'I'm losing £120 for every day I spend here'

Is the Fringe getting too expensive for performers and punters alike? Director Paul Arendt, who has taken his first show to the festival this year, reveals all
Leafleteers for Paul Arendt's show
That's £200 well spent ... leafleteers for the show Arendt is directing. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod
Published on Thu 11 Aug 2005 05.39 EDT

How much does it cost to stage a show at the Edinburgh Fringe? Answer: more money than the show will make. There are some exceptions to this rule. You might be famous already, or just very lucky. You might have stumbled on to a unique gimmick; fortunes have been made by Australians manipulating their genitals until they resemble national monuments.

However, for the vast majority of performers at this year's fringe, operating at a loss is not so much a risk as a given, and the best approach is to shrug your shoulders and accept the fact that you will spend August blowing your savings.

From a certain point of view, the fringe is the theatrical equivalent of vanity publishing. If you discount the major venues, there are no filters on quality. Anyone can play at this table: all you need is cash. Naked ballet? No problem, just sign here. Measure for Measure on stilts? Wonderful idea, that'll be four grand. See you again next year. Edinburgh is full of sad idealists with empty pockets.

I've been reviewing the festival since 2001 and, up until recently, I assumed that those four years would be the ideal experience with which to cross the fence and actually participate. My assumption, as it turns out, was sheer, low-watt-bulb foolishness. Working as both poacher and gamekeeper has its own unique difficulties (at the Gilded Balloon press launch, I had to network myself) but they are nothing compared with the central problem: it's all so bloody expensive.

The comedians that I'm directing, Faultless and Torrance, are an established female double act on the fringe. Our show is a frivolous reworking of John Woo's atrocious action movie Face/Off; it has no great ambitions beyond making people giggle for an hour. It's costing us £9,500, give or take. The reviews are good, so far, and the audiences are building. If we're really lucky, we might claw a few thousand back from that outlay. Personally, by a rough calculation, I'm losing £120 for every day spent up here. And, faced with the grey reality of the festival performer's life, which consists of working very hard all the time while losing a lot of money, I wonder why so many people put themselves through the trouble.

I ask Karen Koren, the hard-nosed director of the Gilded Balloon, for some financial tips. "You have to do it for at least five years in a row for people to remember you," she says. Five years! Spending £10,000 a time - and most performers are not wealthy people to begin with. "Adam Hills started in the mid-1990s and did it for three men and a dog. Now he's got his own TV series in Australia and Hollywood are looking at him," she insists. "But of course, it doesn't happen for everyone."

Newcomers can avoid expensive mistakes simply by reading the small print. Inexperienced companies blithely stump up thousands for their venues and expect that price to include technical operators on tap, state-of-the-art equipment, 24-hour public relations support, and possibly backstage cocktails. In reality, little comes for free, unless you are adept at calling in favours. One group told me that they had been asked to provide their own broom to sweep the stage.

To survive the month, I discover, you must beg, borrow, blag and sell yourself with a fervour that would be unthinkable in day-to-day life. The first sniff of a good write-up is gutted for quotes, photocopied and slapped on to every available surface. During the festival, Edinburgh's Royal Mile resembles a Wall Street trading floor invaded by an army of drunken circus performers - and there is no alternative to joining the fray.

Loitering outside our venue, Faultless and Torrance and I thrust leaflets, freshly stapled with the day's reviews, at passers-by. "Brilliant comedy. Five star reviews. Two- for-one tickets tonight. It's really funny. We've got popcorn, we've got moustaches, we've got a sword fight with umbrellas." And so on. Every seat secured is another few pounds off that monstrous bill. I find myself translating them into meals and cigarettes. Let's not even consider the money that I might have made this month if I had taken a proper job.

At least the advice is free. Comedian Peter Buckley Hill has been coming to the festival for 12 years. In the real world, he lectures on marketing at the University of Westminster, so he is well placed to explain the peculiar economics that apply here.

"The important thing to realise is that artists finance the fringe in its entirety," he tells me in a brief hiatus between compering. "Apart from trivial amounts of sponsorship there is no other finance. So not only do we provide all the artistic input, we also provide all the money."

A wild-eyed, professorial figure, Buckley Hill is a fringe institution, partly thanks to his act (an invigorating flirtation with comedy disaster), but mostly because he does not charge admission. Buckley Hill works on the basis that wary Edinburgh punters are more likely to take a flutter on unknown acts when they have nothing to lose. To hear him tell it, working for nothing makes more economic sense than charging for tickets. A free show will rarely be empty, which is good news for his venue. They in turn allow him to perform without paying rent. He loses less money than he would by following the conventional stand-up route.

"There is a financial point at which you don't take a risk," he says. "I'm not going to pay £11 to see someone who's uncertain, and if I'm not, who else is?"

Everyone I talk to says that Edinburgh is getting more expensive, for the audiences as much as for the acts. When presented with a leaflet, punters are more likely to haggle over free tickets than ask what the show is about.

"You used to be able to do the Fringe out of sheer willpower," says Rohan Acharya, producer of the BBC's live stand-up show. "It's getting more commercial, and we're probably all driving it."

Acharya, another fringe veteran, has been trudging up to Edinburgh since the early 1990s. "I had absolutely no resources and no idea what I was doing. I blundered up here and we crashed our way all over the festival. The first week was a nightmare, then we got a four-star review in the Scotsman and bang! Everyone was watching the show."

His advice to starry-eyed neophytes like myself is stark: "You can't expect to go to Edinburgh for one year and come back a star. It's absolutely unrealistic. What you can do is come back harder and more experienced."

But is it worth the trouble? "It delivered me a career," Acharya says. "I was a sixth-former doing a play, now I'm working in television."

There's a stand-up comedian called Janice Phayre staying in our flat, so I put the question to her, too. "You buy into the idea of Edinburgh," she says. "It's like the American dream. It's fuelled by money, sure, but, in theory, anyone can succeed."

Much later, she pops her head round my door and says: "It's fun, too. Don't forget to put that in, will you?"

How it adds up

Expenses so far for the show Faultless and Torrance Take Their Faces/Off

Producer: £1000
Director: free
Performers: free
Public relations: £900
Technician: £260
Magazine advertising: £584.27
Fringe brochure entry: £242
Venue hire: £3,900 (or 40% of box office, if greater)
London previews venue hire: £300
Accommodation for three: £1,500
Train travel for three: £123
Poster design: free
Poster printing: £145
Flyer printing: £200
Set costs: £36.20
Rehearsal space: free
Photography: £100
Replacement umbrellas for umbrella fight: £27.40
Stuffed dog: £13.50
Miscellaneous props (elastic, lampshades, silly string): £31.70
Costumes: £27
Music: £24.98
Photocopying: £8.20
Alcohol: £80
Total: £9,503.25

· Faultless and Torrance Take Their Faces/Off is at the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh (0131-668 1633), until August 28.
· Peter Buckley Hill is at the Laughing Horse, Edinburgh (0131-556 4481), until August 27.