Ballantine Dykes - Beyond the backstage

EMMA BALLANTINE DYKES gives a fascinating insight into the real nuts and bolts of putting on a show at the Edinburgh fringe festival

When a theatre company arrives at the Edinburgh Fringe the stage is already set for the biggest arts festival in the world. By early August, as many as 261 venues will have sprung up all over the city and a glossy programme will already be extolling the virtues of over 1800 different shows. Meanwhile an army of reviewers will be sharpening their pencils in anticipation. Inside, the theatres themselves will be heaving with technicians, press officers and front-of-house teams ready to spin the straw of amateur productions into gold. By the time the first crisp ticket is torn from its stub the city will have undergone a seemingly spontaneous transformation into an arts wonderland. Yet bohemian as it might all appear from the front row, Fringe shows depend on an infrastructure which takes months to prepare.

The biggest venue provider for theatre companies at the Fringe is C Venues. From marquees to cabaret bars, its venues, ranging from 40 to 200 seats in capacity can accommodate almost any project – from the most humble and obscure Fringe offerings to seasoned sell-outs. Theatres are created by hijacking some of the less inspiring buildings in central Edinburgh and disguising them beneath an inviting layer of black cloth, scaffolding and chicken wire. Entrance halls and patios are turned into cafés and barbeques to feed and water the performers and their public, and banners quickly re-brand university lecture rooms and church halls with the C Venues logo and a layer of posters to attract passers-by.

With around 200 shows during the three week run of the Fringe and over 200,000 audience members to usher through its doors, it is no wonder that in peak season C Venues employs 200 people to keep things running smoothly. Getting a job at a venue has to be one of the best ways to see the festival on the cheap. Although the job calls for a twelve hour shift every day, including 5am technical rehearsals which have to be squeezed in before the daily programme begins, it also brings with it the rewards of a “C Pass”. This humble piece of laminated card is a free ticket to any show that C Venues has to offer. It also works its magic at many of the local shops and restaurants, where discounts can be obtained for everything from a panini to a haircut. Best of all, working at a venue is a way to feel that sensation, much-coveted by anyone who has ever visited the Fringe as a tourist, of being “on the inside”.

However, in spite of this army of pilgrim workers who keep the ticket offices open and the poster boards interesting, the bulk of the planning and management falls to a team of just nine people. Three of them work all year round and the others come up to join them in Edinburgh as the summer draws closer. Their most daunting task is to gather together the many varied requirements of 200 companies and work them into a feasible timetable. Vacant slots can be snapped up just days before the start of the festival, so producing 30,000 full-colour brochures and finalising the set, seating and publicity arrangements of every act can be a headache. Once this Herculean task has been achieved managers must then deal with a steady stream of tricky, even sometimes impossible demands by anxious artistes during the course of the festival, not to mention some questions that almost anyone would struggle to answer. “What can we do?” asked one performer optimistically after a scathing review in The Scotsman.

“It can be a tense working environment” admits Will Young, one of C Venues’s assistant managers and an Oxford PPE undergraduate. “Most of the managers end up working a nineteen hour day on a regular basis.” He also highlights the pitfall of working in a not-for-profit organisation, saying wryly: “The staff think the pay is low whilst the companies complain that we take too high a percentage of their takings.” Yet if anything these observations serve to show just how passionate people are about the Fringe, being prepared to do whatever necessary to be part of the action. In spite of a gruelling schedule Will still managed to produce a show which ran every night of the Fringe: evidence that even the longest shift in the world can’t shake the sheer enjoyment of putting on a spectacle, which is of course what underpins the whole institution.

It takes two and half weeks of non-stop building to complete the transformation of Edinburgh’s empty spaces into stages - and just two days to rip it all down. Stepping into Adam House, the main C Venue, on the day after the Fringe is a sobering brush with reality after the magic of the festival. Theatres in which, only hours before, actors were taking their final bow are reduced to a collection of building materials in a matter of minutes. Props suddenly brought out into the light, old umbrella, a toga and a teapot, seem incongruous and forlorn, abandoned in a corner while the crew continue tearing the set down. The whole building rings with the whine of drills set to unscrew and the clank of scaffolding poles being disconnected; but by this stage in the festival the first bid for 2008 has already been received and the cycle is starting all over again.

Emma Ballantine Dykes is a final-year English undergraduate at Exeter College. She has put on two shows at the fringe with Oxford Gargoyles and also produces shows in Oxford.