You may have heard (if you follow me on any social media platform you definitely have…) that I took a show that I co-wrote, co-produced and then performed to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2022. It’s now been a few days since the last performance and I’ve had time to reflect on the experience as a whole, something I definitely couldn’t do whilst it was happening, such is the festival’s intrinsically manic, non-stop nature.
In general, the experience lived up to any lofty expectations I had and probably surpassed them as well. I managed to never lose sight of the fact that it was an honour and a privilege to be putting a show on in the first place and that meant that whatever was thrown our way, good or bad, it made it a lot easier to take it all in our stride.
Some, if not the majority, of the performers at the Fringe are hoping to utilise the festival as their big breakthrough moment. The careers of many comedians and performers were indeed launched in Edinburgh and so there is a distinct scent of aspiration and occasionally even desperation that lingers in the dressing rooms and venue bars. I never thought of our show in the same way. And so I guess there wasn’t the weight of pressure that many of our fellow acts must have felt.
And yet on the flip side, there have also been so many people who have praised us for having the “courage” to do this and that they wish they could do the same one day. Well, you can! I’m not going to deny there’s quite a lot of thought and effort involved, but I guarantee you have put just as much thought and effort into something else in your life that won’t have produced anything like the rewards that the Fringe will. And if you are ever so slightly considering it, I hope the following little guide can be the thing that tips you over the edge…
So with the caveats established that this is by no means a “How to Make it at the Fringe” guide and certainly not a “How to have the perfect Fringe” guide either, I hope that these little tips can help to make performing at the festival a less intimidating prospect. To put it as bluntly as I can: If we can do it, with our limited budget, experience and expertise, and it can still go incredibly well, then really anyone can.
#1- Sell, but don’t Oversell
If anyone has been to the Fringe before, then you will incredibly familiar with one thing: Somebody rapidly reeling off a perfectly rehearsed one-sentence pitch about their show, whilst stuffing a flyer into your hand. And if you’re brave enough to walk down Edinburgh’s busiest street, The Royal Mile, you will finish a hundred-metre stretch with enough paper on your possession to open up a stationery store. It’s a bit annoying and worryingly not very environmentally-friendly, but it’s such a massive part of the Fringe that you have no choice as a performer but to grab a big stack of your own flyers and head out to bother some poor passing tourists.
Given that there are over 3000 shows at the Fringe, competition is fierce and so what you say, and perhaps more importantly, how you say it can be the decisive factor in somebody coming to see your show instead of the guy dressed in drag a couple of feet down from you. You need to do something to catch the eye in the first place. A fellow performer gave us the fantastic idea of getting a big whiteboard and writing “What’s on your Bucket List, Edinburgh?” to try and engage people without having to just blindly promote the show. And then once you have established that relationship and they’re actually willing to listen to you for a minute, then you can try and convince them to buy tickets and come and see you.
And whilst this may just be my personal taste, this “softer” approach is far more effective than the “oversell” tactic. The best example of this being at the Greenside Launch event on our very first day at the Fringe, an American director got talking to us about her show. She summarised it really well initially and I was honestly very willing to come and see it, but she just kept going and going. And ten minutes later, I was now determined to avoid the show at all costs. So that’s the balance: You have to put yourself out there, or you’ll be performing to empty seats each day, but don’t forget that no one, especially if they’re British, has any time for self-obsession.
#2- A Good Technician is like gold-dust
Okay, now this one we found out by sheer luck. Getting a technician was one of the most difficult parts of organising the festival. Some venues book them for you, but Greenside aren’t one of those and whilst they did provide a helpful list of accredited freelancers, the person I had initially booked had to drop out and everybody else had since been snapped up. So after a desperate scramble on a Facebook page, we found Peter literally a week before we started, and only met him the day before our Tech rehearsal.
Given these circumstances, I’d have taken anybody that had two fingers and could therefore move the lighting switches and press play on the computer at the same time. Instead, Pete helped to transform the show from an amateur shambles that wouldn’t have looked out of place in someone’s front room to something that at least resembled a slick, professional production.
The gaping hole in mine and James’s creative knowledge was the technical side and whilst I had tried my hardest to make a legible cue sheet and put all the music in the right order, Pete took one look at our plans on that first meeting and quickly told us that what we wanted was essentially impossible unless he took it all over and programmed it himself.
Now, not everyone will get somebody who is so amenable and willing to help at such short notice so my advice is to find someone who knows what they’re doing as early as possible and trust their superior knowledge to put everything in place. Quite frankly, you’ve got enough to worry about anyway, leave the technical side to those who know what they’re doing. It makes all the difference.
#3- Take time to yourself before each performance
It seems a ridiculous thing to say, but with everything else that’s going on at the Festival, from flyering to social media posts to talking to other performers to arranging to meet friends and family, the thing you think about least is the actual performance at times. So, therefore it is absolutely essential that about a half-hour to an hour before your start time, you go back to the dressing room and get into “the zone.”
Now, all the credit for this has to go to James, who thanks to his acting course, has an endless amount of acting warm-ups that we would run-through each day. I was maybe a bit sceptical at first, but once we had done it a few times, I could actually feel my body relaxing and then re-energising, ready for the performance. Added to that, we would then both switch off from each-other and put our headphones in and listen to music, just to make sure we were mentally in the right places for the start of the play. Everyone is different so there’s no point going through our own routine, but find yours and make sure you do it every day, regardless of everything else you need to do. It would be an awful waste to spend all that time getting people into your space, only to not be ready to impress them once they’re there.
#4- Stick to what you know
One unexpected lesson I learned from Fringe this year was that I am getting old fast. Given that it’s been three years since I’d even been in Edinburgh as a spectator, the world and the methods of promotion have come a long way since then. This year, Fringe was partnered with TikTok. An app I have never used and find about as irritating as Chinese water torture. I know, I’m twenty-four going on eighty-four.
Now, for some performers I bet this is a godsend and I’m sure they used TikTok to great effect during the festival. And we did wonder if we were missing a major trick and so booked a meeting with the Fringe TikTok team to discuss what we could do. The poor woman was probably just doing her job but she lost me almost immediately and once she started showing us her own “fan account” (whatever the actual fuck that means) I stopped listening altogether. We left the meeting respectfully and then looked at each-other, saying at the same time: “We’re not doing that.”
Now, this isn’t meant to be a rant (though it may have slipped into that) but just a pointer that TikTok wouldn’t have worked for us because we wouldn’t know what we were doing. My father, who tried to appoint himself as marketing manager for the show, put up a TikTok of a still image of our poster and a rap song that he didn’t even know he had used. That’s not how we were going to get people in. So, stick to what you’re comfortable with. Better you do what you know well, than do things you don’t understand badly.
#5- Don’t obsess about numbers
We went into the festival saying things like “Oh if we get half-capacity every night, that’ll be pretty good.” Whoops. As mentioned above, there are 3000 shows at the festival and unfortunately your show is rarely going to be at the top of people’s to-see-list. Especially for the first few performances, no-one will even know you exist and so you can’t expect big crowds to turn out. Therefore, you should see it as a success if anyone comes to see you at all. At least you have someone to perform to. This was put into perspective for us as the shows in the slots either side of us both had performances where they didn’t have a single person. Now these were more experienced, and quite frankly better, performers than us, so it shows how difficult and competitive it can be.
And if your show is half-decent, it will pick up. By the end of the run, we were exceeding half-capacity. And thankfully we never had the dreaded empty room. You can track your box-office sales online and I did become a bit pre-occupied with this, mainly because I was essentially watching a live report of my personal financial debt. Obviously it’s a good thing to keep one eye on this, but I’d recommend not worrying about it too much. If you get into the mindset that one performance is more important than another because of who is in the audience, you’ll just mess yourself up.
#6- Reviews: Find the Gold in the Dirt
Reviews are a massive part of the Fringe. If you are struggling to get people in, then a good review can change your fortunes, as people do read publications like The Scotsman and EdFringe Review when deciding what to see. And even now, when I read the Greenside Facebook page, it’s full of acts begging for people to come and see their show, because they’ve got a reviewer in and need to look as impressive as they possibly can.
Now, I think reviews affected us less than your average act because of what I mentioned above regarding us being there to enjoy the ride rather than to “make it big.” But that doesn’t mean we didn’t search them out and read them when they came! It’s human nature to want to be praised and championed and of course no-one is doing Fringe thinking that their act is rubbish so there’s a fair amount of ego involved.
That being said, it’s incredibly important not to obsess about star ratings and quick takes. And even more important to try and get some self-awareness of where your show sits within the Fringe spectrum. There are professional companies that are at the very top of their game selling out hundred-seater venues every single night, being reviewed by the exact same people as you. So, it’s unlikely, bordering on impossible, that you’re going to get five stars each time.
Instead, just take the win that somebody took the time to come and review you at all. We again were incredibly fortunate in this regard as we were reviewed by some pretty prominent publications and whilst they of course didn’t love every single thing about our show, each one said a number of really positive things. That’s what I mean about “finding the gold in the dirt”; always focus on the positives. And if I’m honest, reviewers know what they’re talking about! Nearly everything I read about our show was pretty much spot-on; so when they praise you, make sure you absolutely cherish that.
#7- Get by with a little help from your friends (and family)
Finally, I’m going to shamelessly gush about everyone who supported us during this crazy process. Despite everything I’ve just said about making the most of your Fringe experience, it would all have been irrelevant without our family and friends. Not only have they helped us in a million different ways, from providing accommodation, to buying dinner, to helping us flyer, to taking photos and videos to even fixing our props (Thanks Mum!) but they have also been such a big percentage of our total audience. And for me personally, it relaxed me so much when I was standing behind the curtain, knowing there would be friendly faces in the audience.
So, my final piece of advice or lesson learned from performing at the Fringe is that before you do anything else, make sure you mobilise the support of those closest to you. Everyone will always be able to help in some way and when every cost counts, it helps that they don’t charge for their assistance! More than that, the Fringe can feel overwhelming at times, so having the people you love the most around you to offer comforting words or just to take your mind off the show for a moment is an absolute essential. Perhaps the most important thing of them all.
George F Brown 