Last week, Part 1 of the notes on the workshop conducted by Toby Gough and John Lee on October 9 explained the magnitude and the scope of the legendary Edinburgh Arts Festival. Part 2 gets down to the nitty gritty: how can artists present their own work there?
Saying it is an ordeal and that it requires perseverance before all else is an understatement. Lady Salsa lost lots of money and underwent loads of disasters at the Festival. However, it is now a successful show touring worldwide. So, it CAN work …
Part2
The first step is going to be the hardest. Taking the risk of trying to get some money together to get over to an international festival, to get seen internationally, to ply your trade and to try and do something out of the ordinary, which is something I think all of you dream to do. It’s tough and I think if anybody really wants to make a success of theatre, you have to be prepared to put everything on the line which I’m sure you do here keeping [the Actors Studio] alive. To actually go into the festival, you have to be prepared to go throw yourself into the Abyss.
Obviously, you can prepare yourself for that leap. For the Edinburgh Festival, you need to have your registration in by April. You have to contend with huge amounts of theatre companies so your publicity is essential. You need to state things very clearly on your posters like time, venue, name and date because people will go to see ten shows a day at the Edinburgh Festival and they’ll programme their day on what time you are on, what time it is and they need to see [this information] amongst a sea of other posters. The key thing is to have a poster that stands out or to have a campaign that stands out.
Jerry Springer: The Opera, one of the hits last year, which was a satirical look at Jerry Springer in opera, they basically stole everyone else’s posters. They got a speech caption saying, “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!” and they just put these on every one else’s posters around town. So, there are ways of publicising your show. A stand-up comedian this year, Aaron Barschak, gate crashed Prince William’s birthday dressed up as Osama Bin Laden in a pink dress and kissed William on the lips, singing “a kiss on the lips can be quite Continental”. He got the heads of security of Britain sacked, the SAS were called in to test the palace security, the Queen was there, Osama Bin Laden was seen in the Queen’s presence, heads rolled, and Barschak sold out his shows throughout the Festival. However, the pressure on him was so huge that after the second show in the Festival, he cancelled his show because he didn’t have the material to follow it through. I think he’s given up comedy.
If you’ve got a good show, then you stand a very good chance of getting good reviews and getting an award. You can only get a Fringe First Award if the show hasn’t been performed before. The Edinburgh Festival was set-up as a festival for new work, new writing. All the prestigious awards are for new work. If you get an award, then you can sell out and you might break even. If you break even, then you’ve got a massive hit. I don’t think we’ve broken even for about six years because it’s a massive expense. If you can break even, then you’ve done very well. There are 20,000 shows over four weeks by 800 groups and you need to rise above them if you want to go home with good reviews.
You need go there two weeks early to start publicising your show, to be there slightly ahead of the masses. If you can make your presence felt there before the Festival begins, then you’ve got a much better start. Go out and meet people, speak to people. A show sells itself on a human touch. People want to go and see friends they meet in the street. It’s not a situation where the audience comes to you. You have to go out there and fight for your audience.
You have to think outside the circle, so try not to get your news [only) in the arts papers. Think about how you can get your show in the other sides of the papers, like Aaron Barschak who was in every page under the sun. Good press shots are always very good to have because people like to see good images. Newspapers in Britain are all photo-led. You need a big picture that tells a story. Another thing that you don’t have to pay for which will give you more publicity are press previews. That’s a very powerful marketing tool if you haven’t got any money, if you can’t spend thousands on a full-colour poster and getting 5,000 and getting them put up. You don’t have much control over the press there, so they drop by anytime to review your show.
You need a good show, principally, but you can actually bribe people emotionally. Give the reviewer a crate of beer. Buy them a cake because they’re all working hard and they’re hungry. At lunchtime, go and hand them sandwiches. It makes every difference when you get a brilliant double-page spread because you spent a bit of money on getting everybody lunch.
The average ticket price is about £5 or £10. It runs for four weeks and starts with a big cavalcade in which all the groups take part. It’s punctuated in the middle by a Fringe Sunday, a festival where everybody gets to meet everybody else. And it ends with a massive fireworks night, one of the biggest in the world. The first week, you’re normally getting your show out there with word of mouth. The second week is when, possibly, if you get an award, people come and see it. The third week is when you can possibly make your money and the fourth is where you can try and survive.
Cost-wise, you’ve got your travel, to get over there. You’ve got a £250 registration fee. You venue cost, you have to pay for your venue. The only venue you don’t pay for is the Traverse Theatre which might be interested in new Asian work. For all of the work I’ve seen advertised here, that might be a good venue to try out. Most places will take a guarantee on a 60-40 box office split. You’re paying probably about £100 per 100 seats per night. Depending on what your venue provides, you might need extra technicians. They charge you for everything. You get charged a foreign entertainer’s tax, which is about 9% now. The Fringe Office takes 6% off the tickets. There’s also VAT or Value Added Tax of 17%, which as foreigners, you can’t claim back. Accommodation is about £100 per person per week and the rates soar throughout the Festival. If you get an apartment for 10 people works out to about £3000 for four weeks, so it’s very expensive. That’s basically the main costs of the Festival.
The venue you use obviously determines how much box office you can take, but nobody ends up making any money. There were groups that came from Russia thinking they’re going to get their fame and fortune in Edinburgh. They sell their houses and families, turn up at Edinburgh and lose everything. With Lady Salsa, we went to Cuba to put it together. We sent all the air tickets for the Cubans to come over. DHL lost the air tickets, so we had to get new ones delivered and the Cubans arrived two weeks late. Air France lost all their musical instruments and costumes the day before they were meant to open the Festival, so the opening night was a bit of a disaster. Also, Air France flew them to the wrong airport – flew them to Gatwick instead of Edinburgh. I don’t know how that happened. Then the bus that we booked to bring them up to Edinburgh left because the Cubans had problems with all their luggage that got lost. So we flew them up at vast expense on some last minute flight. The bus that I got from my friend had a big puncture on the way to the airport, so we had to get them all into taxis. They put all the bags into one taxi. We got the flat, which was on the fifth floor on the main central High Street at 3am. The bags jammed and the taxi locked, so no one could open the taxi. All the drunk Scotsmen eating fish and chips at a nearby shop came and helped open the taxi. And then, after four weeks performing at the venue, the venue manager refused to pay us the £48,000 box office money because he said the venue had gone broke. So, for all that, we didn’t receive a single penny. Broke and desperate, we then took the show to a very small theatre in London called the Pleasance Theatre, which is the sister venue of the Pleasance Theatre in Edinburgh. It became very popular and we then transferred to Covent Garden and it stayed there for two years. And now it’s here, after touring Australia for a while.
NEXT WEEK: The concluding installment of Toby Gough’s workshop highlights.
First Published: 12.11.2003 on Kakiseni