The Fringe has grown dramatically since its inception. Statistics for 2007 concluded that it was the largest on record: there were 31,000 performances of 2,050 different shows in 250 venues. Ticket sales amount to around £1.5 million.

Of the 2000+ shows, theatre was the largest genre in terms of number of shows until 2008, when it was overtaken by comedy, which has been the major growth area over the last 20 years. The other genres are, in order of number of shows: Music, Dance & Physical Theatre, Musicals & Opera, and Children's Shows, in addition to assorted Events and Exhibitions.

It is possible to sample some shows before committing to seeing them. For many years, the Fringe Club (variously in the High Street and at Teviot Row from 1981 to 2004) provided nightly showcases of Fringe fare to allow audiences to sample shows before purchasing tickets. The Fringe Club closed down in 2004, and various venues still provide "the Best of the Fest" and similar. The best opportunity is afforded by "Fringe Sunday", started in the High Street in 1981 and moved through pressure of popularity to Holyrood Park in 1983, which is held on the second Sunday of the Fringe when many companies perform all or part of their show for free. Having outgrown even Holyrood Park, this now takes place on The Meadows. Alternatively, on any day during the festival the pedestrianised area of the High Street around St. Giles Cathedral and the Fringe Office becomes the focal point for theatre companies to hand out flyers, perform scenes from their shows, and attempt to sell tickets. Many shows are "2 for 1" on the opening weekend of the Festival.

During the 2006 festival 20 venues got together to form the Associated Independent Venue Producers (AIVP). Its main role is to lobby public bodies for better publicity for the Fringe, and to seek improvements to Edinburgh's infrastructure to support increased numbers of festival-goers.

Your Fringe lowdown...

Unjuried festival

The role of the Fringe Society is to facilitate the festival, concentrating mainly on the challenging logistics of organising such a large event. Alistair Moffat (Fringe administrator 1976-1981) summarised the role of the Society when he said, “As a direct result of the wishes of the participants, the Society had been set up to help the performers that come to Edinburgh and to promote them collectively to the public. It did not come together so that groups could be invited, or in some way artistically vetted. What was performed and how it was done was left entirely to each Fringe group”. This approach is now sometimes referred to as an unjuried festival.

Quality

Over the years this approach has led to adverse criticisms about the quality of the arts on the Fringe. Much of this criticism comes from individual arts

critics in national newspapers, hard-line aficionados of the Edinburgh International Festival, and occasionally from the Edinburgh International Festival itself.

The Fringe's own position on this debate may be

summed up by Michael Dale (Fringe Administrator 1982-1986) in his book Sore Throats & Overdrafts, "No-one can say what the quality will be like overall.

It does not much matter, actually, for that is not the point of the Fringe ... The Fringe is a forum for ideas and achievement unique in the UK, and in the whole world ... Where else could all this be attempted, let

alone work". Views from the middle ground of this perennial debate point out that the Fringe is not complete artistic anarchy. Some venues do influence

or decide on the content of their programme, e.g. the Traverse and Aurora Nova.

A frequent criticism, well-aired in the media over

the last 20 years, has been that stand-up comedy is "taking over"

the Fringe, that a large proportion of newer audiences are drawn almost exclusively to stand-up comics (particularly to television comedy stars in famous venues), and that they are starting to regard

non-comedy events as "peripheral". The 2008 Fringe marked the first time that comedy has made up the largest category of entertainment.^[16]

The freedom to put on any show has led periodically to controversy when individual tastes in sexual explicitness or religion have been contravened. This has brought some into conflict with local city councillors. Needless to say, there have been the occasional performing groups who have deliberately tried to provoke controversy as a means of advertising their shows.

Power of larger venues

There are several large venues that contain many separate performing spaces, the most notable being Assembly, Pleasance, The Gilded Balloon and Underbelly. It is thought by some^[who?]

that each of these big, central, one-stop-shops

becoming in effect a "festival within the festival".

By staging many well-known acts in one place it is thought^{[by whom?]} that they are able to attract

audiences away from the more modest (and more difficult to find and get round) venues which,

by charging performing groups less, offer more "traditional" fringe events involving newcomers. Concerns over what can be seen as the

disproportionate power of these super venues

have been heightened by their use of corporate

sponsors and various attempts to work together,

e.g. the production of a programme covering their venues has been tried.^{[17][dead link]}

Ticket prices

In the mid 1990s only the occasional top show charged GB£10 per seat, while the average price was £5–£7; in 2006, prices were frequently £10+ and £20 was reached for the first time in 2006 for a show that lasted 1 hour. Some of the reasons that are put

forward for the increases include: the increasing

costs associated with hiring large venues; theatre

licences and related costs; plus the price of accommodation during the Edinburgh Festival

which is expensive for performers as well as for audiences.

In recent years a different business model has been adopted by two organisations; The Free Fringe and

The Laughing Horse Free Edinburgh Fringe Festival

have introduced the concept of the free show. There were 22 shows that came under this banner in 2005, growing to 69 in 2006 and 320 in 2007. Ninety percent of these free shows are comedy. There is also the "pay what you can" model of the Forest Fringe, discussed below.

Costs to performers

Conversely, putting on a show at the Fringe is costly to performers,^[18] due to registration fees, venue hire,

cost of accommodations, and travel to Edinburgh.

There are graduated registration fees, inexpensive venues, and inexpensive accommodations, but despite this, few shows even break even.^{[citation needed]}

 Instead, the festival is touted as a networking opportunity, training ground or springboard for

future career advancement, and exciting and fun for performers as well as spectators.^[19]

Fringe of the Fringe

The Fringe at times itself sprouts a fringe. While the festival is unjuried, participating in the Fringe requires registration, payment of a registration fee,^[18] and use

of a Fringe venue. For example, the 2008 registration fee was £289.05.^[20] Some outdoor spaces also require registration, notably the Royal Mile.^[21][22] 

Thus some artists perform outside of the auspices

of the Fringe, either individually or as part of a

festival or in association with a venue, either

outdoors or in non-Fringe venues. By way of

illustration, in 1987 there was a "Fringe Fringe",^[23]

 and in 2007 Etiquette, a show by the London group Rotozaza, took place in the cafe of the

Aurora Nova venue (an official Fringe venue) and

tickets were available through the venue box office,

but the show was not part of the Fringe, due to registration fees.^[24] Starting in 2007, and continuing

in 2008 and 2009, a primary "Fringe of the Fringe" festival is the Forest Fringe,^[25] at The Forest Café, in association with the Battersea Arts Centre (BAC). The aim is to encourage experimentation by reducing costs to performers – not charging for space, and providing accommodations – and to audience –

all shows being "pay what you can".^[26]

According to the Fringe Society there were 261 venues in 2006, although over 80 of them housed event(s) or exhibition(s) which are not part of the main performing art genres that the Fringe is generally known for.

Over the first 20 years each performing group had its own hall. However, by around 1970 the concept of sharing a hall became popular, principally as a means of cutting costs. It could be possible to host up to 6 or 7 different shows per day in a hall. The obvious next step was to partition a venue into two or more performing spaces; the majority of today's venues fit into this category. This approach was taken a stage further by the early 1980s with the arrival of the super-venue - a location that contains many performing spaces. The Circuit was one of the early super-venues; it was in fact a tented “village”, including one space with room for an audience of 400, that was situated on a piece of empty ground, popularly known as “The Hole in The Ground” where the Saltire complex, which now houses the Traverse Theatre, was subsequently built in the early 1990s.

Nowadays, venues come in all shapes and sizes, with use being made of every conceivable space from proper theatres (e.g. Traverse or Bedlam Theatre), custom-made theatres (e.g. Music Hall in the Assembly Rooms), historic castles (C venues), to lecture theatres (Pleasance, George Square Theatre and Sweet ECA), conference centres, other university rooms and spaces, temporary structures (The Famous Spiegeltent and theUdderbelly ), churches and church halls, schools, a public toilet, the back of a taxi, and even in the audience's own homes.

The groups that operate the venues are also very diverse: some are commercial and others not-for-profit; some operate year-round, while others exist only to run venues at the Fringe.

From the performers' perspective, the decision on where to perform is typically based on a mixture of cost, location (close proximity to other venues is seen as a plus), and the philosophy of the venue, i.e. some will prefer a site where commercial consideration is not the obvious primary driver, a site where they will feel more comfortable and more an integral part of the venue.

The professionalism of venues and of organisations has increased hugely. The church hall at Lauriston Place used by Edinburgh University Theatre Company as Bedlam Theatre was taken over by Richard Crane and Faynia Williams from Bradford University in 1975 to house "Satan's Ball". This was an ambitious benchmark production which inspired others.^{[citation needed]} By 1980 when William Burdett-Coutts set up Assembly Theatre in the Assembly Rooms on George Street (formerly the EIF Festival Club), the investment in staging, lighting and sound meant that the original amateur or student theatricals had been left behind. There was still theatre done on a shoestring, but several cultural entrepreneurs had raised the stakes to the point where a venue like Aurora (St Stephen's Church, Stockbridge) could hold its head up in any major world festival.

The Pleasance Courtyard during the
2006 Edinburgh Festival Fringe

The concept of Fringe Theatre has been copied around the world. The largest and most celebrated of these spawned festivals are Adelaide Fringe Festival and Edmonton International Fringe Festival. The number of such events continues to grow, particularly in the USA and Canada. In the case of Edinburgh (est 1947) the Fringe is an addition to the Festival proper. Hence the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. But where there is no actual Festival to be added to - such as New York (est 1997) - or where the festival is more "fringe" than anything else, the word comes before the word "festival", thus the "Adelaide Fringe Festival." (est 1979).

In the field of drama, the Edinburgh Fringe has premièred several plays, most notably Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard (1966) and Moscow Stations(1994) which starred Tom Courtenay. Over the years, it has attracted a number of companies that have made repeated visits to the Fringe, and in doing so helped to set high artistic standards. They have included: the London Club Theatre Group (1950s), 7:84 Scotland (1970s), the Children's Music Theatre, later the National Youth Music Theatre under Jeremy James Taylor, the National Student Theatre Company (from the 1970s), Communicado (1980s and 1990s), Red Shift (1990s), and Grid Iron. The Fringe is also the staging ground of the American High School Theatre Festival.

In the field of comedy, the Fringe has provided a platform that has allowed the careers of many performers to bloom. In the 1960s, various members of the Monty Python team appeared in student productions, as subsequently did Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, the latter three with the 1981 Cambridge Footlights. Atkinson was at Oxford. Notable companies in the 1980s have included Complicite and the National Theatre of Brent. More recent comedy performers to have been 'discovered' include Rory Bremner, Fascinating Aida, Reduced Shakespeare Company, Steve Coogan, Jenny Eclair, The League of Gentlemen, Al Murray and Rich Hall.

Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2008

Edinburgh Fringe Festival History

The story so far...

compliments of

www..edfringe.com

The Fringe story began in 1947, when the Edinburgh International Festival was launched. It was seen as a post-war initiative to re-unite Europe through culture, and was so successful that it inspired more performers than there was room for.

Well aware that there would be a good crowd and focused press interest, six Scottish companies and two English decided to turn up uninvited and fend for themselves.

We're just about to begin our 63nd Fringe and it's still young! It lives in the present, shifting and changing from year to year to accommodate all of the people who want to attend. Over the years, as the Fringe Organisation got bigger so did the programme. Companies began multiplying as soon as the Fringe got its own phone, and by the timethe computers were installed over 30 years later, hundreds were coming.

The pages here form the facts of the Fringe story,

a story which is far from over....

History of the Fringe
27 May 2008

We may be approaching the 62nd Fringe but let's not forget the years gone by. Here you can look at our history since 1947 right up to the present day. The dates form the facts of the Fringe Society story - a story which is far from over.

1947
Eight theatre groups turn up uninvited to the first Edinburgh International Festival. The inn is full so they check in at venues away from the big public stages. The first Fringe has been born. There is no central box office, no Fringe Programme, no advance publicity – the interlopers just arrived.

1948
Robert Kemp of the Evening News unknowingly coins the name that is to later describe the largest and most famous festival in the world: 'Round the fringe of the official Festival drama there seems to be a more private enterprise than before... I'm afraid some of us are not going to be often at home during the evenings'.

1951
Edinburgh University Students open a drop-in centre at 25 Haddington Place. Used by many early Fringe performers, it provides cheap food and a bed for the night.

1954
Fringe groups hold their first meeting. 'We are cutting each other's throats,' says one producer. Joint box office and publicity are given high priority as a cure for this calamity.

1955
Edinburgh University students set up a central box office and café in part of the Old College. By this time the student limb of the Fringe is already established with Durham, Oxford, Birmingham and Edinburgh universities represented regularly. Thirteen groups attend.

1958
The Festival Fringe Society becomes organised. A constitution is drawn up, a brochure with all non-festival shows published, tickets sold centrally, a club set up and information given. Artistic vetting is to have no place in the societies aims, a decision which remains central to the development of the Fringe.

1959
The first Fringe Club, box office and information bureau opens in the YMCA in South Andrew Street. The Fringe is expanding. This extract from a Fringe questionnaire made out by Lee Puppet Show in 1959 shows early concerns as to its size: 'The festival business this year was not up to the previous eight festivals done by this theatre. Reasons: 1. The official festival did not attract the type of visitor it had done in the past. 2. The Fringe was too big. There was not room for three puppet companies at this time.' There are 19 groups in total.

1962
The Fringe Bulletin warns: 'Competition is intense – we expect the number of Fringe Groups to increase to 34 - against last years 28.' The festival Fringe Society is run entirely by volunteers and board members meeting in each other's flats. There are complaints from Edinburgh University that the university exchange is receiving more calls than they can handle, and could the committee speed up the installation of the Fringe telephone?

1966
Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is premiered by the Oxford Theatre Group.

1969
The festival Fringe Society is launched as a limited company at the home of the chairman, Lord Grant. Public funding to set up an office is immediately sought. There are now 57 groups.

1971 
John Milligan the first Fringe administrator, is employed. The first steps to a more professional Fringe are being taken. 7:84 Scotland perform their first Fringe production at Cranston Street Hall, Trees in the Wind by John McGrath.

1972
The highly regarded Fringe First award is set up by the Fringe and The Scotsman, under Arts editor Allen Wright, to attract attention to the dozens of new plays being shown, many of which badly need publicity to boost dwindling audiences. In 1972, 45 new plays are premiered. Ten awards are presented in 1973.

1976
Alistair Moffat takes over as administrator. During his six years at the helm, the Fringe expands massively – 182 groups take part in 1972, rising to 494 by 1981.

1980
The annual competition for the Fringe poster design is launched in schools all over Scotland. The competition attracts around 3000 entries every year.

1981
New venues of all descriptions begin to pop-up city-wide during this period, among them the Assembly Rooms.

1988
A huge fund-raising campaign realises the move to custom-built Fringe offices at 180 High Street. Gerald Scarfe is commissioned to design the façade.

1989
The Fringe has a staff of four and a new press office. The NALGO dispute threatens to close down the entire Fringe, due to a selective strike by office staff in Edinburgh District council where they issue temporary theatre licenses. Behind the locked doors of negotiating rooms, the Fringe pulls through ten days before the festival begins.

1992
Technology makes the Fringe box office more user-friendly than ever before, rendering the famous queues up the High Street a thing of the past. There is nostalgia for the heady days of one man in his basement office sorting out the mile-high tickets, but for both public and performers booking in, things are much easier.

1997
The Fringe celebrates its 50th anniversary.

1998
For the first time, the Fringe commenced a week earlier than the International Festival. This was brought on by the fact that Fringe companies were finding it increasingly difficult to fill venues in the last week which ran into September.

2000
The Fringe became the first arts organisation in the world to sell tickets online in real-time. Over 4,500 bookings were made over the internet.

2001
The Fringe is still getting bigger. In 2001 over 600 groups from 49 different countries performed 1,462 shows in 175 venues across the city. On the first two days of the festival a "2for1" ticket initiative is launched increasing audiences over that weekend by 226%. Ticket sales soar to a record £6,636,093.

2003
Ticket sales hit the million mark for the first time (1.18 million)!

2004
...and they just keep selling (1.25 million)!

2005
...and selling (1.35 million)!

2006
...and selling some more (1.53 million)...

2007
...more more (1.69 million)!

Sources of reviews

For many groups at the Fringe the ultimate goal is a favourable review which, apart from the welcome

kudos, may help to minimise any financial losses

that are suffered in putting on the show.

Edinburgh based newspaper The Scotsman,

often seen as the 'bible' of the Edinburgh Festival

for its comprehensive coverage, originally aimed

to review every show on the Fringe.

They now have to be more selective, as there

are simply too many shows to cover, although

they do see more or less every new play being

staged as part of the Fringe's theatre programme

because of their Fringe First awards.

Other Scottish media outlets that provide coverage include: The Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Herald and the Scottish edition of Metro.

Scottish arts and entertainment magazines The List and Fest Magazine - also provide extensive coverage.

Several organisations have appeared in recent

years who freely offer a comprehensive mixture of printed and web-based reviews. They aim to cover

shows that are missed by the larger organisations.

They include: Edinburghguide.com, ThreeWeeks; Broadway Baby Fringe Review, and Fringe Guru, to name

but a few. Garden Sessions are an internet based

outlet which provides coverage on its weekly

radio show, as well as reviews on folk music and

the more traditional aspects of the festival. ThreeWeeks, Broadway Baby, Fringe Review,

and Fringe Guru have collaborated for the

2009 Festival to produce iFringe, an iPhone

application that collates all of their reviews

and allows for reading on the go.

Most of the London based broadsheets also

review, in particular The Guardian and

 The Independent, while arts industry weekly

 The Stage publish a large number of

Edinburgh reviews, especially of the

drama programme.

In addition, journalists / reviewers from all over

the world are in Edinburgh during the festival,

and their reports and reviews appear in media

outlets around the globe.

There are a growing number of awards for Fringe shows, particularly in the field of drama:

The USAWeekly News

in 1996 introduced the

USAWeekly News

100 Star Award

for shows at the

Edinburgh Fringe Festival

that were way above the normal

five star standard,

which has become

equilavent toi recieving an

Academy Award

at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

The play Love Laboiurs Won

written by new up and coming

playwrite Ryan J Smith was the

first Edinburgh Fringe Performance

to recieve a

USAWeekly News

100 Star Award

The Malcolm Hardee Award

• The Perrier Awards for Comedy came into existence in 1981 when the award was won by the Cambridge Footlights. (Two further award categories have since been added.) Perrier, the mineral water manufacturer withdrew in June 2006 and was succeeded by the Scottish-based company Intelligent Finance. In 2009 IF also withdrew and could not be replaced so the awards are now temporarily being funded by promoter Nica Burns and rebranded as the Edinburgh Comedy awards, or "Eddies".
• The Malcolm Hardee Award "for comic originality of thought or performance"^[29] is to be presented for ten years, 2008-2017.^[30][31] An initial one-off Malcolm Hardee Award had been made at the Fringe in 2005, the year of Hardee's death, to American musical comicReggie Watts^[32]

• Fringe theatre
  • List of Fringe Festivals
• List of if.comedy and Perrier comedy award winners

• Fringe theatre
  • List of Fringe Festivals
• List of if.comedy and Perrier comedy award winners

• Bain, A., The Fringe: 50 Years of the Greatest Show on Earth, The Scotsman Publications Ltd, 1996
• Dale, M., Sore Throats and Overdrafts: An illustrated story of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Precedent Publications Ltd, Edinburgh, 1988
• McMillan, J., Carnegie, J., The Traverse Theatre Story 1963-1988, Methuen Publishing, London, 1988

• Official website
• Edinburgh Festival Guide
  
• full listings and reviews for all the Edinburgh festivals
• Histories of the Fringe and other Edinburgh summer festivals
• A User-generated map of all the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Venues for 2008
• Guide for FREE Fringe Events