Joyce Mcmillan
If there’s one thing that’s clear, from the huge flowering of fringe festivals in cities across the world, it’s that “fringe” is a word of many meanings, even when we only apply it to the arts and performance. When the term was first coined in 1948 to describe the eight companies who had decided to present their own shows during the first-ever Edinburgh International Festival the previous year, it referred to geography as much as anything else; most of the recognised citycentre venues were occupied by the Festival, and the eight companies appeared around the “fringes”.
Within a decade, though, “Edinburgh Fringe” had become the recognised phrase for the selforganised festival that had sprung up in Edinburgh in August; and the word began to pick up other connotations, to do with dissent from an official cultural agenda.
Many of the original Fringe companies were motivated by the lack of Scottish content in the international festival, and by its failure to reflect some of the radical movements emerging in post-war British culture, from agitprop drama to the folk music revival; they were “fringe” not only in their location and organisation, but in their impatience with the slightly stuffy cultural pieties of post-war Britain.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that by the mid-1960s, when the Fringe was presenting more than 50 different shows, this informal festival had become a huge attraction for young student theatre companies, including the Cambridge group who first opened up the space in the Lawnmarket that, in 1963, would become the original Traverse Theatre; and by the 1970s, as the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s took hold, the whole concept of fringe theatre and performance was becoming a major part of the western cultural landscape.
“Fringe”, by this time, carried meanings to do with radical and daring content, with a willingness to perform in unconventional spaces, and with a relative cheapness and simplicity of form. And although many ideas and artists from the Fringe were rapidly adopted by mainstream theatre companies and others, the idea of fringe theatre still survives and thrives all year round in cities like London and New York, as a vital adjunct to what happens on Broadway, in the West End, or in the big subsidised theatres.
All of which means that there are as many ways of interpreting the idea of fringe as there are cities on earth, and as many ways of creating a successful fringe festival. Fringes can focus on opening up new spaces, on presenting small-scale shows that challenge overblown production values, on exploring new trends in performance, on bringing international work to town, or on presenting a deliberate, in-yourface alternative to bigger festivals in the same city. Or they can do as Edinburgh has always done – and as the world’s second biggest fringe, in Adelaide, also does – and embrace the idea of a fringe festival with no managed agenda at all, which takes the ultimate radical step of welcoming any performer who wishes to appear, and just seeing what happens. This is the famous “open fringe” model; and as every Edinburgh citizen knows, it has its advantages and disadvantages, compared with the much smaller, but greatly appreciated, programmed fringes in cities like Dublin and Prague.
Its most obvious feature, of course – and the one least understood by those who issue yearly litanies of complaint about the Fringe – is that no-one, least of all the Fringe Society which offers advice, prints the programme, and runs the central box office, has any control over the size of the Fringe, which has grown from those original eight companies in 1947, to 2,870 companies this year, presenting a record 3,398 shows.
“It’s too big!” wail the critics, poring over the phone-book-sized programme, and fighting their way through the impenetrable crowds that swirl around the Fringe’s central area in August. Yet they rarely if ever suggest exactly how these companies should be prevented from coming to Edinburgh – roadblocks at the city bypass, perhaps? – or who should have the power to decide who comes and who doesn’t; perhaps because it’s pretty clear that unless the Edinburgh Fringe is to conform to the norm