Tag Archives: Austentatious
Jul 28, 2014 · 3:52 pm
The Edinburgh Fringe's free festivals as seen by The Free Festival's Alex Petty
Blatant self interest at Edinburgh Fringe
I have to declare an interest. At the Edinburgh Fringe this year, the annual increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show AND the daily Grouchy Club which I am hosting with critic Kate Copstick are both being staged at The Counting House – a Laughing Horse Free Festival venue. The Edinburgh Fringe is strangely complicated. Pay attention. This year, the Fringe officially starts on Friday but, as always, actually starts this Wednesday. The Laughing Horse Free Festival and Bob Slayer's Heroes of Fringe/Pay What You Want shows start on Thursday. The La Favorita Freestival starts on Friday. And the PBH Free Fringe starts on Saturday. There are two types of venues in Edinburgh. There are the traditional 'pay' venues. That means audiences pay in advance to see the shows and the performers pay large amounts to rent the rooms and facilities.
This year's PBH Fringe logo
But there are now four organisations hosting 'free' shows. That means entry is free (though you are expected to donate money on the way out) and the performers pay nothing to perform in the venue. The original Free Fringe was started by Peter Buckley-Hill (known as PBH) in 1996. He was later joined by Alex Petty of Laughing Horse Comedy, but they split in 2004 and Alex started the (in Peter's eyes) competing Free Festival. My understanding was that Peter did not agree with Alex's view that they should charge the acts a small amount to cover the cost of appearing in the printed Free Fringe programme (although the PBH Free Fringe runs fund-raising pre-Fringe shows in London). Last year, Bob Slayer started his 'Pay What You Want' version of the free model which means you can either get in for free or guarantee a seat by buying a £5 ticket in advance. This year, there was another breakaway from PBH's original Free Fringe organisation. The breakaway organisers – calling themselves The Freestival – have managed to get £25,000 sponsorship from local La Favorita pizza chain, matched by £25,000 sponsorship from Arts & Business Scotland.
Alex Petty talked to me at the Soho Theatre
"PBH seemed to feel threatened by your Free Festival," I said to Alex Petty when we met at the Soho Theatre in London. "Do you feel threatened by the new Freestival this year?" "Not at all," said Alex. "I think the more free organisations the better. And let's not forget the Scottish Comedy Festival down at The Beehive, where they do a mixture of paid and free stuff." "Would you take sponsorship like the Freestival?" I asked. "I think that's given them a good foundation this year," said Alex. "They've started as quite a large organisation with several venues and performance spaces, whereas we started with one venue and gradually grew and acquired equipment and things we needed over the course of eleven years. What they've managed to do is get the equipment and stuff in and pay for the set-up for their venues in one go.
The Laughing Horse Free Festival logo for this year
"The Free Festival gets sponsorship in little ways – Kopparberg sponsor various bits of The Counting House. The Three Sisters is sponsored. It tends to be the venues themselves in partnership with sponsors, not us. It pays for the stages. "And then a lot of the companies behind the venues put money in as well. Our three main venues – The Counting House, Three Sisters and Espionage – spend a lot of money on advertising themselves, supplying equipment and staff. "We've never got to the point of having a big headline sponsor for the Free Festival. A lot of companies who want to sponsor comedy are alcohol companies and they want to get their products into the venues, but we have 22 venues all tied to different breweries, different companies. Some are owned by bigger companies; some are independent; trying to get them all to sign up to the same thing is difficult."
The new Freestival 2014 logo from pizza sponsors La Favorita
"Now, with the Freestival," I said, "there is even more competition." "We've all got slightly different ideas," said Alex. "It's going to be a friendly rivalry." "Bob Slayer's Pay What You Want shows are listed in your Free Festival brochure," I said. "Can you see a joint Free brochure coming out?… Although presumably not with PBH Free Fringe shows in it." "Peter can be very combative about stuff," said Alex. "It's his way or no way. He's got a very set vision and sticking to that is good in many ways. You would think Peter would be happy and proud that there are so many people now doing free shows, but he's not happy with other people doing similar things." "The perceived problem with free shows," I said, "is the quality."
Bob Slayer's Pay What You Want hybrid of both free & book
"Well," said Alex, "there are good and bad free shows. There are good and bad paid shows. There used to be a lot of Oh. It's free. It must be rubbish. But now people are just treating them as normal shows. Every individual show, free or paid, rests on its own laurels. "The more people put on serious free shows and set up decent venues, the more people will come across to the free shows. In the last eleven years, it's grown ridiculously and we have not seen a dip in audiences even though, every year, there are more shows – We have grown; PBH has grown; Bob Slayer has come along and expanded things. I think, with bigger and better acts and more venues running for free, that is going to pull audiences away from paid to free venues rather than taking any numbers away from the existing free audience." "But the quality of the free shows," I persisted, "must be lower, because you haven't got the technical back-up. You can't do a 10-person musical."
The cast of Austentatious: An Improvised Jane Austen Novel (Image by Idil Sukan of Draw HQ)
"Austentatious was in The Counting House Ballroom last year," Alex pointed out, "and this year we have Who Ya Gonna Call? (the Ghostbusters musical). In terms of putting on large, complex productions, it's difficult. But the Ballroom at The Counting House means we can put on things which have 6-10 people on stage. It has programmable lights; we can do scene changes and lighting changes. The Three Sisters is getting there as well, with a couple of its bigger rooms." "I understand," I said, "that the Freestival have put soundproofing into the Cowgatehead. So things ARE looking up. But what do you get out of it? Not vast amounts of money." "Sadly not," said Alex. "Laughing Horse gets work and good PR. When performers go up to Edinburgh and then progress their career, we go on with them to other festivals where we do make money and we get a lot of good PR which pushes us up in the industry a bit for getting further work.
Janey Godley at the Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show in the ballroom of The Counting House (Photograph by Stephen O'Donnell)
"We don't run quite so many comedy clubs any more. We have 10 or 15 places where we do regular monthly gigs or on-and-off. But we do a lot of corporate bookings and one-offs. We have 22 venues in Edinburgh during the Fringe – about 35 performance spaces. We have four venues during the Brighton Fringe. This year we did the Perth Fringe in Australia for the first time. Our main one in Australia is still the Adelaide Fringe; we manage some spaces out there. And we've done the Melbourne Fringe for the last couple of years. The Singapore Comedy Festival we started doing this year: we actually run that festival with guys out in Singapore – we pay acts to come out and do the festival. So we run venues and promote and produce shows and make money throughout the year." "So how can you expand in Edinburgh?" I asked. "We're comfortable with where we are at the moment. We're at a size which is manageable. We want to do better what we are doing now." "Have you ever wanted to perform yourself?" I asked. "No," said Alex,. "I see all the stresses and strains the acts go through. I like being in the back room, enjoying it and putting stuff together." "How did you get into the business?"
Laughing Horse Comedy originally came from a Black Horse
"I used to go to a comedy club in Richmond with a mate of mine, Rob Lee. He wanted to get into comedy. It ended up not being the thing for him. "But I had sat down with him and his brother and we wrote a bit of material for him and he did do a few gigs and one of the local pubs we drank in – The Black Horse – said You should run a comedy club. That's where the name Laughing Horse comes from. A couple of the guys he'd done open spots for – Kevin McCarron and Fenton McCoot…" "Fenton McCoot?" I asked. "He was an ex-hairdresser who, about a year-and-a-half in, just vanished completely. I've not heard from him since. He moved back to Ireland, apparently. But he just vanished at one point and him vanishing was when I started booking the acts because no other bugger would do it. So we started running a comedy club and we fucked everything up as we went along but gradually got our thing together and we got a second comedy club and, over the course of two or three years, learnt what we were doing and started to go up to the Edinburgh Fringe. We just learnt as we went. Now I can book all the acts I want to see myself." "I like comedy," I said, " because it gives me a chance to meet bizarre, mentally-deranged people." "There's certainly a few of those around," said Alex, "But I think the one thing that's lacking on the comedy circuit these days is there are not the good entertaining nutters around that there used to be. People who would go on and do bizarre acts and be great at what they did for five minutes. I miss that element of the comedy circuit. It has got blander."
Tagged as Alex Petty, Austentatious, awards, Bob Slayer, comedy, edinburgh, Fenton McCoot, festival, free, Freestival, Fringe, Grouchy Club, Kevin McCarron, Kopparberg, La Favorita, Laughing Horse, Malcolm hardee, PBH