Article
Culture
5 min read

Edinburgh's grim endurance test of character

How a comedian survived the Fringe and kept going back.

James Cary

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

Three actors stand on a stage, in costume, surrounding a metal conical structure.
Expensive prop? Check. Just Out of Reach performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2008.
EFFC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This article was first published 22 August 2023.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is probably the greatest arts festival on earth. And it’s getting bigger every year. In 2001, 666 groups presented 1462 shows in 176 venues, selling 873,887 tickets between them. By 2017, everything had doubled. 3398 shows at 300 venues sold 2.9 million tickets. Even Covid19 couldn’t burst the balloon. This year, the Fringe is as big as ever. How does it keep on growing? 

I have a controversial theory based on my experience as a Fringe performer. And it’s not about the insatiable demand for tickets, but the strange supply. Let me explain. 

Every year, tourists arrive in Scotland’s capital to sample an exciting buffet of comic and dramatic treats, alongside a smorgasbord of bizarre spectacles. It’s a hit-and-miss affair, for sure. But most punters know that most shows are, well, a punt. The fringe programme contains comedians, theatre troupes and performers you’ve never heard of performing something that’s rather hard to get one’s head around, until one’s seen it. And sometimes not even then. 

The average Fringe goer might well take in half a dozen shows over a long weekend. One might be a favourite Mock the Week comedian of the telly in a venue that seats 800. But the rest are small, intimate, dank spaces that may be uncomfortably packed, or embarrassingly empty. Again, that’s all part of the experience. Add some beers, some unfamiliar street food and just enough sleep to function, and that’s the Edinburgh Fringe experience. 

Spare a thought for the thousands of performers you leave behind. There are the ones trapped in that outré fringe show which runs until the end of the month. 

Except it’s only one side of it, oh Fringe goer. As you jump on a train from Waverley station and return to the office with a sore head and some good stories about some weird outré theatre that really didn’t work, spare a thought for the thousands of performers you leave behind. There are the ones trapped in that outré fringe show which runs until the end of the month, doomed to perform the same deeply flawed show twenty-seven times, like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hillside. 

If you’re a fringe performer, and I speak from the experience of having performed or produced various shows at the Edinburgh Fringe between 1996 and 2017, things are rather different. 

The Edinburgh Fringe is not a talent show where the obscure but gifted performer finds an audience, acclaim and fame through sheer hard work and pluck. That is the experience of a few, but for most, the Fringe is more like running a marathon in the rain wearing an amusing but extremely absorbent fancy-dress costume. It is a test of grim endurance. 

It’s not just an endurance of physical stamina, although the odd hours, the alcohol and the ill-advised street food all take their toll. Ultimately, the Edinburgh Fringe is a month-long examination of character. You will experience emotions and feel frustrations that only happen in this annual cauldron of dysfunctional ambition. 

It’s not about the show. The 60 minutes spent on stage in front of the barely adequate lights is the straightforward part of your day. The show, even if it’s improvised, is broadly the same each time. How you spend the other 23 hours is real test. 

You might think that the task is simple. Every day, you leap out of bed, eat a hearty Scottish breakfast, grab your stack of flyers, and go out and spread the word about your show. No? 

Here’s the problem: within a week or so, you’ve worked out that your show is not what you thought it was. What seemed to be an hilarious off-the-wall idea back in February, now seems like a joke worn thin, that technically didn’t quite work in the first place. You are not in contention for an award. Your show doesn’t have any ‘buzz’. Your temporary friends console you that you’re being penalised by doing something different. Or you’re in the wrong slot. Or in the wrong venue. Or getting the wrong audience… when you get an audience. 

The expensive prop from your show that is carried around the streets to sell tickets now feels like an albatross around your neck. Your costume hasn’t been washed for over a week and probably never will be. And every punter you speak to has already booked to see the hot new show that has captured the zeitgeist. Oh, and the Cambridge Footlights. And that comedian who was on Mock the Week. Or as it Live at the Apollo? And then they’re going out to dinner with some friends. 

At that moment, you remember how much this is costing you, the largest amount of your budget going to your temporary landlady who is currently sunning herself in Malaga having rented you her broom cupboard. 

And then it starts to rain. 

There’s something about the Edinburgh Fringe that keeps performers coming back year after year. Next year, it’ll be different. And it isn’t. 

It appears that I have not made my case for the continual expansion of the Edinburgh Fringe. I have demonstrated a thousand reasons to abandon Auld Reekie and never to return. But let me tell you about what happens next to our hapless performer. 

In the short term, the embittered, disenchanted performer may give in to the seven deadly sins, justifying all kinds of self-destructive and narcissistic behaviour. Terrible food, too much booze and ill-advised liaisons. But this is Edinburgh where everything is multiplied many times over. It’s not the seven deadly sins, but seventy-seven deadly sins. 

In fact, wait. ‘The Seventy Seven Deadly Sins’? Is that an idea for a show for next year? You start to design the flyer in your head. In the midst of your frustration and exhaustion, you’re already planning your return next year. 

Here’s where the wisdom of the ages kicks in which explains my theory. In the Bible, there is a wonderful proverb from King Solomon which runs thus: “As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.” There’s something about the Edinburgh Fringe that keeps performers coming back year after year. Next year, it’ll be different. And it isn’t. But maybe the year after it will be. And so every year, alongside the newcomers, the old timers return with a new show. And the fringe grows a little bit more every year. 

Actually, the first half of that proverb sounds like a great title for a Fringe play. And after my years of experience, maybe it’s time I went back… 

Related articles

Review
Culture
Film & TV
5 min read

To boldly hope: how Star Trek dares us to be better

Amid dystopian dramas, Paula Duncan analyses the attraction of the Star Trek franchise.

Paula Duncan

Paula Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, researching OCD and faith.

Spock and Kirk stand on the bridge of a spacecraft.
The young Spock and Kirk, in 2009's Star Trek.

It’s something of a running joke that the popular animated series The Simpsons can predict the future – so much so that this was addressed by Time magazine. It is far from the only show that has a take on our pending fate. There is no shortage of dystopian futures available to us – nuclear war, rising sea levels, zombie apocalypse, super-contagious virus… Some of these no longer feel quite as fictional or remote a possibility as we might like. Such storytelling allows us to consider what it might mean for us to live through such scenarios and, perhaps, think more carefully about how we might prevent them.  

I’m sure there are movies, games, books, or TV shows that spring to mind for each of us when we think about this. For me, it is the Hunger Games and the Divergent book series by Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth, respectively. Even when these stories offer us a hopeful possibility of redemption, they do so in the wake of disasters that humanity has failed to prevent. We are invited to dwell in the worst parts of humanity and human nature. In some stories we destroy ourselves. In others, we find ourselves simply destroyed. I find it all too easy to become preoccupied by the potential horrors in our near or distant future. 

This is why I’m so drawn to the vision of the future that the Star Trek franchise offers. There’s a hopeful message at the heart of the series that makes our continued existence seem plausible but doesn’t discount the changes we need to collectively make to achieve this. I am slowly making my way through Star Trek: Deep Space 9, having now completed The Original Series (TOS) and The Next Generation, and I’m always struck by this ultimately hopeful view for our future. It’s a not-quite utopian view of the future. We don’t achieve perfection in any way but we do learn to survive and thrive despite the challenges presented to us.  

What do we pass on to our literal next generation? What morals, what values? What hope for a future in which we both survive and thrive? This, I think, is the crucial point. 

Listen now

It's certainly not perfect. There are definitely things that are uncomfortable on the show – the portrayal of women, for one thing, often misses the mark in TOS. But I do think it represents a beginning, a promise that things can get better. I’m reluctant to write any line that begins “for its time”, but I think there is something in that here. I also defer to the judgement of someone who was actually there, contributing to the formation of the Star Trek universe: Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura. She wrote compellingly about the importance of diverse representation in the cast and what it meant to viewers in her autobiography Beyond Uhura. She reflected there:  

Like all of Gene’s characters, Uhura embodied humankind’s highest values and lived according to principles that he was certain would one day guide all human endeavor. In Star Trek Gene created a work of fiction through which he communicated a timely, yet timeless message about humankind’s power to shape its future. But most important, he gave that vision to the world: to writers, to enlarge upon; to directors, to dramatize; to actors, to personify and make real; and to audiences, to enjoy, cherish, and incorporate into their own hopes for the future and for humanity. 

For all its flaws, TOS set up a universe where we could see a better and fairer future for ourselves. In this early series, there are certainly problematic elements that would be written differently today. But there is, at least, hope.  

What speaks most clearly to me is the idea of stewardship. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, it began when TOS originally aired in 1966 and follows the crew of the star ship Enterprise on a five-year exploratory mission through space. On the bridge, Captain James T. Kirk is accompanied by some of the best crew Starfleet has to offer. We follow them through the stars, visiting new people(s) and places and getting into an uncanny number of scrapes.  

Airing in 1987, The Next Generation shows us the new and improved Enterprise is now captained by Jean-Luc Picard and a whole new crew with new skills and talents but the principles are the same – a crew that looks out for one another and their ship, caring for their home away from home. The Enterprise changes and different people take the helm, but the common goals remain. 

Perhaps if we contemplate our world to be something like this: if we consider that we might each be given a collective opportunity to hold the fate of our planet, how should we act to make sure that we hand over the best possible future to those that come next? What do we pass on to our literal next generation? What morals, what values? What hope for a future in which we both survive and thrive? This, I think, is the crucial point 

There are some key messages that we can draw from Star Trek’s view of our future. Captain Kirk frequently talks fondly of an Earth that has eradicated poverty and many unjust power structures. What might need to change for us to get to a position where we hold the same values? Where might we need to sacrifice personal gain in order to create a more sustainable world? I cannot help but think that we are not acting on this as quickly as we should be. The BBC recently published an article focusing on the episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in which 2024 is shown to be a year of riots and unrest on Earth. Even in our sci-fi not-quite-utopian future, our progress is slow.  

I’d like to conclude with a reference to the 2009 movie reboot of Star Trek. Captain Pike says to a young Jim Kirk:

“your father was Captain of a star ship for twelve minutes. He saved eight hundred lives, including your mother's. And yours. I dare you to do better.”  

What if we looked at our stewardship of our planet in the same way? We briefly, collectively, have a chance to make a difference. We have a chance to do better. We need, therefore, to boldly go.  

Related articles