridge and thinking what the **** am I getting into"
Fringe veterans on diversity, the decline of flyers and why comedians still flock to Edinburgh
In the darkness of a cellar in Edinburgh’s ancient Old Town, the spotlight picks out a figure in a white night dress. Eleanor Morton makes a haunting sight. Her audience, meantime, may scream with laughter or with fright as she mixes her stand-up comedy with spooky, ghost-laden theatrics.
Brought up in Cramond, she knows the city well. She runs the audience through a little of the Capital’s ghoulish past. “Edinburgh is ghost central,” she says, describing the spooky buildings, the graverobbers, the streets hidden underground … “all those empty houses, but are they haunted or are they just AirBnbs at £400 a night plus cleaning?”
Eleanor’s performed at the Fringe for many of the past 14 years now – even just in her early 30s she’s hit the veteran stage. She first performed at the age of 18. Before that, she experienced very little of the Fringe: “You didn’t go into town in August- it was too busy and too stressful.” But as a young performer she discovered a rich community at the festival, “the camaraderie was really nice… you’d meet people where you’re like they’re really interested in the same thing I am, even though we’re all different ages and genders and backgrounds.”
She may be a hometown girl, but she’s also now very much a part of the community of artists who perform and has seen much change over the years.
Another member of that community, Sid Singh, was performing at comedy open mics in New York City in 2013, when he was invited as a last-minute support act for a friend’s Fringe show. Although he couldn’t really afford it, he decided to go, thinking it would be his only chance to go to Scotland: “I remember getting the train up from London, arriving at Waverly with a rolling suitcase, and ending up getting lost and going over South Bridge, and seeing that mess of people and thinking what the fuck am I getting myself into.“Eleven years later he still makes an annual appearance at the comedy festival.
The Fringe has exploded in size. By ticket sales it is the third largest event in the world, after the World Cup and the Olympic Games. It has also become hugely more expensive, with rising ticket prices for punters and accommodation and production costly for performers, causing many of us to believe it’s in danger of becoming a corporate monster. But beneath the surface, what has, and hasn’t, changed about Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival over the past decade or so?
Costs of Performing
The high cost of accommodation is a theme most years at the Festival and Fringe, when the laws of supply and demand send the costs of hotels, B&Bs, hostels, student accommodation and self-catering soaring. This year that has apparently been further exacerbated by scarcity of self-catering accommodation following the introduction of Edinburgh’s self-catering licensing scheme.
For performers it’s no laughing matter. It is now widely accepted among comedians that few make a profit at the Fringe; ticket revenue in a festival of over 3000 shows is unlikely to cover the cost of accommodation for a month, on top of venue fees and advertising. While Singh maintains this rise has been less severe for older performers like himself who have been able to rely on existing relationships to find accommodation at a more reasonable rate, many other artists have spoken out on the issue.
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