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The Guardian
4 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
‘This could be our last year': student comedy troupes priced out of Edinburgh fringe
'I don't have any family connections in comedy or television, my leg up was that I went to a posh university that had this relationship with Edinburgh,' says Nish Kumar, who joined sketch group the Durham Revue while he was a student and got his first taste of the Edinburgh festival fringe – and his future career – as part of the troupe. 'The Revue going to the fringe created so many opportunities for me. There is nothing anywhere in the world like it. For all of its problems, I still see that it has this ability to change people's lives and teach people the job of being a comedian.' Now, as the cost of taking shows to the fringe continues to rise, current members of the Durham Revue and other student sketch groups say they are being priced out of the performing arts festival. 'We're looking at the fact that this could be our last year,' says Alannah O'Hare, co-president of the Durham Revue, which as well as Kumar, counts Ambika Mod, Ed Gamble, Bafta-nominated TV writer Tom Neenan and Taskmaster's Stevie Martin as alumni. The group has gone to the fringe almost every year since the mid-70s. 'There's a huge legacy there,' says O'Hare. 'But it's becoming increasingly impossible.' Durham isn't the only university with a legacy of developing comedy talent. As well as the Cambridge Footlights and Oxford Revue, there is the Bristol Revunions, rekindled in 2008 by Charlie Perkins (now Channel 4's head of comedy), which counts Jamie and Natasia Demetriou, Ellie White and Charlotte Ritchie as former members. In the north-west there are the Manchester Revue and the Leeds Tealights, which boasts comedians Annie McGrath and Jack Barry, producer Phoebe Bourke and comedy agent Chris Quaile among its alumni. Kumar first experienced the fringe's transformative effects in 2006. Every year, Revue members write sketches and put on shows in Durham, with the goal of creating an hour of comedy gold for the festival. 'That was the whole purpose, because we wanted to be professional comedians and there isn't an obvious route,' Kumar says. Performing every day for a month improved his writing, plus, he says: 'You get a certain comfort that means you're not having a full-blown physiological panic attack every time you stand on stage. That confidence never leaves you.' Students also get the chance to watch other shows, which 'teaches you a lot about what you can do in comedy' and helped Kumar understand that not every interesting comedian is a TV star, but there's a pipeline to it. 'I got to see Russell Howard in a room with 100 people and then six months later he appeared on TV,' Kumar says. Crucially, students get to experience this without racking up substantial debt. 'The opportunity to go as students where you're not putting huge amounts of personal finances at risk, it's a really fleeting opportunity,' says O'Hare. If students must fund the experience themselves, 'you'll lose working-class voices, you'll lose lower-middle-class voices,' says Kumar. 'But we won't lose art from posh people because they have independent wealth.' McGrath, who attended three fringes with the Tealights, agrees: 'Edinburgh has already become wildly unaffordable for so many acts and punters, and landlords have a lot to answer for. It's really sad as it could wipe out a generation of new talent. It also means there's a lack of diversity in what is being created if only the wealthiest acts and biggest names are able to go.' Her student experience was 'totally magical' and 'instrumental in shaping the path I took after university,' McGrath says. 'Edinburgh is where I met so many of my comedy contemporaries, and I managed to get an agent the summer I graduated which gave me the confidence to think this could be a viable career.' Durham Revue and other troupes fund fringe runs from profits of the previous year, with extra money raised by staging shows throughout the year and, if they're lucky, grants from their university. These are not guaranteed and becoming harder to secure as university finances are squeezed, say O'Hare and Evie Cowen from the Leeds Tealights. The biggest hurdles are venue and accommodation costs, says O'Hare. This year, the Revue will spend about £9,000 on accommodation – 60% of its overall costs – 'and that's students sharing beds, it's not luxurious living'. Cowen says the Tealights have found accommodation for £6,500, a huge increase on the £4,000 spent in 2023. To cover the increases, Durham Revue has started its first crowdfunder, to which Kumar and other alumni have contributed. Yet this 'does not offer a long-term solution', O'Hare says. Leeds Tealights turns 20 this year and hopes money raised from an anniversary show will cover festival costs. Both groups worry about how they will bridge the gap in 2026. 'It feels like the inaccessibility of it has accelerated over the past few years, and it's impacting young people and students and people starting out,' O'Hare says. Is there a solution? Kumar says lack of university investment is 'shortsighted'. 'I'd definitely like to see more bursaries coming in to help,' Kumar says. 'They're talking about placing taxes on streaming services to reinvest into UK television – I'd like to see more of that invested into grassroots arts programmes. We need to look at how arts funding has been slowly chipped away for the past 15 years.' If students from all financial backgrounds can no longer attend the fringe, 'you're losing a really valuable training ground,' Kumar says. 'Comedy is one of the things we still do well in this country. Not providing funding for it is insane.'
The Guardian
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A spoof universally acknowledged: comic Rosalie Minnitt on her bonnet-crazed Jane Austen parody
Every now and then a comedy concept comes along that seems so obvious, you can't believe no one has done it before. How can Rosalie Minnitt's Clementine be the first character-comedy show to really mine the absurdities of our love of all things Jane Austen, all things frilly-bonneted and Bridgerton? OK, it's not a completely untapped seam of funny: think West End improv perennial Austentatious or that fantastic touring theatre hit Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort Of). But Minnitt is the first to distil it into a single comedy character, and to make it far funnier than we have any right to expect – not by doubling down on period pastiche, but by making her alter ego both none-more-Regency and thrillingly 21st century too. The character debuted in 2022 and Minnitt, 28, has been threatening to retire her for a while. But demand never quite goes away and a UK tour now beckons for a character her creator didn't initially envisage as a comedy act at all. Lady Clementine's genesis took place under lockdown. 'Everyone had lost their minds a bit,' says Minnitt, a graduate of Durham University, where she performed with the Durham Revue. 'And I had lost a bit of confidence in myself. I was working in a bar, then in a summer camp, then for a charity. Then I lost my job and was on furlough. I didn't know what I was doing with my life. I was lost and directionless. Then I went through a breakup – classic!' She rolls her eyes. 'So I was like, 'I need to put this energy into something.' And it was this.' Initially, it was just an impulse, half an idea with no outlet. 'I've always loved history,' she says, 'and at the time there was this idea of 'girlboss' history. Anne Boleyn was a girlboss, all of that. But I liked the idea of a historical figure that was vaguely uninspiring and caught within the traps of her own era's patriarchy.' Minnitt was struck by the fascination with all things Austen, more so perhaps because she's a part-outsider to Englishness. The daughter of teachers, she spent much of her childhood in Belgium before moving to Wiltshire. 'We live in an age where people are obsessed with not living in the present. They're either looking for an escape to the future, or fantasy, or the past. And we're romanticising things. I find that fascinating. So it was a perfect storm of these strands, and of people feeling dissatisfied with their love lives. All of that came together in this quite weird patchwork show.' It's a patchwork that needs to be encountered to be fully understood. 'It very much started as a parody/spoof,' says Minnitt, who was inspired by an 'insane' handbook she found in a charity shop advising Edwardian women on how to find a spouse. But it didn't stay that one-dimensional: 'I didn't want to be making knowing winks to genres all the time.' The show, which follows Clementine manically hunting down a husband before that most terminal of deadlines, her 27th birthday, makes hay with corseted costume-drama stereotype: the decorousness, the snobbery, the deeply repressed subtext. But it also artfully fudges the particular period Minnitt is dramatising, as Clementine's Austen-alike backdrop blurs with every other period in which a woman's liberty was put out to market, her self-worth pegged to her age, attractiveness and whatever assurances she may have from this or that tailcoated beau. Hmm, you think, that doesn't sound so different from 2025. Reader, you'd better believe Minnitt is wise to that too. Her coup with Clementine – a sleeper hit at the Edinburgh fringe two summers back – was to cross-fertilise a period parody French and Saunders might have attempted with the achingly of-the-moment standup pioneered by Kate Berlant, Catherine Cohen and a generation of comics capturing always-online life and its endless neurotic identity curation. So this great time-bending whirlwind of a show contains as many references to Reddit and Instagram as to riding crops and perfumed billets-doux. The result feels like a fantasia on feminism and female identity through the ages. It was greeted, when I saw it at Soho theatre, by great gales of laughter, of the type generated only when a show touches more than just a funny bone, but a deep nerve too. 'It can get feral,' says its creator. 'It can feel like I've whipped the mob up and I can't control it!' But if the response can be unwieldy, it's thrilling too. 'It feels joyous, in an extremely female way. I've spoken to audience members who are like, 'It's girly, it's childlike, it's about being a woman but it's not sexualised. It's about being silly.' I got a message from someone that said, 'If someone asked me why I like being a girl, I'd tell them to go see this show.' I loved that. That's why I'm doing this.' The show's continuing success seems so deserved, and assured, that it's startling to hear Minnitt describe the difficulties she had making it happen – and asserting herself in comedy. A few years and one hit show into her career, she still feels like an outsider, not always welcomed by the industry. 'I think people don't like stuff that feels like chick lit. That's why some of the industry reception has been a little bit cold. It can be a difficult sell to a male audience.' At any rate, she says: 'I still feel impostor syndrome. I'm struggling to find my feet and where to put my energy. If you have a successful show, you're expected to know how to do everything, which is quite difficult. But I'm coming to terms with that.' Part of coming to terms with it is taking Clementine on the road. This (memo to anyone who thinks Edinburgh fringe success means Fleabag glory) is not a glamorous process. 'For the next two months,' says Minnitt, 'I'm going to work three jobs so I can afford to do half the dates I wanted to do. And my mum's doing the driving for me. I've had to get her involved to cut down costs.' She is also marking out next steps – for the Clementine character, and for her own career. Minnitt writes for CBBC, recently appeared in cult comic Jordan Brookes's faux-musical Fontanelle, and has a guest role in the new Alan Partridge series, How Are You? (in which 'the satirical broadcaster checks in on the mental health of the nation'). Alongside John Shuttleworth, say, and Count Arthur Strong, Partridge's is a face on the (typically male) Mount Rushmore of character comedy: an exemplar (or maybe a warning) of what a career that's dedicated to the lifelong performance of a comical alter ego might look like. Is that a path Minnitt can see herself taking? 'When I look at people who are more experienced, I do think I should apply the same rigour to my character,' she says. 'What does she do? What doesn't she do? It's so fun to have all those rules for your world. I don't know why everyone doesn't do character comedy: it's so much more fun than standup.' As we speak in London on the eve of her tour, she is already planning a new show for Clementine. 'I'd like to put her in a revolution show, a Les Mis parody. That would be so fun.' And not too hard, you'd think, for a performer already used to whipping up her crowds into a riotous mob. 'I want her to go to the city, too, and for that to have a Dickensian energy. But mostly, I just want to make stuff that's funny and silly. That has always been my guiding principle.' In the meantime, as the ground shifts ever more turbulently under feminism, Minnitt is just excited to be getting her delusional, delightful and neurotic alter ego back on stage. 'It feels so hard to be a woman in this year and this age – it's more complicated than it used to be. There's a lot of pressure that we don't quite know how to name yet. But Clementine is a great vessel for exploring that. The show will always change, because the world is changing. It's a great mirror to what is going on now.' Rosalie Minnitt: Clementine is at Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot, on 8 March, then touring
