When the going gets tough

For all her quiet professionalism, Kath Mainland must have wondered what she was getting into when she took up her position as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s first chief executive. Behind the scenes, the 2008 Fringe had been an embarrassment: ticket sales were down by nearly 10 per cent, thanks largely to the mortifying failure of the electronic box office on the first day of sales. A humiliated Jon Morgan, Mainland’s predecessor as Fringe boss, paid for the fiasco with his head.

In the weeks preceding Mainland’s February appointment, bad news rolled in thick and fast: corporate sponsors deserted in their droves; Fringe Sunday, the festival’s biggest event, came under threat due to lack of funding (it was subsequently axed); and the Fringe was reported to need emergency funds of up to £600,000 to meet its basic running costs. Even by the financial standards of 2009, Mainland’s new stomping ground looked a mess.

Speaking to Fest four months into her new role, however, Mainland seems pleased with the progress so far. “There are more people taking part in the Fringe this year than ever before,” she points out (albeit by the slenderest of margins, with ten more shows than last year). “The arts don’t necessarily do badly in a recession – people need cheering up, and our job is to make sure those people come here. I think we’re cautiously optimistic at the moment."

Mainland’s cautious optimism contrasts with the brutal realism on display in other quarters. William Burdett-Coutts, director of the Assembly Rooms venue, agrees that advance ticket sales this year have comfortably outstripped expectations. But shortfalls elsewhere will leave venues in trouble, he suggests. “It’s going to be a very tough year for Assembly. We normally raise about £200,000 in sponsorship. This year we’ll get less than half that. It’s absolutely down to the recession: most of our sponsors are being hit by the financial situation.”

Burdett-Coutts’s lament points to an uncomfortable chink in Mainland’s sunny tidings: however strong the audience turnout, the Fringe relies heavily on commercial sponsorship to make ends meet – a source which has rarely looked less reliable. It was the failure to find a sponsor that did it for Fringe Sunday, a free show that attracted a quarter of a million people last year. The founder of the prize formerly known as the Perrier Award has this year had to invest £150,000 of her own cash to keep the iconic comedy awards from going under, after online bank Intelligent Finance pulled out of a deal. And after all the fuss over the foundation last year of the Edinburgh Comedy Festival—a “breakaway” venture by the Fringe’s biggest four venues designed largely to attract a major-league corporate partner—its founders had to announce in January that no such client had materialised.

With many firms set to be licking their financial wounds for some years to come, the Fringe’s income from conventional sponsorship is unlikely to regain its former levels any time soon, says Joe Goldblatt, executive director of the International Centre for the Study of Planned Events at Queen Margaret University. Instead, the festival should aim to exploit companies’ eagerness to improve their image in local communities – by encouraging them to fund free Fringe tickets for schoolchildren, for instance.

However strong the input of the festival organisers themselves, Goldblatt argues, public funding must also do its part. “All festivals—especially the prestigious ones in Europe, and Edinburgh in particular—require core funding from government,” he says. “The question is how much?” More, please, reply many leading Fringe figures as they gaze hungrily at the annual £2.3 million in public funding enjoyed by the Edinburgh International Festival. The Fringe , by contrast, receives no direct support.

Still, the big Fringe players must bear some blame for their collective difficulties. The bitter in-fighting over the Edinburgh Comedy Festival is symptomatic of the communication breakdowns that have stymied real collaboration at the Fringe, at a time when it is struggling just to maintain its national profile. And it’s not simply that established rivals like Glastonbury “have got bigger and better,” notes Goldblatt; “everything has. The media demand something that is newsworthy. The fact that Edinburgh has been around for 63 years can count against it, as it competes for media coverage against new, breakthrough events.”

Happily, Mainland appears to have made a strong start in channelling the Fringe’s disparate egos and mojos towards securing its long-term future. Her job title alone suggests a new, more businesslike approach to running the festival: previous incumbents were styled as “directors”, a name with overtones of artistic control that coincided with accusations, from venues and promoters, of high-handed interference. For  Underbelly's Ed Bartlett, critical of the Fringe Society in the past, the future looks good. “The Fringe Society,” he says, “has two primary functions: to produce the programme, and sell the tickets. Last year threw up a huge number of things that were wrong with the system. But Kath Mainland is already doing great things – she’s the right person to be running the Fringe.”

With a CV including Fringe work as a freelance producer and as manager of the Assembly Rooms, Mainland seems keen to continue her involvement at a grass-roots level. “The priority," she says, "is to get out and see as many shows as possible, and really get an idea of what it's like out there."

“I mean that variety is the beauty of the Fringe. You can see someone off the telly in the same day as you see an emerging theatre group in a swimming pool – where else can you do that?”