Welcome back to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre by Fergus Morgan.
Throughout August, The Crush Bar has focussed on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, most featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. In case you missed it, here is Tuesday’s issue…
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The festival has six days left…
More awards business was conducted over the weekend, including a second batch of The Skinny/Fest’s Besties, plus the shortlist for the Comedian’s Choice Award, the shortlist for The List Festival Awards, and the longlist for the ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards (not to be confused with the Edinburgh Comedy Awards), to which Damien Warren-Smith, AKA Garry Starr, has just donated £1600. The final Fringe First Awards and The List Festival Awards will be revealed on Friday morning, and the Comedy Award winners will be announced on Saturday.
The Edinburgh Minute has published a round-up of loads of five-star reviews.
Pleasance was forced to cancel a show in 10Dome after water cascaded through the ceiling on Friday following the rain. Katie Chambers reports in The Stage.
Under new council plans, due to be debated on Friday, Edinburgh’s major arts organisations will get a 11.5 per-cent funding boost from the tourist tax, but that would actually only equate to £8625 for the Fringe Society, because 11.5 per-cent of not very much is not very much. More from The Herald’s Brian Ferguson here.
The departure of the TV festival for Manchester next year will not deter screen producers from scouting work at the Fringe, according to SNL UK producer Alex Cartlidge, speaking on a panel at Shedinburgh. More from The Scotsman’s Jane Bradley here. You can keep up with Bradley’s entertaining Festival Diary here, too.
Scottish culture secretary Màiri McAllan and Fringe Society boss Tony Lankester launched the Made In Scotland showcase on Thursday. I was on the selection panel this year. You can check out all the stuff we chose here.
You may have spotted the war of words between ex-Etonian Underbelly founders Ed Bartlam and Charlie Wood and the Fringe Society’s Tony Lankester in the news. In her Substack, journalist Jackie Kemp sides with the latter…
Also on Substack, in his sporadic newsletter, Time Out’s Andrzej Lukowski reflects on his Edinburgh Fringe experience this year, with his five favourite shows and some interesting reflections on the long shadow of Fleabag…
Finally, in The Scotsman, festivals editor Andrew Eaton-Lewis discusses the fraught thirty-year phenomenon of star ratings at the Fringe.
I will send out one last Edinburgh Fringe newsletter on Friday with a list of my top ten shows - I am still catching stuff! - before going into hibernation for a month. Today, though, instead of bothering you with another list of five shows worth seeing, I thought I would use this newsletter for some sporadic reflections on the festival this year. And, no, I am not going to mention Amanda Knox or the Sauna Theatre.
Has this been a bad year for theatre? Or have critics not done their jobs well enough?
Whenever I have had a chance to chat to my critical colleagues over a coffee or a beer over the last fortnight, there has been a consensus that, while there are plenty of decent theatre shows at the festival, none of us have had our socks blown off by something that feels fresh and exciting and game-changing as in previous years.
Lyn Gardner has written about this in The Stage, bemoaning the “very, very average” work she has trawled through and laying the blame at the financial barriers associated with presenting work at the festival and consequent market-oriented approach taken by many producers. “Risk,” she writes, “has been priced out of the Fringe.”
Is this actually true, though? Could it be that my colleagues and I, time-poor and PR-reliant as we are, are simply not looking in the right places? We only ever see the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reviewing theatre at the Fringe: surely there is weird and wonderful stuff beneath the waterline? And, if we can’t seek it out, who can?
The comedy-theatre crossover (and the Edinburgh International Festival) is where the exciting stuff is
In the 2010s, when I first started covering the Edinburgh Fringe, the buzziest stuff was the playful, provocative work being devised by emerging ensembles, most of whom seemed to have met as students at Warwick University. I would theorise that this was rooted in the impact of influential companies like Complicité and Improbable. Then, the financial circumstances got harder and the Fleabag effect took hold, and the festival was flooded with solo shows about awful things.
In recent years, the festival wheel has turned again, away from theatre (see above!) and towards the uncategorisable, conceptual stuff that straddles the boundary between theatre and comedy, and often involves people being extremely silly or disgusting. I am thinking of shows like Conk’s Man Sings the Same Song Over and Over Again for an Hour, Garry Starr: Classic Penguins, and Underground Monk Show, and, on the more serious (but still quite silly) end of the spectrum, shows like Elf Lyons is The Woman on the Edge, Baby Everything, Megasquirt: Fully Loaded, and Birds. Is it glib to hypothesise that artists are responding to a ridiculous world by making ridiculous shows?
And, while we are discussing where to find the good stuff: whisper it, but the Edinburgh International Festival has programmed some really interesting stuff this year, just as it did last summer: Christiane Jatahy’s Ibsen experiment A Trial, Ivo van Hove’s fantastically fleet Angels In America, Missy Mazzoli’s surreal opioid opera The Galloping Cure, and Zora Howard’s brutal Beckettian three-hander Hang Time, There is more to come this week, too: I am particularly excited about When Prophecy Fails. I would still like to see fewer orchestras and more theatre in the programme, but hats off to Roy Luxford for introducing EIF’s august audiences to some spicy stuff.
The Edinburgh Council is screwing up the tourist tax
Ahead of the Fringe, all the talk was of Edinburgh’s new visitor levy, the first of its kind in the UK, having an adverse impact on the festival by further increasing the cost of accommodation and thus putting off both artists and audiences alike. We will only know if this has actually happened when the Fringe Society releases its data next week, but it doesn’t feel like it, does it? To me, the city centre feels as rammed as ever.
Where the council has messed up, though, is in divvying the funds raised by the tourist tax among Edinburgh’s major arts organisations. The details are too complex to cover comprehensively here (that’s part of the problem) but several plans have been proposed and then pulled. The latest, which will be debated at a committee meeting on Friday, is to increase major arts organisations’ annual funding by 11.5 per-cent.
That sounds good for, say, the Lyceum, Capital Theatres and the EIF, who are already fairly well supported by the council and will see their grants jump by £37k, £67k and £220k respectively. It is a slap in the face for the Fringe Society, though, which only gets a paltry £67k annually and would therefore only get an extra £8625. For a festival that is worth hundreds of millions to Edinburgh’s economy and is estimated to pour £6m into the council’s coffers via the tourist tax every year, that seems insane. There needs to be a rethink and the Fringe Society deserves much more, although that would, of course, annoy the venue operators that resent its administrative dominance.
New venues are welcome, but festival infrastructure is going to become an issue
One of the more joyful aspects of this festival has been the return of some much-missed venues, including Gilded Balloon’s Teviot HQ and the redeveloped King’s Theatre, and the opening of some new ones, like Francesca Moody’s Shedinburgh, the Sauna Theatre, and the Fringe Society’s new home on Infirmary Street. I still miss the Paines Plough Roundabout, though. Fingers crossed it is back in business next year.
One problem that has become apparent this year, however, is that much of the existing infrastructure is going to struggle during future festivals. Fringe venues, as we saw last week, are simply not capable of coping with extreme heat or heavy rain.
As our climate becomes more extreme, with more downpours and more droughts, festival venues will need to adapt if they are to remain appropriate places for artists and audiences alike. Or, of course, they could all convert to sauna theatres.
Space for informed, insightful critical discussion is vital amid the miasma of AI and influencers
This feels like the first year that AI has actually had an impact on the Fringe. I can see some legitimate some uses for it, particularly around mining the mountain of box-office data the festival sits on so that artists can make more informed decisions, but the AI-generated posters, the vibe-coded planners, the search engines scraping publications for content and not paying them a penny? That can all get in the bin.
Also, earlier this month, in a haphazard attempt to further this newsletter’s reach, I logged onto Instagram for the first time in a decade and made it an account. There is a high chance I will be logging off and closing it in the near future, though, partly because I have neither the time nor the skill it demands these days, but mainly because, well, it sucks, doesn’t it? All the content I see is attention-chasing videos about performers with no audience (what is this, 2023?), irritating influencers giving out terrible recommendations (Lannan? Please!), and theatre companies lamely jumping on the latest inane social media trend (kinda chic to shut the f**k up, eh?).
Amid all of this, I think that informed, insightful and independent coverage of the Fringe is more important than ever. That is (partly) why I trawl through dull council reports and catch as many shows as I possibly can. That is (partly) why I write as much as I do, for The Stage, The Scotsman, The FT, and here on Substack. And that is (partly) why I experimented with a live critical discussion a fortnight ago, and am planning on developing that idea into something more significant next year. Maybe you think this stuff is worthwhile, too. Maybe you want to prove that right now...
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That is it for today. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.
Fergus
Hi Fergus. I'm at the Fringe with Baby Brain, starring Kimberley Nixon, a darkly funny play about a woman struggling with postpartum psychosis. 4 & 5 star reviews, rave audience reaction, Studio 3, George Square Assembly, 4.40pm daily. I'm biased, but I think it's fresh & exciting (and very funny, very emotional!).