Fringe benefits

The organisers of the Edinburgh international festival must surely be hoping that all publicity really is good publicity. So far, though, in the row over the Dublin Abbey Theatre's explicit staging of Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Barbaric Comedies, it doesn't look like it: around half the audience walked out of the first performance of the play, which includes graphic portrayals of rape, and several commentators have warned of dire financial consequences for the festival if the show fails. It is the sort of fracas more reminscent of the high-octane, low-budget fringe festival, where earlier this month a comedian, Scott Capurro, caused a minor storm with attention-grabbing jokes about the Holocaust.

In truth, though, neither festival can afford too much of this kind of revenue-threatening controversy. As the festival reaches its peak this week - with the international festival, fringe festival, book festival and film festival all in full swing - two incidents have drawn attention to serious financial problems at the fringe, while at the international festival things are looking just as bad.

In June, negotiations broke down between Edinburgh council and arts producer David Bates over the rental of a site for Bates's vastly popular Spiegeltent venue, which has taken centre-stage in the shadow of the city's Scott Memorial for the past four years. Partly because a mutually acceptable price could not be agreed, it is not there this year.

Meanwhile, the Assembly Rooms, a linchpin of the fringe comedy circuit, has been fighting to survive under the weight of debts and a new council rent of £80,000 for the duration of the festival - making the venue, in the words of its artistic director, William Burdett-Coutts, "the most expensive empty building in Edinburgh, if not the country". Festival director Paul Gudgin has joined the fray, arguing that "cracks are appearing" in the fringe because promoters are being deterred by the risks of mounting productions, which frequently cost as much as £150,000 each.

Brows are being furrowed at the flagship international festival too. The EIF subsidy - what Bernard Levin once famously called "the annual grudging of the money" from the city council and the Scottish Arts Council - has, in real terms, been shrinking unremittingly for years. In 1999, it came to £1.95m, 35% of the festival's total revenue - a reduction in cash terms of 20% on the 1994 figure. (The rest of the money came from ticket sales - £2.1m or 33% - and sponsorship and merchandising deals).

Organisers of the various festivals are aggrieved because they feel the funding bodies do not fully appreciate the economic benefits they bring to the city and to the country as a whole.

They have a point: even aside from the intangible benefits of prestige, the economic bottom line is impressive. According to the most recent detailed study, conducted in 1996, the festivals stimulate £122m of additional spending, boosting local income by some £30m and maintaining thousands of jobs.

"Any other city would pay millions to have the fringe in their city, especially considering the amount of trade it pulls in," Tim Hawkins, director of the Komedia venue, has said.

If it were simply a matter of the local authority's poor attitude, a solution might be straightforward. But it's not that simple. A new study by Edinburgh council points out that since 1996 it has had to reconsider its support "for festivals and events" alongside "competing service priorities and in the context of shrinking financial resources"; in any case, the authority also contributes a further £385,516 to the film festival, children's festival, jazz festival, book festival and others, and is now proposing to write off the deficits of the EIF and the science festival.

And taking a nationwide view, funding for arts festivals is hardly in decline. This is especially the case this year: by the end of 2000, the Millennium Festival Awards for All scheme - a joint initiative of lottery-funded grant-making agencies - expects to have spent £100m funding 15,000 arts festival projects. Perhaps it is simply time for other arts events to get a slice of the money, and to leave the exuberant and expanding Edinburgh festivities to look after themselves.

But even if the festivals are victims of their own success, they are still victims. Faced with cash shortages, the EIF spent £343,000 less on productions in 1999 than the previous year, making available 10% fewer tickets.

"Festivals of this reduced scale cannot continually be produced without affecting the long-term viability and worldwide reputation of the festival city," writes its director, Brian McMaster, in the most recent annual report.

There are obvious solutions, but McMaster does not favour them. "Any further erosion in public sector support will inevitably lead to fundamental changes in the nature of the event itself," he writes. "Even if it were possible to increase [income from sponsorship and ticket sales] this would lead to a smaller audience and to the exclusion of a large section of its current audience base."

Walking down the Royal Mile dodging over-enthusiastic leafleteers and street performers advertising their fringe shows, it's hard to think of Edinburgh's festival season as a fast-fading patient in need of an urgent cash injection.

Commercialisation has been notably slow in bringing about the disastrous effects that have been predicted for years: the iron grip of a handful of big-money venues on fringe comedy, for example, does not seem to have stemmed the flow of energetic students and am-dram hopefuls willing to bear financial loss in order to be a part of it. They do it because they believe in the festival, in what Burdett-Coutts has pinpointed as "the exuberance and excitement it generates and the sheer joy it brings to live performance".

But all that exuberance has a price tag. And it would be something approaching a tragedy if the price were ever to become too much for the festivals to bear.