Edinburgh Fringe fest takes frivolity online
LONDON — David Chapple began planning his trip to the 2020 Edinburgh Festival Fringe a year ago, since you can’t be too prepared when you hold the world record for the most Fringe performances attended in one season.
Having seen a record-breaking 304 shows in 27 days in 2014, he was planning another Fringe viewing marathon this year for his wife’s 60th birthday. But in early April, the event — the world’s largest arts festival — was canceled for the first time in its 73-year history, because of the coronavirus.
For Chapple, a civil servant who estimates that he spends half his income on watching live comedy and keeps chickens named after British stand-up comedians, it was devastating. “Edinburgh is everything, really,” he said. “It’s the focal point of our year.”
The festival’s cancellation has been a big blow to long-term fans — and to the 30,000 performers who travel to the Scottish city each August to show their work. To fill the gap, some artists have gone online to try to capture the anarchic, diverse and somewhat overwhelming experience of being at the Fringe.
Among them is Francesca Moody, a London-based theater producer who took the original stage version of Fleabag to the Fringe in 2013 and had planned to stage three plays in Edinburgh this month.
When the festival was called off, her fellow theater-maker Gary McNair joked that he would have to stage a “Shed Fringe” from his garden instead — a pun that “set cogs whirring” in Moody’s producer brain. Six weeks ago, she came up with Shedinburgh, an online festival of comedy and drama that streams live from a garden shed for three weeks starting Friday.
In fact, there are two sheds, each measuring 6 feet by 8 feet: one onstage at London’s Soho Theatre, the other at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. Both venues have been closed since March, when the British government ordered theaters to shut to help slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Setting up the sheds inside is a nod to the questing spirit of the Fringe, which takes over every corner of the city of Edinburgh each August, transforming pubs and gardens, gyms, parking lots and lecture theaters into performance spaces.
“The cancellation of the Fringe has left a massive hole,” said Moody, who has attended the festival for 17 years. “This is an opportunity to acknowledge how magical the festival is, how important it is to me and to a lot of the artists who have had success there.”
Thanks to social distancing rules and space restrictions, the “Shed-ule” is dominated by one-person shows from artists like Jack Rooke, Deborah Frances-White and Tim Crouch. Audiences will watch on Zoom after donating at least $5 per ticket, and profits will go toward a fund for artists aiming to stage a show at the Fringe next year.
Before planning was halted because of the pandemic, this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival had confirmed more than 2,200 shows from 48 countries in about 230 venues, said Rebecca Monks, a spokeswoman for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society. They were preparing for a similar-scale festival to last year’s, in which more than 3,800 shows were staged and more than 3 million tickets were sold.
Edinburgh is “the way that arts organizations, venues and TV production companies find new work; the fact that it doesn’t exist this year will have a significant impact,” said Moody, who knows how life-changing a successful Fringe can be.
When she and Waller-Bridge took Fleabag to a dank vault under Edinburgh’s George IV Bridge seven years ago, they raised money on Kickstarter, didn’t pay themselves and gave away tickets for the first week to fill the 60-seater room. It became one of that year’s most talked-about shows, which led to a run at London’s Soho Theatre, where it caught the attention of the BBC’s head of comedy.