Anthony Alderson has led the Pleasance Theatre Trust, since 2005, taking over from founder Christopher Richardson. Leading one of ‘The Big Four’, Anthony has overseen the expansion of The Pleasance into a multi-venue behemoth, staging hundreds of shows every year, and entertaining thousands upon thousands of paying audience members. About him, the Fringe has exploded to levels likely never imagined in its earliest incarnations, and he was kind enough to sit down with me, to discuss his experiences, concerns, and hopes for the future of the World’s Festival city.
Warning: This is a LONG article, and I would have edited more out, but frankly, everything left provides an absolutely invaluable insight into the mind of one of the Fringe’s more influential decision-makers.
The Pleasance Theatre Trust
Shows from 3rd – 29th August
For further details click here.
Comments from me: Italics
Anthony Alderson: bold
How would you summarise your philosophy on the Fringe, and your work within it?
Relatively simple. I think that The Pleasance has always taken a view that our job is to support as many bits of our programme as we possibly can. We’re a registered charity in Scotland, England and Wales and it’s written into our constitution that that is our role. We were founded by Christopher Richardson, who in 1995 I think did one of the most selfless things of all, which was to turn what was his own private business into a charity because he realized that it was bigger than him. I came to the Fringe with Christopher back in 1987, I’ve been part of the pleasant team ever since I was a teenager and have worked in and around this Fringe for all that time.
Future proofing The Pleasance
I think that my job in many ways was to try and get The Pleasance into a place where if the proverbial bus was to come along, somebody could step in. I mean, there was no reason why anyone couldn’t have done it back then, but then board did give me the job!
For me the Festival is about the people who come, and about the extraordinary messages, the issues it raises: It’s an enormous celebration of freedom of speech, and most of all of a community that just wants to have the most extraordinary amount of fun.
How would you distinguish yourselves from the other promoters/venues in the mix?
It’s a difficult…I mean there are some obvious corporate differences: we are a not-for-profit, and we absolutely state that as a part of our mission and in fact it’s something we’re immensely proud of. We have no shareholders, I have a voluntary board who I answer to and, at the end of the day I will stop earning the salary from The Pleasance, and I’ll retire or move on to something else. Another fundamental difference, is the fact that we don’t run the bar, the bar is run by Edinburgh University, and I think it’s sometimes misunderstood.
He who rules the bar, rules the profits
The economics of venues up and down the country — at the end of the day it’s the bar that pays for the front of house staff, it pays for the bar staff, it pays for an awful lot of organizations. If you can earn an extra three quid off the back of every ticket that comes through the door, it’s a very, very different business model.
There are very few ways to earn money doing what we do: it’s tickets, it’s merchandise, it’s little bits of sponsorship, or Trust/Foundation money, or personal giving, and then there’s food and beverage. If you don’t get the food and beverage well that is a £1.5 million pot, that we get a tiny little percentage of. So, for us it ain’t about the bar, it never was. The bar was always there as a way of making people want to stay, and be in the environment…but ultimately, it’s about the work on stage. That’s what we care about the most: making sure that we have the most exceptional program.
Spread the risk, increase your offering
To make that balance, you have those big bankers [highly popular shows] that are going to bring in the dosh, because it’s only with those that you can support say ten little 50-seaters. We’ve always seen ourselves as a sort of microcosm of the whole thing. All we are is a collection of little venues under a single umbrella, and we work on the basis that if you have 2000 seats and you spread them across 20 different rooms, you’ve got a better chance of filling each of them from the bottom, rather than worrying about whether you can just fill one, and worry about that last tiny little margin which so often in the arts you never get to do. It’s kind of spread betting, but with the community as the most important concern.
We also take the view that we have an audience of over 600,000 people, and if we program only one type of thing, then that audience would undoubtedly be smaller. It’s a genuine desire to put on a festival, and a festival should represent all. Some of that is challenging, and one of the huge changes we made was the creation of the Kidzone. We’ve always had a children’s program, but creating the Kidzone means offering a place where parents know that they can bring their children with activities between shows where they can be entertained and looked after and maybe engaged in a different way.
In response to this innovation, 2019, The Pleasance sold around 50,000 family tickets, Anthony tells me, whereas ten years before they were only selling around 2,000.
The late-night programming, we’ve sort of sacrificed some of that, in order to do more in the morning. We officially used to start at sort of 12:30 in the afternoon, but now our program really comes to life at 10:00 in the morning. There’s nothing nicer than watching hundreds of children around the Courtyard. That first year really, really blew me away! We gave everyone a yellow balloon and by midday the whole city was full of little yellow balloons, it was just magnificent. Also in 2019, assisted by one of our patrons, my wife came up with this idea of trying to get tickets into the hands of those school kids who otherwise couldn’t come or wouldn’t come. Maybe their parents wouldn’t bring them, or the school couldn’t afford to bring them. As it turned out, the biggest challenge was transport: they couldn’t get the minibus or a bus or whatever else to bring the kids to the festival.
Improving access – The Kidzone
We went out to loads of schools around Edinburgh, and we found that actually if we could solve the transport problem, they would come. We had over 600 children, in their uniforms in that last week, when they’d all gone back — which amazed me because it’s the first week in term for quite a lot of them – and the Courtyard was full! We gave them a packed lunch, a ticket to the shows and access to the Kidzone. You know those people will be back!
That was a big, big shift.
I think the other the other major parts The Pleasance, which is probably less obvious, is the support programs that we run for artists come into the festival. I think we are probably supporting somewhere in the region of 30 different artists to come this year (2022). We formed a number called Pleasance Futures, because we needed a single funding vehicle that people could really understand, but actually what we did underneath it was to fund programs from the Kidzone, to the Young Pleasance, to the Ex-Young Pleasance; which is those people who want/wanted a little hand holding while they produce their first work. We also still have something called the Charlie Hartill fund — which just been going for 16 years — and that brings up a play every year, as well as a group of comics. We also run an associate’s program which is for those artists, and companies, who are at the next level. What we’ve tried to build is a ladder: a proper aspirational ladder. So, come as a child, experience a festival first time, and maybe in a few steps time you’re producing your first professional play, or show, or comedy or whatever that might be.
The Pleasance gives back
The final part of that, was in 2017, a conversation between myself and Nic Connaughton, who’s the head of Theatre, was to create a national partnership program, and to try and support people from the regions — we were very London centric or Edinburgh centric — so we went out to ten number one touring venues, all producing venues with little studio spaces as well, who were developing new artists, new writers, new companies, whatever it might be. We said to them, ‘well, if we put some money into that program would you put a bit in as well?‘
The ultimate plan, Anthony tells me, was to create a nationwide network, whereby shows developed at one venue, could find a wider audience by visiting the others. Selected shows would premiere at The Pleasance in Edinburgh, and then undertake a national tour via the associated venues, with a possibility of a performance at the Pleasance, London at the terminus.
I’m delighted to say that this year I think we’ve got 12 shows in that program, and that’s now supported by a couple of trusts and foundations who have seen the value in it. The argument is always made that the Arts subsidy is London-centric, and that by virtue of the fact that we have a London theatre, and a London address, makes us a London organization but that’s sort of nuts. 85% of what we do happens at a festival which happens to be on the other side of the border. The value of that festival comes back to every single region across the country: every single one. There are buyers, makers, creators from every single part of this country.
Anthony expressed his objection to a binary view of arts funding, and regional favouritism, insisting the real picture was far more nuanced, and that “practicality” should be the watch-word.
I’m glad to say that some of the trusts and foundations that we work with have seen that ours is a genuine way of doing this in a way that could be massively supportive of artists. At The Pleasance we’re very practical people: we want people to have good spaces to perform in, we want them to have a team of people around them to support their work and make sure that they’re doing the best that they can.
There’s volunteers, and then there’s volunteers
We get a lot of criticism for that because some of those people are volunteers — not all of them — and we try and give them the best possible technical expertise and support that we possibly can for them to put on their work. For us it’s solving practical problems. For example we created a digital ticketing system because that practical problem needed to be solved and I think that’s how we look at it. I used to be a carpenter yeah, and I kind of approach everything in the same way which is: let’s look at the practicalities of this, why is this a problem, and how do we solve it? Putting on a festival is simply a very long list of little problems. This year is going to throw up its individual challenges and so on, but every year does, and in a funny way you’ve got to be a little bit of a masochist to want to take it on! Most would look at it and think it was totally nuts. For me, it’s a very lovely way to fill 365 days of the year, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.
Of your comrade organisations, is there any you particularly admire, and why?
I think all of them in in very different ways, and I’m not avoiding the question in saying this. Tara & Darren at Greenside are great, what they do is fabulous…I think she’s a wonderful individual, and they run a really great organisation.
I think of Summerhall, when it broke through in terms of the live art program that it puts on; the fact that people didn’t believe that we could have a permanent Fringe empire in the middle of Edinburgh all year round. Okay, so Robert [McDowell] occupied a very privileged position of being able to fund it as he did, and buy the buildings and everything else, but there’s very few other people who would have used that money for that reason.
I think the Traverse has a really key role — I think sometimes it sits between the International Festival and the Fringe. It’s Scotland’s premier new writing venue, it champions Scottish writing and Scottish new work and has a very distinct voice.
Then you have Dance Base who fill that brilliant physical theatre/dance niche, and of course William Burdett-Coutts [Assembly founder], who comes from a commercial way of doing things, but if you really wanted to make money, you certainly wouldn’t do this! I think what comes across is his absolute love of the event, the festival. I think what he did, back in 1979, was inadvertently create the modern Fringe! He took on a Multiplex venue, with a deal that worked and everyone’s pretty much copied it since.
Then the sharp elbows of Charlie and Ed at Underbelly…I mean who would have thought that a big venue could have appeared at the time that it did.
Anthony Alderson
Then the sharp elbows of Charlie and Ed at Underbelly…I mean who would have thought that a big venue could have appeared at the time that it did. Their creation of the cow…persuading the university to allow them Bristo Square when that was off limits to everybody. They took a different stance, which was: ‘we will do better deals for artists because we’ve got a bigger bar.’ They came in and sort of disrupted the landscape, and made us all compete a little bit harder. I think there are champions across the board!
No one’s perfect
There are so many myths and legends around the Festival: about how it works and who does what, and how it comes together. I look at each of those people all of them and I see that each of them is driven by a different passion for the event and I don’t think any one of us gets it right or gets it wrong.
The greatest success of this Festival is its open access.
Now there are calls to make it curated, or to change the way in which it works, and I think we’ve got to be careful what we wish for. I think what that leads to is a sort of professional fringe alongside an amateur fringe, and I think that’s a most terrifying outcome.
Those young people who come through the Young Pleasance, who go on to think, okay well we’d like to maybe form a company, they then become Ex-Young Pleasance: they are, at that moment, moving from what could be considered an amateur youth theatre company into a professional world. What determines what a professional artist is that at the moment you sell a ticket, well for me it is.
The fraught economics of Fringe employment & volunteers
Therefore, we’re going to have these arguments around pay, around all of these things, and I have had this discussion with Equity, with Bectu, numerous times around…Well if, say four young students decide to bring a show to the to the festival, and if one of them happens to be better at administration and calls themselves the producer, are we really going to hold their feet to the fire if they’re not paying their colleagues a minimum wage? Why can’t this group of people come together and risk their money and time, in order to do this?
I think we’re in danger of losing that young entrepreneurial artist. If we try to construct around that that that idea, that somehow everybody’s entitled to earning a living in the arts…I don’t think you are. I think that you know if you are an actor and your employed by a company, then that’s a very different scenario. In the Fringe there are so many groups of young people, amongst whom are many who don’t even want for a career in the arts, but are looking for something really amazing to do with their summer holiday, and I think that that has a place. I would be really worried if we were going to destroy all of that because a few people feel that the money is going in the wrong direction.
Volunteers aren’t being exploited by definition
I think the same around this issue of volunteers and venues ‘exploiting young people’. Now where there is bad practice happening across the Festival, we’ve got to get rid, we’ve got to clean things up from that point of view — I completely agree with it — but again, you know we’ve got to be careful we don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. For example, if you if you bring a play to Pleasance 2 for example, there is a team of five people who operate in that venue; one or two of them are probably employed, who are professional technicians or stage managers, or venue managers who run that space. Now in most other Fringe venues, that’s all you get. Well in the Pleasance we thought in order to support shows better, why not offer some of these positions up to those people who want to come? These volunteers we pay subsistence, cover expenses as much as we can, and provide good, single-room accommodation. If we didn’t organise this, there’s absolutely no way those people could afford it, certainly not at the moment. It’s only thanks to our arrangement with the University we can offer these digs.
I think we’re in danger of losing that young entrepreneurial artist. If we try to construct around that that that idea, that somehow everybody’s entitled to earning a living in the arts…
Anthony Alderson
On volunteers…
We’ve worked hard with Volunteer Edinburgh we’ve spent a lot of time consulting with them, and actually I was very pleased that they came back and said, “This is really amazing what you offer!”
Part of it is some of those people coming who have no real experience, and giving them an opportunity to come and dip their toes in the water for a for a month. Now, some of them never come back, some of them go off and have other careers, but I still think they will have gained something amazing from the experience. I think it gives you incredible confidence; it puts you this festival which has a habit of throwing people into the deep end in a way that I don’t think any other environment does. For me this is the most amazing thing that people get out of it.
Sometimes, they come back…
Then there are those who come back the following year and volunteer again, and get a little bit more experience. We run something called the Yellow Pages – a rather silly name for our alumni database — and whenever we get a job through, or some producer rings up and says they’re looking for a stage manager, it goes straight on Yellow Pages. It’s amazing how that database has created job opportunities.
Volunteers, a source of pride, not shame
These volunteers, these young people should be the thing that we are proudest about in this festival. If we were to get rid of the volunteers what would happen would be The Pleasance could no longer offer five people in Pleasance 2, we’d only have one or two; The cost would get thrown back onto the visiting companies, who would then be in a situation where they couldn’t afford it, so they couldn’t afford to come. The alternative is we’d obviously have to raise the ticket price. Before we know it we’d be up at £25 a ticket, which would then alienate an awful lot of those young people who want to bring a show for the first time. Audiences aren’t going to pay £25 to go and see unknown shows.
We’ve got to rebalance the thing, there is no doubt: there ain’t enough money in the system. The economics of it are pretty mad. There was an accountant a few years back who offered, through the Fringe Society to kind of have a look at the books of all the venues, and see if the if he couldn’t bust some of the myths of the Festival. Everybody sent him there budgets and accounts quite openly yeah, on the basis that it was all confidential, and he just came back and said, ‘the only thing I can work out is that you’re all mad, you’re absolutely mad for wanting to do what you’re doing; I don’t I don’t understand why you would do this!‘
Not a get rich quick, or slow, scheme…
I think it’s too easy to walk through the gates of The Pleasance and and kind of look at it holistically and think, well someone’s making a lot of money, and someone is making a lot of money: it’s the city of Edinburgh. I’m trying to persuade the Fringe Society that there is an exercise to be done in tracking each £10 note and just working out where it goes. This festival brings to the country probably something in the region of £700 million to 1 billion every time it does it.
The legacy is far greater than any sporting event that we’ve ever put on, and yet we treat it as something doesn’t require investment; if you think of it in terms of the what it brings to the local economy then it’s less something like 0.05%. We’ve taken it for granted for so long, and we are now reaching a point where organizations like The Pleasance have to look at it and ask themselves if it makes sense anymore. Is there a better way, as a charitable organization, that we could support artists? I don’t think there is, but it’s worth asking the question. We’ve had that meeting time and time again which is: what do we want? What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Should we be doing it? How do we do it differently?… We always come back and decide what we’re doing is quite a good thing and we should be proud of that.
Fiscal transparency
I think what you’ll see this year, probably more than in other years, is, that I’ve got a real desire to open the books and let everybody see you know how it works, see the economics, see how the budget fits together…and ask the question of the of those people who want to see the Fringe change as to how they would do it differently, because I’d love to know; I’d love that advice.
How has/Has the pandemic/lockdown affected how you approach your work?
Well, 85% of the revenue that The Pleasance generates every year comes from the Festival. The Pleasance was born in Edinburgh, out of the Fringe. We opened our London development centre because we needed to get the money. In the old days you’d make all the money in Edinburgh, still have a little by November, and be skint by February the next year. We opened the theatre in London because we recognized that we needed some all-year cashflow, to keep the organization bumping along till the Festival comes round again.
Being one of the ‘Big Four’ comes with risks…
Maybe this is a silly thing to say, but I don’t think many people appreciate that to put on a festival you take a whopping great risk, and in our case a £2.7 million risk every summer, and then you put it all on this this roulette board called the Fringe, and say well we’ve got to balance the books at the end of it! So, for us, the pandemic for us financially started in September 2019 because that was the last time we were earning any money. We’d already paid out a lot of money, we committed quite a lot of cost to the upcoming 2020 festival so, we not only lost that investment of around £150,000, but we were also paying the £750,000 head office overheads. So all of a sudden, we were looking at losing something in the region of £800,000.
Thank God for furlough, there was no way any of us could have survived without it, and I’m incredibly grateful to the Government. It was an absolutely essential. The way I saw it was that Government closed us, not the pandemic, and this hit the arts harder than probably most other industries, save hospitality perhaps.
£11 tickets don’t make rich directors
I think the difficulty was then how do you then keep it going? The furlough was part of it, now at that point I know a lot of arts organisations decided that that they had to cut salaries, say back to 80%. I took the decision that that was a really bad idea because at The Pleasance none of us learn a lot of money, we depend on our ticket sales and the average is still only about £11. So, I took the decision that in order to keep our team together we had to keep salaries at 100%, and it was our job to then go out and find money. So, we put in place of public fundraising ask, which raised some money; we went out to trust and foundations; we got a couple of grants in Scotland and the first two bits of the cultural recovery fund in London.
The difficulty I found with all of them was that none of them recognized the unbelievably unusual cash flow of an event organization that puts on a big festival! I mean the latest the latest cultural fund which has come out of Scotland, I think we’re ineligible because we no longer have an office in Edinburgh where we’re paying rates. Any sensible organization would have given up their offices and all started to work from home, but now we’re no longer paying commercial rates, even though we’re charitable, it means that we’re no longer eligible for any of the funding.
I don’t understand why that distinction would be made! It seems completely mad to me to take a festival of this size and this important; this is the absolutely Edinburgh’s cultural crown, and the Scottish government doesn’t appear to be taking it very seriously. I hate saying it, as we’ve had little bits of money from it but the dialogue around it is seems to be along the lines of, “oh well they can just trade their way out of this…” and I genuinely can’t see some of those venues surviving. There’s a real danger with some big venues surviving, and struggle on, and lots and lots of very little ones. It’s the bit in the middle that will be smashed to pieces, and just won’t exist.
It won’t happen immediately, it’ll happen over two or three years…we’ve got to go back to the drawing board and decide on priorities around what the arts are; why it exists. There’s a reason why the arts are considered a privileged occupation, and that’s because we’ve destroyed arts education. Why on earth would anybody tell their child to go into the arts? They just wouldn’t. I mean I’ve managed to produce an actor, a musician, and an artist and any other parent would wonder what they’d done wrong!.
The arts needs more support, it’s needed that for a long time. it’s a very, very large growing industry: entertainment media, and the fringe has been a feeder for television, film, theatre across this entire country. It’s a feeder for what is a multi-multi-billion-pound industry. I don’t think you’ve got to be that smart to understand that. It bewilders me that we can’t get this right. We’re pushed all the time in the arts, to go find answers to all the problems stemming from the collapse of arts education, around diversity, inclusion, and all of those things. Yet we’re not getting the support in order to do it.
… this is the absolutely Edinburgh’s cultural crown, and the Scottish government doesn’t appear to be taking it very seriously.
Anthony Alderson
Everybody in the arts would be head over heels if there was more money and we could solve some of these problems. You’re preaching to the most converted bunch of people on the Globe!
We took the decision early on, that we had to keep everybody on board: we had to try and do it. We have quite a flexible theatre in London and so into October 2020 as the first lockdown was really coming to an end, we decided to take all the seats out and we opened the Venue as a cabaret-style space with table service. There were two reasons for this: we have we have three theatres in the space, and the foyer’s never been big enough to cope with a full audience, so it meant that the audience for the main house went straight to their seats, there was no queuing, there was no queue at the bar, everybody had a bit more space, and also we could build proper dividers between all of those tables.
Learning from restrictions
My view was, well people are happy sitting in a restaurant then why don’t we just be a restaurant? Why don’t we look like a restaurant? It really worked and in a funny way we found a kind of USP for a space; we’re filling it more often because it’s smaller. The bar take has certainly gone up. It costs more money to run it but it’s working.
We then got into a festival in 2021 and we got a little bit of Event Scotland funding: we couldn’t have done it without it. It paid for the event but it didn’t put back that three quarters of a million in head office overheads. We’re going into our third year of that cycle, so in very simple terms we’ve written off the reserve that we’ve built. We had very carefully put a little bit of money aside each year just for that rainy day. Now nobody thought that the rainy day would last 3 years, but it will be 3 years before we get that revenue back.
We’re obviously doing a very bad job of telling this story, and I think that’s we’ve got to change, I think the story of the arts, well for anyone who walks into the Pleasance, is that it looks like this is a wealthy organization, with tons of money, and somebody’s making a fortune because we’ve got big celebrities on stage etc, but the truth of it is: it really genuinely isn’t. It barely breaks even every year. It does pay that head office overhead, London sort of looks after itself, Edinburgh contributed to that a bit, but we’ve got to come up with a different structure. I think we need to take a deep, long look at the Fringe as a whole, and ask whether the pot is being shared fairly enough.
Who takes the bar? Edinburgh University
We need to look at the bar deal with the university, it makes up 35% of their annual income. I think universities have probably saved themselves a great deal of money over the pandemic, not speaking of any institution specifically, and whilst I feel bad about saying it, they are being supported.
The Pleasance has been four charities working together very successfully for many years: The University who we rent certain rooms from, The Sports Centre, the Chaplaincy, and The Student’s Association who run all the bars. The bar revenues essentially go to the student association; of course, whilst autonomous, the association and the university must have some connection at a very high level, far further up than we might think. The Association probably costs the university less because of the Festival. Now pressure is being placed on every department to solve budget problems, but we as a society have to decide on which bits are worth having, and how we fund them.
The Fringe Society – a funding sponge?
Another big part of it is: we’ve got to look at the Fringe Society. I was on the board of the society for 14 years, and the costs went up and up. Now the ticket economy alone is supposedly worth £30 million, or it was in 2019, and the budget of The Society is £5 million. Now, not all of it comes out of the ticket economy but if the Fringe Society is taking the sponsorship, and somebody else isn’t; if they’re taking the trust and Foundation money then somebody else isn’t getting that. You can’t have an organization in the middle of the festival which should be supporting the thing yeah that is essentially competing with the very same organizations who are trying to put on the events.
It doesn’t make logical sense. Now they would argue very strenuously that this is not the how things work but unfortunately that’s what it’s become. There is a direct correlation between when The Pleasance was earning sponsorship money, and when the Fringe Society started doing big sponsorship deals with the likes of Virgin money. They suddenly dominated the landscape and the other big sponsors decided, well that’s Virgin Money’s gig, we can’t, or won’t go in. There’s a balance to be made, and I’m not for abolishing the Fringe Society, but I am saying, look perhaps we could do this in a slightly different way.
What are your hopes for this year’s (2022) Fringe? Do you have a stretch goal, all things going your way? How do you think promoters/venues can work best with performers to re-establish live performance?
I think that the key first of all is to open. I think we forget sometimes, but venues form the very infrastructure of a Festival. Without the repeated investment, and some of that is just as simple taking five years to pay for all the black curtains, all of that rigging equipment; it’s all practical stuff that we need. That takes years of investment to build that up to a certain level, so the best thing we can do is come back, and be there, and do it to the best of our ability with the resources we’ve got.
Our second approach was then to go, ‘okay we raised some money during the pandemic, we’ve got a louder voice than a lot of performers’, so we said, ‘right 30% of that money we will put directly back into those doing their debut at the Fringe’. Now we haven’t completely worked out how to spend that money yet but it will go directly into that into that. The other part of it is we’re working with trusts and foundations, we’re working with patrons who donate to The Pleasance, and all of that money is going directly into the art. Little bits of it go into paying for some of the core costs, but we will support at least 30 artists this year in getting their work back to the Festival.
We need to praise the festivals like we should
It’s also about about making absolutely sure that we don’t kick each other in the teeth continually! Look we’ve got to start supporting the community. I’m a Scot, and I know I don’t sound one, I’m a Scot in disguise; I grew up in Dalkeith. The reason I got involved with the Fringe was because I was a teenager in the city and fell in love with it. But Scotland has a real problem with success: we’re not very good at celebrating it. Particularly at home, and we’ve got to be better at taking the success stories and seeing them for what they genuinely are, instead of trying to read between the lines and seeing negativity where negativity doesn’t exist. We’ve got to be better at it. I’ve moved back to Scotland – Anthony lives locally now — a few Scots who live in London said to me ‘you’re going to find that really difficult’ …people joke about the dour Scots mentality, but it’s a real thing, and quite hard to deal with sometimes.
I think Scotland has got so much to be optimistic about and so what I also want is some optimism in this Festival! Stop finding ways to tear it. Put it back on and allow us to fix it slowly: we’re not going to fix it overnight, we’re not going to get it right in one go, but at least celebrate it for what it is, which is the greatest platform for freedom of expression anywhere on the planet. Celebrate that. Let it come back and stop tearing it to pieces.
What’s your position on the costs of accommodation in the city during the Fringe?
It’s very, very sad, I mean how do you control a free market? People want to rent their houses, and everything else. I mean I think we’ve addressed some problems, but we’ve created other ones. Our big hope was AirBnB as a leveller in some way, but in fact what it did was create an easier way for people to earn a lot. It went absolutely through the roof.
Rent controls, maybe the only way
There is only way to do, and that is to simply cap it; to simply say, ‘this is how much it should cost and you can’t charge more during the Festival.’ We have to legislate around it, I don’t see any other way. I don’t think bedroom taxes work or rather, I think bedroom taxes are probably there for something else… but you can’t be expected to pay your mortgage out of one month of the year which is more common than it should be. I don’t think people outside of the loop really appreciate just how much money some private landlords are earning…
As a fringe performer you’ve got to sell 20 to 30 tickets every day just to pay your accommodation cost…and people wonder why the Fringe is broken! That is the single biggest problem. I’ve joked many times about bringing ships into Leith, and parking them up and putting you know containerized accommodation on them. let’s go and build containerized parks everywhere else.
If this was the Olympic Games there would be a site for the performers; two and a half thousand athletes would have one single room accommodation with training grounds with rehearsal rooms and whatever else.
A Festival village for performers
This festival brings more money and more legacy into this country than the Olympic Games will do in London. I think it’s about time that we started recognizing the massive impact that this festival has and we started investing in it properly. it takes a tiny sum of money to build whatever infrastructure that needs to be, and they would pay something, make it 10 quid a night, and put in a decent café that sells reasonable healthy, cheap grub, and give them a fleet of bicycles to get around the city. It’s not a difficult thing to do, in 60 years this festival will generate, if you count inflation, we will have generated £100 billion in the Scottish economy: build us a community in which we can house artists properly, it’s so simple. Or take every single bit of student accommodation, and fund it: we’re not asking for that for free. Queen Margaret’s University, Napier, all of those places that have all those halls of residence. So, okay we can’t kick the postgrads out, but the only way to take on the private market is to either remove the need, or cap it, and legislate for it.
We’re all aware of an increasingly vocal concerns from some Edinburgh residents with regards to “over-tourism.”
a) What’s your take on the current situation?
b) What do you think is the best way forward?
I suppose it depends on what you call a “tourist.”
I think, if you analyse the Fringe numbers, the people who are coming from abroad are less than 12%: it’s a tiny number of people. Edinburgh is one of the most glorious cities in the world, it has cheap airlines and other, cheaper travel options, and as all of those things have expanded then more and more people are going to come.
I think we’ve got to find a way of finding a pragmatic balance in my mind, I don’t know what the Cockburn Society’s view of the world is, but I have a feeling yeah — and this is a hunch – that they’d quite like Edinburgh to go back to being a sort of Georgian museum with the sort of wafting harpsicord music to be coming out of a window somewhere. That strikes me as being the most awful kind of privilege.
Our big hope was AirBnB as a leveller in some way, but in fact what it did was create an easier way for people to earn a lot. It went absolutely through the roof.
Anthony Alderson
I do think we’ve got to be more respectful to the World Heritage site, in terms of what we do. I have nothing against Ed and Charlie and, I have nothing against the use of Princes Street Gardens in a respectful way, but I think the Council has gone too far. The of it looking like a muddy field following Christmas upsets me as a resident. There must be a way to do that event where we don’t have what is a really beautiful part of Edinburgh turned upside down, and then 3 months later we then do it again! I think we owe it to the city to be more respectful.
Keeping Edinburgh beautiful…
We have this big challenge with fly posting: how do we get rid of all the fly posting? Well what we did it create legal posting boards, but then the Council decided to issue a single contract monopoly to one company, and posting went through the roof! This single company then got all this money to keep creating more and more poster sites, to make more and more money. So now we seem to have got back to the same the very same problem we started with! If we could create a decent marketplace where three or four operators could work it within it, then the thing becomes slightly more practical. It strikes me that that this problem arises through bone-idleness on the part of the Council. To issue a single contract to one contractor to do all the posts around the city is just moronic.
I’ve always taken the view that if you want to open an antique shop the best place to open it is next to another antique shop. I think there were simple things that we could do to open the city back up again. There was big resistance to St Andrew’s Square [Where one could find a big Fringe hospitality hub up till a few years ago] from Essential Edinburgh because it didn’t want that part being ruined — seemingly ruined. Use it once a year, not twice, so that it doesn’t have to become an Ice-Rink and Christmas Time. I’ve got nothing against Charlie and Ed, or the way they do business but there are better ways that we could treat this city, with just a little bit more dignity.
Better infrastructure, better public transport
Lothian buses, I’ve thought of this for ages, could actually make some money out of it: we don’t have a festival bus route. It’s just pragmatic, make it a hop-on, hop-off. Charge 50p or £1 to go round on it, and it would pay for itself. We could remove more cars from the city centre during August and beyond. We could do with more cycle lanes too, make it a far nicer place to live. I’m a cyclist, and it’s the most terrifying thing to do, cycling in this city, given the potholes, and total lack of infrastructure for cyclists is just woeful.
I was going to try to keep off the tram, but it seems we’re paying for a piece of infrastructure that’s utterly useless.
I suggest it might be hugely beneficial to Leith, and perhaps open it up as a Fringe location and relieve the hyper-concentration in the Old Town.
That’s genuinely true, but…If we, at The Pleasance, decide to open a new room we reckon we won’t get the money back for 3 years. We can’t transform the Fringe overnight; the Council are going to have to help us do it. That’s not a case of limiting licensing in one place, and opening it in another. It’s a case of being open to funding bids from folks who can open hubs, say in Leith.
It strikes me that that this problem arises through bone-idleness on the part of the Council. To issue a single contract to one contractor to do all the posts around the city is just moronic.
Anthony Alderson
Anthony suggests that the Council could support such efforts for the first 3 years, subsidising cashflow, and then be paid back if, and when an effort works out.
Help us out, help us do it… little things like putting in a Festival bus route, bicycle lanes, get rid of more cars during August, that would really help, and it would make the city more attractive for everyone. We’ve moved of course, over to the EICC [Edinburgh International Conference Centre], and we’re trying to push that whole side of Edinburgh. There’s a great big square behind it, but it’s eye wateringly expensive to hire, I think it was something like £1000 a day! The Council seems to think that sort of money’s being generated, it simply isn’t, so we can’t afford it, and don’t do it. So we come back to where we can afford to be.
There’s an economy of scale. The Pleasance has gotten bigger over time out of necessity, there is an economy of scale. The more rooms your putting money through, the little bits of money that come out of each…it’s a little bit like the bar. Take Underbelly, every time they add another metre of bar, I imagine they make more money, and we do too! There’s no doubt about it.
The Fringe isn’t taken seriously enough
If we were businesses that were really taken seriously, Scottish Enterprise would be all over us looking investment opportunities. These [the Fringe venues/promoters] are genuine entrepreneurs, smart people working out ways…they want to change the world in a funny way. We’re not in it for the money. We’ve got stuck on this thing of ‘Oh the Festival is too rich, people are making too much money, it’s all unfair.‘
If we could expose the truth, you know, properly look at this in a genuinely constructive way…it’s the only way to shift it.
I suspect the business rates in certain places are higher than they would be if it wasn’t for the Festival. I think the licensing situation is just ridiculous. The cost of licensing in Midlothian compared to the cost of licensing the same thing in the city of Edinburgh…it’s thousands of times higher. This excuse that it’s to do with the cost of managing it, I I don’t buy it myself. Pleasance 2, in terms of its layout hasn’t changed in 25 years.
Fly-posting, a problem exploited, not fixed by the city council
One of the arguments about the fly-posting was that came from the Council was that it was costing a quarter of a million pounds to clean it up, which is a valid point.
Anthony explained that the Council had threatened removal of licenses if the fly-posting wasn’t removed. The Pleasance, and others pointed out that whilst their name was on it, they weren’t actually responsible for the posting. He, and others suggested the Council simply charge each promoter for a contribution to the costs of removal, thus making money, rather than spending it. This they did.
Overnight they earned a considerable sum of money. I know I’m looking at this simplistically, and there will be other major costs associated, but there is no doubt that this tidying went from being a cost, to being a saving. But that money was never reinvested. One of the fears I have around the bedroom tax, is it won’t be spent on cleaning streets, or bins, or getting the recycling done; all of this is always pushed back onto the venue. I mean, we haven’t even begun to talk about ventilation, but that’s the big beast that’s coming, but that’s also going to be pushed onto venues. There’s going to be very little support to get it right. It’s a can of worms, nobody really wants to open.
Do you think Edinburgh is still the most important arts festival in the world? If yes, how can it stay there, if no, how can it get back?
I think we’d be very foolish if we thought we could just keep the Festival as it is. Performers, audiences, venues, act with their feet, because they have to. Look at the way theatre has transformed, companies like Punch Drunk, emerged because they couldn’t afford to be in theatres; people are using different spaces. We have to look at theatre in a different way. We have to stop protecting Victorian buildings, and look at temporary structures that can be put up and go places, and could be used for other things.
Fund the Fringe, or risk losing it
Theatre is such a simple mechanism, in some ways. I can see the advert in the paper, ‘Festival for sale to the highest bidder,’ and I can see some city coming along and offering the £20 million a year or such, and the performers will move very, very fast when that happens, because they want the money. We absolutely can’t rest on our laurels, we have to be very, very careful.
It is currently a death by a thousand cuts, it’s not a single thing that we’re getting wrong: we’re getting tonnes wrong, and tonnes right. I’m more optimistic than pessimistic, but we are getting a lot of it wrong, and there’s no honest dialogue about this. I don’t believe that Brian Ferguson is wring honestly about one side or the other. I think the journalism around this needs to be healthier. I think there needs to be a much cleverer debate about how the Festival moves on, and it might not work in my favour, and I accept that for what it is.
But if the Festival is to survive, it needs investment, and a much smarter debate.
Do you have a favourite, or top 3 favourite acts who’ve worked with you so far?
I’ve seen thousands of shows in my lifetime, and some that have just blown me away.
There was an Israeli woman who brought a show called “DAH-ee”, which is the, I think, the Hebrew word for ‘enough, or stop.’ It was a one woman play, concerning different dialogues of people in roadside cafes or whatever else, at the moment at which a car bomb, or an explosion went off. It was the most extraordinary…it was dealt with in the most beautiful, humane, touching way – there was never a dry eye in the theatre.
I saw another play, Badac Theatre company brought up a play about domestic violence – founder Steven Lambert has become a very good friend. He hung a lamb’s carcass in the middle of the stage. On one side of the stage was a man, on the other side of the stage was a woman, and they’re reciting this sort of poetry and in the front on a box was an actor playing a child. He (Steve) had a piece of copper wire, a big piece of copper cabling, so that every time they portrayed the violence that he had towards his wife, he would beat this carcass. You saw over the course of an hour, what physical violence actually does to a body: the broken bones the flesh, the bruising. By the end of this hour this carcass was beaten to a pulp, I mean, it was it was the most disgusting portrayals of domestic violence I’ve ever seen in my life. Three quarters of the way through this play you realize that the mother has died from her injuries, and this horrific man is now going to do exactly the same thing to his child. I will never ever-ever forget that performance, it changed my life. We had animal rights protesters who came every day and tried to set off the fire alarms because of the what they saw as a waste of a life, and it was really difficult to argue against but it was also a really, really important piece of work. There was never any applause, it would have been the wrong reaction, people simply got up, and walked out in silence. There was a solemnity I’ve never experienced in the theatre before.
What comes next, is one of the funnier things I have ever heard from the world of theatre producing…
We did this show called ‘Auto Auto’, which had a car on stage, and the idea of the play was for two German percussionists to destroy the car by the end of the hour. It had to be Vauxhall Astra and from the passenger side it had to look like a brand new car [facing the audience], and then over the course of the hour they played it like a drum, and by the end of the hour they’ve destroyed the car: they’d cut the roof off, they’d smashed the windows then. It was a sort of protest of the automobile.
They sent me the rider and I had to buy 27 Vauxhall Astras. I think it was 2010-2011, and it was a really difficult thing to do, there just weren’t that many on the road, but I found a place out near Ingleston, one of these big fleet places – you see cars parked till Thursday. The sort of place where people go around and take parts off them. I went to see this guy and he just couldn’t believe his luck when I said, ‘I’ve got I’ve got to find 27 Vauxhall Astras. I want you to put all the windows back in; I want you to drain all the fuel and oil and make them safe to be on stage. Oh yes, and we then want you to deliver them, and then the following day, I want you to come back and take away the wreck!‘
He absolutely thought I was a nut case. So I got one of the percussionists to come to have a look at these cars. We were standing at the top of this hill looking down over the 27 Vauxhall Astra and he turned to me and he just said, “Anthony, I can’t play the ones with the sunroofs” …and 22 of them had sunroofs!
I had to buy another 22 Vauxhall Astras so at one point I 49 Vauxhall Astras! Madness, utter Madness!
Is there any particular up and coming talent you’re excited to bring to Edinburgh this year?
It’s so hard because, you read these things on paper, and you don’t actually know…
I have no doubt there were will be some truly magnificent pieces of work, but some we’re not ready to launch, but as soon as things firm back I’ll come back and tell you.
It will all be wonderful.
Don’t take the curtains for granted
I really hope we get a genuine opportunity to do it in its fullest form, I hope there are no bumps in the road from now. One of the biggest challenges right now is just getting everything out of the warehouse after 3 years. Take those black curtains, who knows what’s been living in them?
That alone could be 10’s of thousands of pounds just cleaning them. The cost of living’s gone up, the cost of a piece of plywood has gone up. In this year, we’re seeing inflation everywhere, and it’s really hard to see what effect that’s going to have.
Just to get it back on, and open is going to be a miracle in and of itself. No one should underestimate how unbelievably difficult that’s going to be.
The biggest Edinburgh Fringe ever?
I still think, with a fair wind behind us it could be the biggest Festival we’ve ever put on, I think it could be incredible. We exist in a very big market place, as one stool-holder, and sometimes it just comes down to market share. Even if the Festival is smaller, perhaps the impact on The Pleasance won’t be as great as across the board, but I don’t know, I genuinely don’t know.
All I do know is that we’ve got a really strong programme. I hope that audiences come out. I hope people don’t feel fearful. I mean we’re putting an enormous amount of investment, money we don’t even have, into ventilation systems, air conditioning, to make those rooms safer, and more comfortable. We are reducing capacity in some to improve comfort, but they are small rooms, and there will be groups of people in them who’re moving around the city. Who knows what this Festival will bring, but there’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going to need support of some kind to get it on, and that message has to come out loud and clear. This ain’t happening without someone helping us, we’re not going to return to normal. Let us do it, let us try, because I think that’s the key: don’t put anymore hurdles in the way, because it’s hard enough as it is.
Publishing the budget?
If I’m feeling really brave, I’m going to publish the budget, show what it costs. We’re a charitable organisation, so it’s all pretty much online anyway, but I don’t see any point in hiding. If you look back over the history of inflation – what a subject to talk about – you’ll find the cost of putting it on has risen far higher than the tickets. We may well talk about the days of the £5 tickets, but if you go further back, they genuinely weren’t. In those early years of the 1950’s people did pay proper money to go to the theatre, and the Fringe when it began didn’t take place in pubs. We’ve slightly re-written history as if the Stand-up in the pub is the origin of the Fringe, which it genuinely isn’t! We need to look a little further.
Now I have nothing against the Free Fringe, which has its place, but I do think they have to stop tearing everyone else apart. One thing that’s very clear about an open access festival is that it doesn’t belong to one group.
I mean we’re putting an enormous amount of investment, money we don’t even have, into ventilation systems, air conditioning, to make those rooms safer, and more comfortable.
Anthony Alderson
PBH [Peter Buckley Hill] and I sat on the Fringe board together for years, we haven’t always agreed, but we’ve at least been tolerant towards each other’s point of view.
For me, in terms of progress towards inclusion and diversity, we are trying to make substantial changes. There is a big part of this debate which surrounds the issue of tolerance. It’s OK to have a different point of view, you may not agree, but you don’t have to tear into each other. We’ve all got to become a little more tolerant of each other.
Equal scrutiny of all venues…
We also have to be sure there’s the same level of scrutiny across venues, in terms of licensing, in terms of safety etc. I sometimes worry that a pub that is licensed throughout the year, that suddenly become Fringe venues, don’t always fall under the same scrutiny as we do. This purely worries me from a safety point of view.
I don’t profess to have any of the answers, but I do know how we do our bit, and that we’re doing it for the right reasons. The biggest challenge for me is that we just have to stop tearing it all apart, and start celebrating it for what it is: an absolute joy to an awful lot of people.
Invest, invest, invest
I’m mates with the lot who run the Montreal Comedy Festival, and every year I’m astonished at the sums of money that the city throws at that festival, in a really, really big way. They get it, they absolutely get that it’s worth the investment, and it could be done so carefully, and cleverly here, so no one’s running away with pots of money. They wouldn’t anyway, the Arts are an innately responsible part of our world, but it does need investment.
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