Should Edinburgh festivals follow Glastonbury and take fallow years?

Any local who wandered through Edinburgh’s hauntingly calm city centre in 2020 must have asked the same question. What if Edinburgh could be like this without a global pandemic? Could the six festivals in August which see the capital jam-packed with literally thousands of shows, take a fallow year?

Could Edinburgh’s Festivals sink under their own weight?

EDINBURGH’S local authority has been under increasing pressure to address the threat of over-tourism. In the face of short-term tourist rentals outcompeting long-term renting residents, the council introduced stricter licensing on short-term lets last year. The local authority has also announced a £2-per-night tourist tax, which will be implemented mid-2026.

The problem is far from solved, however, with ever more Edinburgh residents avoiding the city centre in August, and a general feeling of frustration towards the Fringe and its counterparts.

Many local artists feel ambivalent towards the Fringe – stuck between having unprecedented access to a global stage but being crowded out by thousands of visiting artists.

Edinburgh-based musician Megan Black said “It’s hard for me because it’s so oversaturated … I like being part of it but I think as an artist working at my level and having to promote a lot of things it can be quite challenging.”

Eleanor Morton, an Edinburgh-born comedian and yearly Fringe performer, described the fine line that the largest of the six festivals treads as it eats up ever more squares, parks and buildings in the city: “I don’t think we need to grow the [Fringe] festival … there’s a capacity it can get to and it can’t get bigger and let’s not try to push it because i think it could sink under its own weight.”

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Fringe performers ‘need a reason to not go to Edinburgh’ SEVERAL Fringe performers responded surprisingly positively to the idea of a year without their annual Edinburgh appearances. To understand this, you have to know the love-hate relationship that many artists, local or visiting, have with the madness of the Fringe.

Sid Singh, a Californian comedian who has been performing at the Fringe since 2013, says it provides valuable training and publicity for comedians. But he also says that ticket revenues rarely outweigh the massive cost of bringing a show to Edinburgh in August.

Singh and fellow stand-up Blake AJ describe the Fringe as being a rite of passage, that comedians need to prove they are passionate enough to spend the money, time and energy the Fringe demands.

Morton agrees, and goes as far as to say that performers would jump at the excuse to miss a Fringe: “Comedians need a reason to not go to Edinburgh, because sometimes we’ll just do it until a pandemic stops us … I’ve done it every year I’ve been doing comedy, because I’ve not had a reason not to.”

Morton also believes that Fringe shows might be better put together, and more closely thought through if performers had two years to contemplate them. “I think it would remind us why we do it,” she says.

Can it work in the real world?

SO what could a fallow year look like, in the real world? Edinburgh is not a farm, like Glastonbury, it’s a capital city with theatres, galleries, and music venues open every month of the year.

Even if there was no formal structure for the comedy festival, it would be difficult to stop venues and performers organising shows outside of the Fringe label, especially since the Fringe was born out of this kind of grassroots performing on the “fringes” of the Edinburgh International Festival.

The Edinburgh festivals have, of course, had one fallow year of sorts. In 2021 they went ahead on a much smaller scale. At the Fringe, for example, the “big four” venues were either absent or much less prominent, there was no flyering, and there were very few reviewers.

“I really enjoyed [2021] actually,” Morton. “Everyone I spoke to was very chill and felt like there was no pressure.”

For others, however, 2021 was disastrous. Kim McAleese, director of the Edinburgh Art Festival, said: “What the festivals do bring are a lot of investment and part-time work at a very specific time. I do think about those people who rely on that income and their work and relationship with it.”

Not only do the festivals as organisations employ a number of full-time staff, any number of businesses from printers to bars to hotels rely on August to balance their books across the year.

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At Summerhall, a year-round Edinburgh arts venue, there is a keen awareness of the problems of the Fringe but CEO Sam Gough and Fringe producer and programmer Tom Forster said that taking a year off would be financially ruinous.

Across the capital, performance venues such as Summerhall and Jazz Bar are already struggling. It seems unlikely that these venues could survive without the bumper revenues of August.

On the organiser side, with arts funding being slashed across the board and many festivals struggling, McAleese wonders if reducing the frequency of festivals might be easier to finance.

Gough and Forster agree that funding is the key issue: “After the Olympic Games and World Cup, the Fringe is the third-largest ticketed event on the planet and public funding for the former events is in the billions. I do often enjoy imagining what a city would look like with that level of public funding and having something of this magnitude annually.

‘But here we are in Edinburgh 2024. An accommodation crisis, bin strikes, power cuts – the result of very limited funding or support. If a fallow year brings about the changes to make that kind of support available to the arts – to sustain staff, venues, artists in-between – like that which we expect of sport, then I’m all for it but first and foremost increased funding has to be guaranteed.”

Dave Southern, a street performer who has a long repertoire of shows at the Edinburgh Fringe and at Glastonbury, worries about the commercial ventures which would be all too eager to fill the gap left by the festivals and their performers. “I used to think that if [the Fringe] wasn’t here [street performers] would all still come, we’d do it ourselves … because we did in the 1980s. I’ve started to think that that’s naive.”

Street performance at the Fringe takes place in large spaces designated and licensed by the council – if the licences for those spaces didn’t go to street performance, would they be awarded to yet another pricey food festival or popup bar?

Something’s got to give...

IN the end, tourism and the performing arts can’t be cancelled, even if certain festivals are. But the fact that the relentless growth continues alongside relentless financial pressure on venues and performers clearly means that a “more is better” approach isn’t working for Edinburgh.

“We can’t keep following exactly the same trajectory just because we’ve always done it that way,” McAleese says. “I think there’s a lot of space for rethinking and renegotiation and different operating models and different institutional models … what that means for the festivals in the immediate, I’m not sure.”