International Theatre Festivals in the UK: The Edinburgh Festival Fringe as a Model Neo-liberal Market

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the UK’s biggest and most internationally influential festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (EFF), analyzing its benefits and risks, particularly for its artists and especially as an unregulated neoliberal capitalist market. The chapter considers some of the EFF’s advantages: the opportunities it offers artists to do a three-week run, show to risk-taking audiences, build relationships with other artists, and take part in an international hothouse for seeing work, learning, and developing. The chapter also considers the EFF’s many pernicious effects: its unregulated and exploitative labour conditions; environmental impact; lack of integration into or contribution to Edinburgh’s year-round performance culture; economic and cultural exclusiveness; competitive individualization of success and failure; and pressures on mental health. It concludes by proposing ways the EFF and its emulators could improve their social impact, such as by making more long-term investment in infrastructure, Edinburgh’s performance culture, and performance makers; actively supporting artists’ mental health; offering structural mentoring support; introducing regulations that protect workers; actively supporting more diverse makers, critics and audiences; and advocating for collaboration over competition. The chapter advocates for a vision of the fringe as, not a neoliberal capitalist market, but a civic sphere.