How to measure a festival's success, contemporary choreographer Temitope Ajose, and three shows to see at Brighton Fringe...
2.2 million tickets sold is a meaningless statistic. We need new metrics. Plus: the artist behind new show Lady M (At Home With Lady Macbeth), and more...
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.
Brighton Fringe returns today, and my inbox is already filling up with press releases about Edinburgh Fringe in August, so I thought I would start this week’s issue with a piece on the metrics by which we measure them - and how judging them purely on scale is a mistake.
Also, there is a chat with contemporary dancer and choreographer Temitope Ajose, whose show Lady M (At Home With Macbeth) opens at The Place next week, three picks of shows to see during the first week of Brighton Fringe, plus your regular shouts and murmurs.
There will be no issue next week, as I’m away - camping and climbing big hills in the Cairngorms if you are interested - but I will be back in a fortnight with quite a special issue.
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Brighton Fringe is back, and Edinburgh Fringe is not far behind – and I wish we used different metrics to measure them both.
Both are unquestionably remarkable events. Edinburgh Fringe is the world’s largest arts festival. In 2022, 2.2 million tickets were sold to 53,117 performances of 3,646 shows. Brighton Fringe is nowhere near that size, but it is still a big deal. In 2019 – the last year for which I can find stats – 270,000 tickets were sold to 4,774 performances of 1,034 different events.
Both festivals are also often spoken about in terms of their economic impact. In 2019, the Centre for Economics and Business Research estimated that the Edinburgh Fringe was worth over £1 billion to Scotland’s economy. Again, Brighton Fringe pales in comparison, but its economic impact is still significant. Also in 2019, the festival estimated that it generated £20 million for its local economy.
All these stats are regularly trotted out as evidence of both events’ incredible success – but what do they really tell us about the festivals, and about the feelings of the artists that perform at them, or the quality of the shows those artists made, or the experiences of the workers that are essential to their existence? Not much.
I would like to see other statistics make it to the top of post-festival press releases instead – some things that actually indicate a degree of progress on the issues that matter most. Like the amount of money that makes it into the pockets of performers, rather than the pockets of the landlords bleeding them dry, or the bank accounts of London-based venue chains owned by old Etonians, for example. Or the number of festival workers paid the living wage. Or the number of mental health crises suffered.
I know some of these things are hard to quantify, but some of them are not. Plenty of artists now see both Edinburgh and Brighton Fringes as marketplaces in which to sell their shows to producers and programmers – so how about focussing on the number of accredited industry professionals that attend them instead? Or the number of shows those industry professionals actually go and see? Plenty of shows at both events are desperate for some kind of critical coverage to shout about, too – so how about focusing on the number of accredited media? Or the number of reviews they produce?
And, lest we forget, these are arts festivals – so what about the arts at the heart of them? Are the shows themselves any good? Are they imaginative and bold and enthralling? Or are they staid and cynical? And how diverse are the performers that are putting them on? Are we really making progress there?
I wrote about this after last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and I will keep writing about it because it really bothers me. Selling 2.2 million tickets or 270,000 tickets or 2 billion tickets is a meaningless statistic that only emphasises scale and obscures the problems of affordability and access that plague fringe theatre festivals in the UK.
I love both Brighton Fringe and Edinburgh Fringe and I am excited for what both have in store this year – my theatre picks will all be of shows performing in Brighton over the next few weeks – but I wish their organising bodies and the commentators that cover them would focus on quality over quantity, and on integrity over economy. Only then will we know if they are truly the extraordinary events they say they are.
Meet dancer and choreographer Temitope Ajose.
What do William Shakespeare’s Scottish play and the psychoanalysis of Carl Jung have in common? They are all part of Lady M (At Home With Lady Macbeth), a new seventy-five minute solo show from contemporary dancer and choreographer Temitope Ajose, premiering at The Place next week.
“I have a particular love of Carl Jung’s work on the collective unconscious,” says Ajose. “I also love Macbeth, and particularly the character of Lady Macbeth and the archetypes she represents and rejects.” Those two influences were swirling in Ajose’s thoughts in 2020, when she took part in Choreodrome, The Place’s innovative programme for dance artists to develop ideas without the pressure to produce a finished product. That, she explains, was the original inception of Lady M.
“Over the summer, the Place invites artists to research ideas they find interesting,” Ajose explains. “They are really well supported with studio support and technical resources. They hang out with other artists and give feedback on each other’s work. Sometimes they end up in a commission. Sometimes they don’t. There is no need for an end product at all, and that is quite rare.”
Ajose’s ideas were further developed through residencies at Wainsgate Chapel in Hebden Bridge and Tripspace in London, and with producer Claire Cook, dramaturg Emma Williams and composer Adam Liston. The project is now returning to The Place for its world premiere. An immersive show for only 55 audience members at a time, Lady M sees Ajose use speech, movement, dance and interactive elements to explore the psychological states of Shakespeare’s most famous female character.
“When you come into mid-life as a woman, you are socially conditioned into being a mother and a nurturer and a hostess,” Ajose continues. “You are not supposed to be disagreeable. You are not supposed to have power. You are not supposed to have big ideas. Women in positions of power in the public sphere is still a contested area to this day. Lady Macbeth is such an exciting character because she dares to do those things, like I am. And she has such extraordinary power as a result.”
Lady M is also Ajose’s first solo show. She discovered dance as a teenager, trained in a range of dance styles at Lewisham College, then specialised in contemporary dance at London Contemporary Dance School. Her career since leaving has been a collage of working as a dancer (with Punchdrunk and Protein Dance Company), a movement director (at the Gate Theatre and the National Theatre), and a choreographer (staging work at the Tate Modern, the Serpentine Gallery and Dancebase).
In 2019, partly because her two children had grown up a bit and partly because she felt like she had something to say, Ajose seriously started making work under her own aegis. She created My Name Is My Own, a response to June Jordan’s 1978 Poem About My Rights that also involved director Jo Tyabji, poet Jay Bernard, and sound designer Mwen, and was staged at the Southbank Centre in 2019.
Lady M, Ajose says, is the continuation of that spark – and she hopes its premiere at The Place is just the beginning of its journey. “The show sits in this interesting place between theatre and dance, so I think it would work well in a lot of different spaces, especially spaces that are a bit alternative,” she says. “After this, I’m not sure what I will do. But I will do something different. Women cannot be contained or defined into one particular thing. We are dangerous and caring and logical and wild.”
This is promotional content. Lady M (At Home With Lady Macbeth) runs at The Place from May 11 until May 13. You can find more information and book tickets here.
Three shows to see at Brighton Fringe
Destiny - The Rotunda, until May 8
Written and performed by Florence Espeut-Nickless, designed by Jenny Roxburgh, and directed by Jesse Jones, Destiny was originally performed online as part of the hybrid 2021 Edinburgh Fringe, then returned to the festival in 2022, before embarking on a tour last Autumn, now arriving at Brighton Fringe for four performances. It sees Espeut-Nickless play Destiny, a young woman living a miserable life in rural Wiltshire, who dreams of showbiz success. Critic Anya Ryan called it “captivating” and “authentic” in The Guardian back in 2021. You can get tickets to see it below.
Clementine - The Rotunda, until May 7
This newsletter recommended Rosalie Minnitt’s one-woman comedy Clementine when it ran at VAULT Festival earlier this year, and it is recommending it again now! It first ran at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2022, then at VAULT, and now pops up in Brighton for three shows this weekend. Directed by Tristan Robinson and Alison Middleton, with music from Honor Halford-MacLeod, the show sees Minnitt adopt her comedy persona Lady Clementine, a Regency-ish era woman catastrophically unlucky in love, who sets off on an adventure. “Bridgerton meets The Mighty Boosh” is the tagline. You can get tickets for its run at Brighton Fringe below.
My Esteemed Friend - Sweet @ The Poets, until May 14
Founded by Dundee-born actor and theatremaker Manchester School of Theatre graduate Daniel Hird, Third Pier Theatre is an emerging company that made its debut with Jen McGregor’s one-man historical fantasy Old Bones in 2019. That show, performed by Hird, ran to acclaim at Buxton Fringe and Prague Fringe pre-Covid, then toured the UK in 2022. It returns at Brighton Fringe throughout next week, in a double-bill with Third Pier Theatre’s new show My Esteemed Friend. Written and performed by Hird – marking his debut as a writer – and directed by Zoey Barnes, My Esteemed Friend is a time-hopping, semi-autobiographical show about fatherhood, ambition and modern masculinity. Tickets are available via the button below.
This is promotional content.
Shouts and murmurs
Here are some other bits and bobs that caught my eye this week, and that you might be interested in…
If you want a bit more from me, then you can read this interview I did with actor and musician Johnny Flynn in The Stage (which is up there with the best pieces I’ve ever done, I reckon), or this one with the RSC’s Peter De Jersey, or this one with musical star Tracie Bennett, or this one with the Orange Tree Theatre’s Tom Littler.
A load of exciting Edinburgh Fringe shows got announced yesterday. The Traverse Theatre’s season looks super (a new Isobel McArthur play! Breach Theatre’s After The Act!), as does Summerhall’s programme (a new verbatim show from Lung Theatre!), and the New Diorama’s Untapped Award winners (Flawbored Theatre!)
The death of Adam Brace - associate director at Soho Theatre, among many other things - at just 43 is desperately sad. I didn’t know him, but I knew the shows and artists he helped build - Haley McGee’s Age Is A Feeling, Liz Kingsman’s One-Woman Show, Sh!t Theatre’s stuff, plus his own plays Stovepipe and They Drink It In The Congo, which I loved. Brian Logan’s tribute to him in The Guardian is a moving read.
Thanks for reading
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all, really - just reply to this email. Or you can find me on Twitter, where I am @FergusMorgan.
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See you in a fortnight.
Fergus