The object is a paperback the thickness of a phone book, printed on thin stock, with several thousand entries set in six point type. Each entry has a title, a venue, a time, a duration, a price and about forty words of description written by whoever is performing. It weighs enough to be annoying in a bag and everybody in Edinburgh carries one in August anyway.
What makes it strange is not the size. It is that nobody chose what went in it.
How the thing actually works
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has no artistic director. It has no selection panel, no submissions process, no jury, and no mechanism by which any person or committee decides that one show belongs in the festival and another does not.
The rule is mechanical. Find a venue that will have you, agree terms with it, pay the registration fee, and you are in the program. That is the entire gate. A company from Seoul with a twenty year touring history and four students from Manchester with a show they wrote in July go into the same book, under the same headings, in the same type.
The organization at the center, the Fringe Society, is not a producer. It registers participants, prints the program, runs a ticketing system and does not curate. It is closer to a telephone directory with a box office attached than to anything most people mean by a festival.
Where that came from
It came from being excluded, which is the part worth knowing.
In 1947 the Edinburgh International Festival was founded to bring European high culture back to a continent that had spent the previous decade tearing itself apart. It was invitation only, as such festivals are, and it invited orchestras and opera companies and a particular kind of theater.
Eight theater companies turned up that year without being invited. They had not been selected, they were not on the program, and they performed anyway, in whatever rooms they could find around the edges of the official event.
Nobody planned what followed. There was no decision to create a second festival, and the Fringe Society did not exist for another decade and a half. What existed was a precedent: that Edinburgh in August was a place where you could perform without permission, and that the city would not stop you.
The open access rule that governs the Fringe today is not a policy somebody chose on principle. It is the original accident, written down after the fact, by an organization created to manage something that was already happening.
What an uncurated festival produces
The results are exactly what the structure predicts, and it is worth being honest about both halves.
A great deal of what is in that program is not good. It could not be otherwise: no filter means no filter, and several thousand shows registered by anyone who can pay will include work that is unfinished, self indulgent, or simply not ready. Performers play to audiences in single figures. This is normal and everyone involved knows it.
The other half is that a comprehensively curated festival cannot produce what this one does. Selection panels choose against a sense of what works, which is formed by what has worked, which means the genuinely unclassifiable thing is exactly what a panel is least equipped to say yes to. A form that does not have a name yet does not fit a category on a submission form.
Open access removes that failure mode entirely, at the cost of removing quality control entirely, and those are the same decision. The Fringe’s reputation for launching things nobody expected is not separate from its reputation for containing an enormous amount of rubbish. It is the same property observed twice.
The scale, which is the surprising part
Here is the fact that reframes everything above. On tickets sold, the Fringe is the third largest ticketed event on the planet. Only the Olympic Games and the World Cup are bigger.
Both of those are quadrennial, take a decade to prepare, involve national governments, and are run by international bodies with enormous staffs and enormous budgets. The Fringe happens every year, in one medium sized city, organized by nobody in particular, because several thousand people each decide separately to turn up.
It is worth sitting with the mechanism, because it is unusual. The Olympics exist because organizations decided they should. The Fringe exists because it is not prevented. Those are different kinds of institution and the second kind is much rarer at scale.
The cost, which falls on the performers
The honest objection to all of this is financial and it has become sharper over the last decade.
Open access means no subsidy and no guarantee. A company pays its registration, pays its venue, pays for accommodation in a city where August rents are what August rents in Edinburgh are, pays to print its own publicity, and recovers what it can from tickets. Most do not recover it. Losing several thousand pounds on a Fringe run is an ordinary outcome rather than a disaster.
Which means the open door is open to anyone who can absorb that loss, and absorbing it is a function of what somebody’s parents do. A gate that lets everyone through still sorts people, if standing on the other side costs a month’s wages. That is a genuine criticism of the model and it is not answered by pointing at the founding story.
What is left at the end
By the last week the city is visibly tired. The venues are running on people who have been doing four shows a day for three weeks and the performers have stopped pretending they are not exhausted.
And the program is still there, in everybody’s bag, considerably more battered than it was. Corners turned down, times circled, whole pages of comedy ignored, a coffee ring across the dance listings, and somewhere in the middle a show at eleven in the morning in a room above a pub that thirty people saw and will describe to other people for years. It is in the same six point type as everything else, because nobody knew.
