Have any of you appeared at the fringe?
Number one son has just got the lead role in a play there this summer. he has a production team who will sort out accommodation etc but do you have any advice for someone playing there (and visiting) for the first time? He’s 19 and still a bit damp behind the lugs.
I appeared in a play there 35 years ago (eeek!) when I was 17 so I imagine there’s basically nothing in common any more. It was a school play and deeply pretentious and the cast usually outnumbered the audience (who were mostly our parents anyway).
It certainly woke me up to the fact I wasn’t and never would be an actor and I never acted again. But I do remember having a very good time and seeing as much comedy and music as could be crammed intoi 2 weeks – very cheaply. Another thing which has probably changed now.
In 19(redacted) I was a stage hand for my then girlfriend’s One Woman play. Tiny “theatre”, the audience sometimes reached double figures but she did get a good write-up from some arty hippy freesheet. The aforementioned arty hippy clearly fancied my girlfriend so next thing she was climbing into his van and heading off to Katmandu.
Advice? Go to as many shows as he can, there’s one every three minutes. Even during the now over-commercialised, overpriced Festival Jamboree, Edinburgh remains one of the great cities – an hour in the best museum on the planet (Scottish National – free, donations gratefully accepted) will lift the heart and burnish the soul.
I was in Edinburgh for 9 years, and for 6 years a reviewer for “Festival Times”, blagging free tickets to shows I fancied, along with having to see many I didn’t. It was a bit Glastonbury, in that it’s great until you see how smug and formulaic it is, and how you need a lot of money to survive, with insiders getting the best out of it. It’s over 30 years since I lived there, and the place has been much refined (until you get behind the various hills). If you can be based in the central area, you won’t need to use public transport. Have a waterproof and warm clothes. Avoid seeing loads of comedy shows, and go to one big omnibus event that has the best of them, eg, the Perrier candidates, or any big benefit at the Playhouse. Don’t pay for overpriced drinks to be in a hip n’ happening place (say, Assembly Rooms bar), as, unless you are the object of erotic desire, you are a grockle the luvvies will look over the shoulder of as they try to find someone more important to schmooze with. There is now a circuit of summer arts festivals, so an awful lot will be elsewhere as well as Edinburgh, not that Edinburgh is always aware there is anywhere existent apart from itself.
Someone needs to tell them: a castle is not enough!
As a student whose life revolved around drama in 198** getting to Edinburgh for the Fringe was absolutely top of my to-do list. In my first August I and a group of like-minded souls hired a hall, fitted it out with lighting and sound and hey presto we were running Venue 84. A few of our shows, and a few from sub-lets. The bus drivers of Edinburgh’s social hall on Leith Walk. Year 2 we ran a space at the not-at-all dodgy Marco’s Leisure Centre. Year 3 we upgraded to the Edinburgh University Staff Social Hall opposite the National Museum. Very hoity toity. Year 4 we took a show as a fledgeling professional company to the Mandela Theatre, run by a relative of Jimmy McGovern the legend had it. I’m sure it is all very different now and much more professional. It all broke even providing nobody got paid. He’ll have a great time, go easy on the Heavy, and learn to get by on four hours sleep. Is the fringe club still at the students union?
Was that in 1984?
I think @clive the Leith busman’s venue was 1985 – still have the wooden mcewans sign with Venue 84 on. If you know your Scots theatre it was run by 7:84 in previous years if I recall correctly.
Played there mid 80s – drumming for a rock and roll review show (Betty and the Bombshells) and loved every minute of it. Great atmosphere everywhere, real muck in, let’s do the show here type of attitude, busking around the city. We did a two week residency in a community centre, extra lunch time shows in the second week, rented someone’s house – it was amazing …. But it was about 40 years ago now!
1978 had me up there, reviewing a (frankly poor) medical school show, tacked on to a show by a dance troupe who had a dancer related to R4 faves, Instant Sunshine. Very much adhering to the Lunchtime O’Booze school of journalism, loads of drink was taken. Strippers in pubs at lunchtime, and sharing “swallies” in a very then unreconstructed Grassmarket all grist to the mill. It was grand, but I couldn’t offer any advice.
One piece of advice is don’t climb over the pointed railings into Princes Street Gardens at night. I very nearly skewered my foot.
Also don’t go to anything on the Royal Mile – wall to wall whiskey Pringle tartan and shortbread tourist tat and tourist trap bars and restaurants
I would make an exception for The Jolly Judge, a terrific little pub down a close on the Royal Mile next to Glsdstones Land.
Wall to wall whisky, I would expect, with a small section allocated for whiskey.
It’s actually a really good pub for beer, my main criterion for choosing a pub. I dare say they have an excellent whisky selection too but that’s not my drink. I could recommend several more in Edinburgh but that’s for another thread.
You is not Wrong – excellent pub
Thanks for all the advice
Writer / Producer of a show a couple of years ago. My advice to a young actor would be to use your venue pass to go and see everything you possibly can, even stuff you’re pretty sure you won’t like.
It’s amazing the whole thing is still stumbling along given the accommodation and venue costs. I hadn’t appreciated just how few shows make money, or even break even. We were playing to full houses by the third week and everyone got paid, but not much more than it costs to be there for a month. I went to see a one-woman show where the performer cheerfully admitted it was losing her £10k, partly because she’d come from Australia to be there.
In recent years the big comedy names have set up residence in the city in August as an alternative to touring, and they’ve sucked a lot of revenue out of the smaller shows. This year I believe there’s something called ‘Oasis’ to compete with as well.
The Free Fringe continues to be a thing and allows people to pay what they can on the way out of a show, rather than commit to what are becoming increasingly lumpy advance ticket prices, which might help someone with little cash to spare. There’s always a suggested donation – around £15 a show if I recall, but I saw people paying less or in a few cases nothing at all, and there’s a wide variety of shows – they claim 600 of them back in 2018. They have their own guide, the Wee Blue Book.