By Robin Cairns
The Edinburgh Fringe has been happening for as long as the official Edinburgh International Festival. Since 1947, when a hand-picked selection of international orchestras, ballet and theatre companies was invited to perform in Scotland’s Capital.
The idea was to celebrate the recent outbreak of peace and share the best of the arts from nations both victorious and vanquished. Big names attending included The Halle Orchestra and Glyndebourne Opera under Sir Rudolf Bing.
But another eight theatre companies also turned up – without formal invitations – and booked their own church halls and school gyms to perform in. To the organisers of the main festival the best idea seemed to be to stand back and let them get on with it. This policy – an ethos of inclusivity operating from long before anyone dreamt up that word – still obtains (in theory) in Edinburgh to this day.
The Courier remarked that on “the fringe” of the main festival there were “many praiseworthy extras”. Including a Macbeth put on at the YMCA by the Christine Orr players – reviewed positively by heavyweights Kenneth Tynan and EM Forster. Though the journalist Robert Kemp grumbled snootily that “there seems to be a lot of private enterprise . . . I am afraid some of us are not going to be home in the evenings”. Which is a bit of an odd complaint from a theatre critic.
My Mum played her part in the first year of the festival. Dorothy Wilson was fourteen in 1947. She would catch a tram each evening from my grandad’s flat in Bruntsfield, rattle through Tollcross and down Lothian Road, then she’d walk round from the Caledonian Hotel to the Assembly Rooms in George Street where, to supplement her pocket money by a few pennies, she checked the tickets at the door from the members of the audience.
While the main festival was international, the companies showing up to perform at The Fringe were a bit more local – for instance, the Scottish Community Drama Association and Glasgow’s Unity Theatre, a radical left-wing group, showing Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths – aimed at a Scottish working-class audience which probably would have preferred the still popular music-hall or the glamour of Hollywood movies.
Edinburgh’s staid bourgeois residents may not have been quite ready for such firebrand productions. There was also a version of Easter by August Strindberg, of The Anatomist by James Bridie, Thunder Rock by Robert Ardrey was on at The Pleasance. The Laird O Torwatletie by Robert McLellan was performed and the Manchester Marionette theatre offered a puppet show at the New Victoria Cinema up on Clerk Street. The Pilgrim Players did The Family Reunion and TS Eliot’s Murder In The Cathedral. There was even a showing of the mediaeval Everyman play in Dunfermline Abbey, 15 miles across the River Forth. So it was substantial fare that was being offered, these are serious texts – the reputation of the Fringe for froth, frippery and late-night shenanigans was yet to emerge.
Edinburgh in the forties would have looked very different from the way it does now every August, with crammed bars and restaurants, full colour poster boards everywhere, massive heaving crowds of people and outrageously dressed actors handing out flyers every five yards. Rationing was still in force in 1947, so food was basic – my Dad used to write in his diary once a fortnight, “Today I had a real egg!”
The wealth of both the city and the people had been eroded by years of war and, although Edinburgh was never bombed, the town would look grey, uncared-for and slightly shabby. The players taking part would be sleeping in hostels, cheap B&B’s, sometimes in the church halls where they did their shows. But in this first year attendances were largely good enough to make it worthwhile for many of the participants and the consensus for most was that they should come back and do it all again next August.
1948 featured The Firstborn, by Christopher Fry at the Gateway down on Leith Walk. Also Androcles and the Lion by George Bernard Shaw. Local drama club, The Makars were at the Cygnet Theatre in St Paul’s Parish Kirk, under the stern cliff of Salisbury Crags.
Edinburgh is spectacular, with the medium sized mountain in the middle, Arthur’s seat, and the dark castle glowering down from its perch on the extinct volcanic rock. I’ve walked through the town on August evenings with actors from England, you turn a corner and the visitors just stand back open mouthed at the vertical spires and outcrops of the city rising out of the haar, the sea fog. Yes, we get fogs in August – when it’s not raining. The haar swirling round the knees of the buildings with the superstructures drifting above like a dream.
Back to 1948. In Princes Street Gardens, at the bandstand, The Flooers of Edinburgh by Robert McLellan, was aired by the Glasgow Unity Theatre. Yes, those West Coast radicals again. I don’t suppose that did much for unity between the two rival cities, the Glasgow lot turning up with a sparkling romp about the slightly pretentious Englification many Edinburgh folks affected after the Act of Union, 1707. People went to public lessons at that time to learn to speak proper English. Glaswegians seldom bothered with that sort of thing.
Duncan Macrae starred in the show, later going on to Whisky Galore, The Avengers, The Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan and Casino Royale, the James Bond spoof. He’s also in Our Man In Havana, the hilarious Graham Greene story with Alec Guinness and Noel Coward. Many of the big names of film and theatre got their breaks at the Edinburgh Fringe.
In 1952 for instance, Ebb Tide, an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Seas yarn was produced – written by Donald Pleasence – the little chap with piercing eyes who went on to be a great film actor, appearing in everything, even as a murderer in a Columbo detective movie, and starring as Blofeld, James Bond’s nemesis in You Only Live Twice opposite Edinburgh’s own Sean Connery.
After performing their shows each night, actors and musicians would gather from all parts of the town to do skits and turns and musical revues in an event, rather prosaically titled, “After The Show”. With the newspaper critics looking for a nightcap after filing their copy for the main festival, this became a well-publicised staple of the Fringe.
In 1949, Joan Littlewood’s famous and inventive Theatre Workshop saw the Fringe as the best vehicle for their new experimental style. And in 1958, with the best part of twenty rogue companies now rolling into town each year, Yehudi Menuhin, the maestro violinist appeared at the main festival. He felt the need to challenge a certain stuffiness he sensed in the approved fare – and also possibly in the Edinburgh audience. To do this he hired the Embassy Cinema in Pilton and proposed a free concert.
Officialdom found some minor legal technicality which prevented this dangerous and revolutionary idea happening so Yehudi put on a Saturday morning concert for a shilling, a fraction of what the tickets usually cost. The place was rammed. Journalists had to sit on the floor. And to Menuhin’s delight, the audience, new to classical music, clapped in all the wrong places. 1958 was also the first instance of the soon to be annual remonstrations about the Fringe being in financial crisis, that the city couldn’t support it, that the event was too big, too serious, not serious enough, too democratic, too undemocratic, a yearly litany of complaints. But we’re Scots, we’re never happy unless we’re unhappy.
1966 saw 33 companies with 70 different productions. Mime, jazz, rhythm speaking – which sounds like an early form of rap music – plays by Tennessee Wiliams, Edward Albee (that’d be Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and Thornton Wilder. And Tom Stoppard with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – which was already so crystally perfect that it transferred straight to the West End of London. The Festival bigwigs moaned that the fringe had taken over and was monopolising serious drama. Which was a drift in one direction, but tides, as we shall see, would turn.
In 1967, Richard Demarco burst onto the scene with a riot of modern art events – visual arts, paintings, sculptures, creations and happenings. He single-handedly dragged a rather moribund Scottish art scene (we had any number of painters at the time churning out dull still-lifes of wine glasses, lemons and fish in sombre greys and greens). Demarco made the Scots public aware of new and challenging movements in London, Europe and North America. The Pop Art of Peter Blake, Bridget Riley’s precise optical pieces and closer to home the muscular semi-abstracts of John Bellany and Joan Erdley.
I mentioned that many stars began their ascendance at The Fringe. Who? Well, Rowan Atkinson, Jo Brand, Steven Berkoff, Ben Elton, Eddie Izzard for five. Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson appeared in the Cambridge Footlights show, winning the prestigious Perrier award for comedy and going on to stellar careers. Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller strode the stage together in “Beyond The Fringe.” Derek Jacobi was noticed as outstanding in a schoolboy production of Hamlet. More recently Bill Bailey and Alan Davies starred in The Odd Couple. And, in the last ten years, Phoebe Waller-Bridge made a swift transition, from playing her Fleabag character in a dank basement, to delighting a national audience of millions with a twelve-episode television series.
But it’s not all about meteoric success. John Bishop, the Liverpool comedian, played to tiny handfuls in his first year at The Fringe. When his manager asked him if he wanted to see the numbers of ticket buyers Bishop said, “What, their phone numbers? Yes, I’ll ring them all up and thank them.”
There is an accepted statistic that the average number of people at a Fringe show is – six. Sometimes that includes the performers on stage. And it may be an over-generous estimation. I dropped in to see a comedian in a well-appointed theatre space last year, 100 seats, full lighting rig and sound. He did his one hour show to nine souls.
He must have been losing a fair amount of money. Because, while the Fringe does not choose or censor what takes place under its name, neither does it in any way fund the acts which decide to come and take part. A friend of mine, a noted poet, did a two week run a few years back. Played to shadows. Some days nobody came. Cost him plenty though. At the end of his stint he said that his wife had told him, quite insistently, that next year they were going to have a week’s holiday in France instead. It would be a lot less expensive.
I first played the Fringe in 1981. Two weeks in St Bernards Church Hall down in Stockbridge. I was in an aimless phase that summer, sitting in a café in Glasgow when I saw a wee notice on the wall saying “Actors wanted, must be free til the end of August”. No problem to me, I was quite frankly free for the rest of my life.
Setting aside the voices of common sense, which reminded me I had no qualifications as an actor and minimal experience I phoned up the number, went along to the audition and, miraculously, got the job.
It was a big company of youngsters, Attick Theatre, twenty of us, some students, one or two artists, a few people like myself “between jobs”. It was an ambitious programme, six plays with three or four parts in each and one big spectacular with everyone in it. This was The Suicide, by Nikolai Erdman. Sounds depressing but it was actually a grand farce. Semyon, the main character, makes a stray comment one day about maybe wanting to kill himself – and soon all the different groups in Russian society (it’s set in pre-war Russia) want him to kill himself to further their own particular cause.
So, a romantic lady wants him to kill himself for the lovers, a party stalwart wants him to kill himself for the communists, an intellectual for the intelligentsia and so on. The staging was pretty good and we had these big set pieces where we were all stood racked up on benches row on row singing and commenting on the action like a rowdy chorus.
I was also in a three hander by Harold Pinter, The Collection. At the climax of the play, I had to threaten another character with a breadknife but one night, finding I had a whisky glass in my right hand and the knife in my left, I decided to sort this out by juggling the two. I caught the whisky glass fine – but the breadknife went flying, clattering off a (thankfully) empty seat in the audience, much to the consternation of the lady occupying the one next to it. The Fringe has always specialised in full-on immersive theatre! We had great times though, we were all about nineteen or twenty years old. Some of the cast even slept in sleeping bags on the stage.
The next year I was running a small outfit of my own and I booked The Bedlam Theatre, a converted church in prime position, dead central, just down from Bristo Square. We had the run of the place for two hours each afternoon. And it cost me £40 a week. I thought it was a fortune. The same space would set me back about £4000 a week now – and that’s just for the two hours.
We did a play by Albert Camus, Cross Purpose, still sticking to the serious stuff. It’s a cheery piece about a mother and daughter keeping an inn in the mountains and murdering their guests for their money. Which worked okay as a way to earn a living until the long-lost son and brother turns up, goes unrecognised by his mother and his sister and is done away with in the customary fashion, poison. We staged it as a radio pay, with four people at microphones, clacking coconuts for horses’ hooves and impersonating crows.
We got good reviews and, fortunately for us, accommodation (always one of the most expensive things at The Fringe) was no problem. My uncle had bought a four-storey ruin down on Palmerston Place and was beginning a ten year plan to do up the floors one by one and sell them off as flats. He was living in the basement and let me and my motley gang of raggedy thespians sleep on the fourth floor on the mouldering carpets amongst the piles of fallen plaster. It was great.
But the Fringe was still growing. That year, William Burdett Coutts took on the entire Assembly Halls, a huge complex of rooms, and kitted them out as individual theatres, thus allowing him to let well-staffed and equipped spaces to many many different theatre companies.
Suddenly some people were making serious money – while the actors and artists were losing it. And pop-up bars and food outlets began to sprout each August too, from beer and burger gardens to champagne and oyster marquees. The local restaurateurs and pub owners, who paid their rent and rates all year round, hated this development and, to be quite honest, I can see why.
Speaking of honesty much of the finance in and around the Fringe is clean enough. Sure, venues, advertising, food, a bed for the night, all these things are pricey, some are a barefaced rip-off but no-one invited any of the acts, it’s entirely voluntary whether you take part. There are people profiteering from The Fringe but it’s not stealing.
What isn’t honest or decent though is the practice of larger venues taking on young people as technicians, stage managers, ticket takers etc. and not paying them wages. There are a few organisations doing this. In one venue I was with, the boys and girls were only getting “expenses” – a few pounds, often for a ten or twelve hour day. This is very poor practice but because they had no employment contracts as such the venue could get away with it. Shabby.
Now let’s move on to something more enjoyable. Scandals. In some plays (and certainly in stand-up comedy) coarseness, vulgarity, swearing, bad taste, glorification of immorality, incitement to riot, these are all seen as pretty much tolerable by the powers that be – but there is one issue on which Edinburgh has historically put down its prim and proper foot. Nudity. On-stage nudity. This is the camel that regularly breaks the straw’s back.
There was even a councillor for Edinburgh, Moira Knox (Conservative, Morningside) who every summer would be phoned up by The Scotsman to offer an outraged quote over whatever latest instance of indecency had occurred. Whether it was a tasteful Lady Godiva or some flagrant student lewdness Moira could be relied on to vent her spleen at this sort of filth being paraded in a public place.
Sometimes, she had a point. Actors are a bunch of show-offs at the best of times and some of them will, at the drop of a hat, drop everything but their hat. I saw a show twenty years ago, a desperate hour of appalling guff, in which a man stripped off to the raw, stood in a bathtub, put a bucket on his head and began singing Rule Britannia while a girl in a tutu hit the bucket with a stick. Where’s Moira Knox when you need her?
Then there was the Jim Rose Circus. He caused a stir. Mister Rose’s troupe featured a number of acts, including one who thought it was both big and clever – and, in some way, entertaining – to tie heavier and heavier objects to his poor long-suffering appendage, an apple, a tin of beans, a brick! Poor old Moira Knox was by this time, thank goodness, safely, unshockably dead.
Television coverage came late to The Fringe, again in the early eighties when a round-up of suggested things to see would be broadcast. Retiring director Peter Diamond watched one of these programmes, Russell Harty Goes To . . . Edinburgh. Diamond bemoaned that only frivolous fringe events got a mention whereas his carefully curated prestigious operas and orchestras were studiously ignored.
His had a point (sort of). In the early nineties, the massive boom in stand-up comedy brought teeming hordes of the sort of people who think they are very funny indeed to Edinburgh. And a few of them even were. Stand-up is cheap to stage. All you need is seats, a light and a microphone. You don’t even need that, in a small room – but comedians find the mic essential, it’s their only prop, they need it like a comfort blanket. Cos it’s lonely up there being amusing.
The thing about comedy is it’s actually much tougher than being serious. In a weighty drama, if your audience is sitting reverently hushed, it may well be that they are utterly absorbed in wonder at the brilliance of what you are doing on stage. In comedy if they’re not laughing – believe me, they’re not thinking you’re brilliant.
It is my observation (and I have the horrible memories of the times I have failed on stage as witness to this) that, if an audience doesn’t think you are funny, they’re not indifferent about it, they’re certainly not sympathetic – no, they look on you with open contempt. I know, I’ve seen their faces. Thankfully, only now and then. But it’s not that the people in the audience are intentionally sneering, it’s just a quirk of human nature, albeit a cruel one.
Anyway, the goldrush of hilarity which swamped Edinburgh gave rise to a new phenomenon, The Free Fringe. Fully kitted theatres were beyond the means of aspiring comics and they didn’t need the bells and whistles anyway. So a chap called Peter Buckley Hill had the idea of audiences coming in for nothing, sitting through a show, then paying whatever they liked as they left. Dropping cash into a bucket.
Developing this model, he arranged with a number of pubs that he would take over their back rooms, round up a roster of comedians, let them hold out their own buckets at the end of the hour – and the pub would keep all the bar takings. Sorted.
It worked. The comedians were getting their venue for free and the pubs were getting a new influx of punters every hour. The practice spread and now there are at least three different free fringe organisations in operation. And it allows entry level participation in The Fringe even to the youngest, most cash-strapped, inexperienced performers. That is of course a mixed blessing.
The Free Fringe does boast acts that have decent careers, even a bit of telly behind them – but it also provides stage time to some of the most talentless, misguided and dire acts which you will ever have the pleasure of seeing grace a public stage. Richard Demarco commented on “an infestation of stand up comics – an epidemic for which there is no cure.”
Oh, and some people just aren’t temperementally suited to the rigours of stand-up. It was at The Canon’s Gait Bar, late one night that a struggling comic, peeved at the boorish interruptions he kept getting from a particular audience member, stepped down off the rostrum, marched across the floor and ended the offending fellow’s evening with a powerful punch to the hooter.
I did the Free Fringe once about a dozen years ago. Just to see how it worked. I didn’t punch anyone. On the contrary, I did quite well, up to a hundred people a night packing into a sweaty basement nightclub under The Hudson Hotel. Only thing though was the cash. The banknotes were fine but after three weeks of shows I had a gallon coffee tin full of silver and copper coinage. About seven hundred quid. It took me years to get rid of it all, handing it over in dribs and drabs to the shop round the corner from my house. I’m still known there as “Him with the change”.
The town is full of famous people in August. You bump into them all the time. I’ve rubbed shoulders with Simon Callow, David O’Donohue, Robert Webb – many years ago I was sat next to Sir Keith Joseph. And The Krankies, the Krankies came to see me about five years ago. They arrived late and I was a few minutes in to my material but I could see this sort of stir going on at the back of the room, this commotion, but I couldn’t see who it was because the Krankies – well Ian’s not very tall but Jeannette’s absolutely tiny.
Then this wee figure came down through the crowd and perched on a seat in front of me. No, she wasn’t wearing the schoolboy cap and shorts, she was very well-dressed. There was a rare outbreak of autograph hunters after my show that day – not for my scribble, for theirs. Ian was kind enough to say that they’d thoroughly enjoyed themselves. I reminded him that it was my Mum who had taught him Scottish country dancing many years ago in Clydebank. Jeannette, sadly, did not tell me I was “Fandabidozi”.
I’ve played in many different places over the years, some quite salubrious, some that would have to send out for salubs if a customer happened to ask for one. The Jazz Bar in Chambers Street was great, an atmospheric underground cavern with a jazz programme to rival Ronnie Scott’s in London. Many venues though are, quite frankly, a bit rough – hidden dungeons burrowed deep into the bedrock with a couple of dozen jumble-sale seats. If the landlord ever bought a couple of light bulbs, these joints would improve dramatically. It does strike me as odd that, in Edinburgh, it is seen as perfectly fine for performers and punters to cram into spaces that in any other city would be deemed unfit for keeping turnips.
I did the Arthur Conan Doyle Centre for two years, down at Haymarket – a magnificent Georgian four storey palazzo. Not the home of Conan Doyle though, this was built by the McEwan family, the brewers. No-one ever got poor selling beer to Scots people. The Conan Doyle Centre, due to the great author’s interest in the subject, is a spiritualist centre – people go there to contact the ghosts of their relatives. Spooky. I played in a room full of strange regalia and weirdly carved furniture.
The ever-expanding Fringe has swollen to 750 different acts, selling more than 2 million tickets for over fifty thousand performances of around 3,500 shows. Handing out flyers on the street is the traditional method for raising a crowd but with so many sheets of glossy A5 paper on offer it’s very hard to sift and select the show that will suit you. And with the traditional yearly binmen’s strike mysteriously occurring exactly at Festival time the city can begin to look like an explosion in a print shop.
Flyposting is banned these days, the penalties are quite severe, but the city fathers have contracted one advertising company to fix posters to railings, to lamp-posts, to traffic bollards, maybe even to anyone who happens to stand still long enough. These provide decent publicity but there are so many and the costs are so prohibitive that the value of using this method is dubious.
I use online adverts on the Fringe website so that whenever people are planning a visit and browsing through the programme the title of my current show pops up and (hopefully!) attracts them enough to purchase tickets. It works well enough. I’ve always made a profit out of The Fringe – but I wouldn’t like to have to live off it. I do sometimes shed what little dignity I have left and don a sandwich board outside my venue for the hour before the show. But I also have the luck to be based in Glasgow so can be in Edinburgh in only fifty minutes on the train, saves accommodation costs.
Starting on August 3rd, I’m putting on the show, Edinburgh’s Pandas Were Just Weegies In Disguise, a one-man play about Morningside Malcolm, a well to do Edinburgh citizen whose lovely daughter has married into a family of gangsters, it gets worse, gangsters from Glasgow! It’s one of five plays I’ve written for this particular set of characters and I’m in a great venue, the church hall of St Columba’s by the Castle. Self-explanatory, it’s very central. My customers often come early for a seat and a cup of tea – and they’ll often stay for a digestive biscuit afterwards, as I chill out there between shows.
How long will I keep doing the Fringe, now that I’ve clocked up 43 years since I first appeared there. I don’t know, I really don’t. But as I said, in the title to this piece – The Edinburgh Fringe: the story so far . . .
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