The Edinburgh Festival Fringe that ended on Monday – though the official International fest continues to this weekend – has reported ticket sales that for the 3rd year in a row have exceeded the million ticket mark: this year’s figure of 1,335,000 is a 7% increase on last year, with 82,000 more tickets sold.
But with this astonishing growth that has seen the fringe almost double in terms of ticket sales in the last five years, levels of funding for it and the Fringe Society that administers it have remained the same. Comments Fringe Director Paul Gudgin, “This is an annual event of Olympian proportions and we’re struggling to find the resources to keep up with the scale of it. Looking at the wider context, we’re at a crucial point for the Fringe.”
Earlier in the festival it was already suggested that this year’s Fringe Sunday was going to be the last, in order to save money; and various commentators have even suggested that since it is the Fringe that dominates Edinburgh and not the heavily subsidised International Festival, it’s time to merge them.
But if the Fringe is doing so well, and it is, then the Fringe Society needs to find a way to extract its own pound(s) of flesh from the millions that are being taken here with higher entry fees to appear in the fringe programme, but without penalising the smaller companies who struggle to come here and don’t make a penny.
