Fringe boss vows to rebuild trust after 'sabre-rattling' row

The Herald Scotland

2 days ago

He said the relationship with venues appeared to have "lost its way" and suggested "entrenched" positions were to blame for behind-the-scenes tensions.
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Support for the Fringe Society is said to have dwindled away from many of the key players in the festival in recent years as it has stepped up lobbying for more public funding.
Mr Lankeser suggested there had been 'sabre-rattling' against the Fringe Society, which has overseen the festival since the 1950s.
Tony Lankester is chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society. (Image: Gordon Terris)
Mr Lankester denied claims that the charity had been competing for public funding with venues staging shows at the 78-year-old event, which will return with 3352 shows in its line-up in August.
Mr Lankester was speaking after venue operators warned that the financial model behind the event was on the brink of 'collapse' due to the impact of soaring costs in recent years.
He urged the venues to ask 'existential questions' about their scale and running costs, and suggested they should not be using the same business model as they were operating under five or 10 years ago.
The Fringe Society has faced growing hostility from the Fringe Alliance, an independent collective of venue operators and promoters involved in the festival every year.
When the Fringe Alliance was launched in 2023 it pledged to 'work with and support' the Fringe Society, as well as 'raise financial support for the Fringe community and ensure that appropriate support reaches all parts of the Fringe ecology".
However a leaked dossier from the Fringe Alliance revealed concerns it has raised privately with politicians and funding bodies about the Fringe Society's growth, budget, influence and funding priorities.
The Fringe Society has secured new funding deals with the UK Government to help open a new "Fringe Central" headquarters building and support a 'Keep It Fringe Fund' for UK-based artists. The Scottish Government confirmed £300,000 of new support for the Fringe Society shortly before previous chief executive Shona McCarthy left her role in the spring.
The Fringe Alliance has accused the Fringe Society of 'competing with artists and venues for funding rather than facilitating their success' and suggested that its operating model had 'distorted the festival's financial ecosystem' and directed resources aware from the Fringe's 'core creative contributors".
Mr Lankester, who was appointed in January, said he started meeting venue representatives in his first week in the job in April and had since met operators of every size.
He told The Herald: 'I think the relationship between the Fringe Society and the venues has lost its way a bit.
'I don't want to speculate about why that has happened. I think everyone was talking across each other, and there was no real common understanding or meeting of minds.
'I think we just need to get those conversations back into a sensible space.
'I don't think there is anyone in the Fringe eco-system, including the Fringe Alliance, who wakes up in the morning thinking: 'How can we make things worse today?'
'The Fringe Society is completely focused on making sure that we can deliver the best possible experience for artists. If they are looked after, audiences will have a good time and the venues will do well. We exist to serve the artists.
'I think the venues have perhaps felt left out of conversations. They do view the Fringe Society as being in competition with them to some degree. When I interrogated that with them I couldn't see any clear examples.
'The Fringe Society has been acting in good faith. If you look at the example of the Keep It Fringe Fund, we have become a conduit to pass that money directly to artists.
'The funding that we secured for the Fringe Central building project wasn't up for grabs by other entities. It's not like anyone else lost out.
'I think it all comes down to a common understanding of what our strategy needs to be and what the role of the Fringe Society is.'
Mr Lankester admitted there mixed views among venue operators about the future role of the Fringe Society.
He said: 'Everyone has their own unique issues. Opinions vary quite a lot.
'Some people say: 'We only want you to run a box office and print a programme and it should be hands-off everything else.'
'Other people say: 'We really need you to raise funds for things and build a way of filtering money back into the ecosystem.
'There has been a certain tone and a sabre-rattling kind of environment about some of the things I have read.
"Yet when I sit around the table with people there is a genuine desire to be constructive and move things forward. Whether that is lip service or not I don't know, but I'm taking it at face value.
'For me, the underlying thing is the relationship between the Fringe Society and all the components of the wider ecosystem, improving communication, which we may not have always got it right in the past, and rebuilding trust where it has broken down.
'We have a business relationship with every single venue. Many millions of pounds move around the ecosystem. If there was genuinely zero trust no-one would be trusting us to sell their tickets.
'There might be some suspicions, a slight circling of each other and a wariness. I think it's just about bringing alignment now.
'Everyone in the ecosystem has their own agenda. That's how it should be. They want to see the Fringe Society supporting their agenda. The reality is there are some things we can support them on, but there are others that are not our business. We rely on them to run their businesses as best they can.'
Edinburgh's popularity as a tourism destination, new city council restrictions on the short-term letting of properties and the impact of concerts at Murrayfield Stadium clashing with the Fringe for the first time have all been blamed for the crisis.
It is said to have forced many artists and performers to limit the runs of their shows, and for venue operators to take an increasing financial risk on their programmes.
The number of shows in the printed programme has increased slightly from 3317 in 2024 to 3351 this year.
However the number of performances has dropped from 51,446 to 49,521 in the space of 12 months.
Mr Lankester said: 'We are not privy to the individuals deals that venues are doing with artists.
'But the landscape has changed. Businesses need to evolve and respond to that. You see that in every industry and every sector around the world.
'If venues are not constantly looking at their business model, looking at the pressures of a changing landscape and still trying to do the same things they did five or 10 years ago the results are going to be pretty sore for them.
'There are existential questions everyone should be asking about size, scale and costs. That kind of business model stuff should be as real for the venues as it is for the Fringe Society or anyone else.'
Lyndsey Jackon, deputy chief executive of the Fringe Society, said: 'It has been worrying some people for a while that artists are coming to the Fringe for shorter periods of time.
'But artists have always done a variety of runs. We did do a trend analysis last year and it wasn't particularly stark in any shift.
'We've always said that one of the benefits of doing a full run for three weeks is that you just don't get that level of professional development and immersion in a festival experience anywhere else.
'A shorter run is still a really valuable thing to do, but we always encourage people to do the full three-week run if they can.
'The question we always ask artists is what their objective is. If it's about professional development, building audiences, testing your work and seeing as much as possible then three weeks is probably necessary.
'Each artist will have their own set of objectives, budget and capacity. Artists have obviously got physical, time and financial restraints. Many of them aren't able to take the whole week off
'It doesn't worry me that people are doing different runs as that model as always existed. It would be more worrying if we were seeing three one-week festivals, but I don't think that's true. An enormous number of shows in this programme are doing the full run of the Fringe.'
This year's Fringe programme will feature work from 58 countries around the world, including 923 Scottish productions and 1392 drawn from the rest of the UK.
Mr Lankester said: 'I think the size of this year's programme demonstrates the resilience of artists.
'I don't think we can pretend that everything is rosy in the garden. We know there are issues, pressures and things we need to respond to.
'But the programme is evidence of what we know about artists, which is how much artists value the Fringe and see it as an important thing to be part of."