Edinburgh Fringe Festival | The debt joke

A genius! Or just a precarious wage slave? Photo: Promo What would Vincent van Gogh be in 21st century capitalism? An Uber driver: precarious and constantly broke. Donna Oblongata's drag clown show "The van Gogh Shogh" begins with this thought experiment. This was shown in August as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. The festival is the world's largest for the performing arts. Every conceivable form, from theater, dance and opera to comedy, circus and street theater, attracts an audience of millions every year.

Dramaturgically clever, Uber driver van Gogh accidentally ends up in a contemporary marketing spectacle called “The van Gogh Experience” in the theater. Van Gogh, with graying teeth, a broken jacket and - of course - a bloody ear, gets wide-eyed when he learns from the audience that his pictures are now making millions. Meanwhile, he himself pulls two beer cans out of his dingy transport box. One for himself, the other he cleverly sells to a spectator for six pounds. After all, he had to live on something, as his only true passion, painting, kept him in lifelong poverty. It runs through the entire piece and is presented by Oblongata in a surprising and varied way. Sometimes he encourages three audience members to paint a picture live on stage according to his instructions, sometimes he despairs of the audience's obviously dull understanding of colors. At the end he sings karaoke to “I’d do anything for love” by Meat Loaf.

Even though Oblongata is definitely making fun of the painter with her exaggeration of the male, unrecognized artistic genius, in her forceful, physical acting she also takes her character seriously as someone who has to make art because he can't do anything else. In this way, the award-winning performer and clown from the USA builds a bridge to the Fringe Festival: every year, thousands of artists throw creativity, time, money and their absolute urge to be on stage into the ring. It is mostly others who profit from this.

The artistic entry criteria for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival are low-threshold. However, there are high hurdles in financial terms. The Fringe Festival does not provide any funding and very few of the productions, which predominantly come from English-speaking countries, are supported by regional guest performance grants. Just to be accepted into a venue and appear on the official program costs £700. There are also costs for the venue, staff, advertising, accommodation and travel. Depending on the size and popularity of the venue, the costs would be between 10,000 and 70,000 pounds, estimates Marc Ashmore from the production company Future Artists. In addition, venues keep 30 to 50 percent of the ticket revenue.

»Working-class artists only come to the Fringe once. They can’t afford it a second time,” comments Loreen Hoodlees, stand-up comedian and semi-finalist in the “British Comedian of the Year 2021” competition. Prith Khalsa from Denver sums it up soberly: "All artists lose money at the Fringe Festival." Nevertheless, he definitely wanted to make his debut there this year with his absurd clown-loves-banana show "Gulp!" The Fringe Festival offers a great opportunity to be seen and signed by agencies or other festival operators.

But even this “being seen” becomes a challenge given the oversupply of 4,000 shows. Anyone who walks through the crowded streets of Edinburgh will end up holding a stack of advertising flyers for shows that artists or paid helpers hand out with emphatic words. On one corner a man even offers free compliments, only to pull out a flyer for his show the next moment.

The struggle for attention is understandable, as ticket sales are the only way to recoup at least part of the expenses. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon, especially for small and relatively unknown acts, that they only play in front of a handful of spectators or that the performance is even canceled due to a lack of audience.

The financial winners of the festival are primarily the venues, which show up to seven shows a day from midday until late at night and also sell drinks and food at horrendous prices. The festival is also expensive for spectators: the normal price for an admission ticket is around 14 pounds, there are no volume discounts or other discounts.

The comedy sector is traditionally very well represented at the Fringe Festival. “Comedy” is defined much more broadly in English-speaking countries than in Germany. While in this country the term primarily conjures up images of a person standing behind the microphone and only sometimes successful punch lines, the English understanding also includes clown (often without a red nose), drag, physical theater, storytelling, improvisational theater, cabaret, variety show, burlesque or even circus.

The Fringe Festival is known for adapting these forms to current social conditions and combining them happily and unabashedly. In addition to Van Gogh singing karaoke, such creative experimentation could be found this year in the clown show “&taxes,” in which a ghost tries to become a stand-up comedian. In “Don’t kill daisy” the audience is asked to save the unsuspecting techno girl Daisy from sudden death several times, like in a computer game. And “Stamptown” is a hyped-up vaudeville fever dream that recently achieved global commercial success with its own Netflix special and whose originality is unmistakable.

Despite their diversity, most comedy productions at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival have one thing in common: interaction with the audience. This is in contrast to the bourgeois theater tradition, which since the 18th century has maintained an invisible yet separating fourth wall between the action on stage and the audience. Especially at the Fringe Festival, where the audience and players are usually cramped together in rather small rooms, people don't exactly treat each other squeamishly. In Lil Wenker's brilliant oligarch satire "BOYKING", Prince Wilfred gets some viewers to get rid of their watches, handbags or even their own T-shirt, as these items happen to be exactly the gifts he wanted for his eighth birthday.

This type of interaction allows players to discuss current events or politics, including the material pressure they are exposed to at the festival. This sounds particularly drastic in the queer-feminist show “#hysterical”. Performer Sierra Callaghan from Wales said she recently lost her job as a biology teacher after it was discovered that she was working as a burlesque and drag artist. Now she's panicking about the festival's unfunded expenses.

It is not uncommon for the description of one's own material situation to appear as a punchline in one's own comedy program. For example, when John-Luke Roberts, named one of the 50 best comedians of the 21st century by the British newspaper "Daily Telegraph", tells the anecdote of how he once reported to Equity, the union for theater workers, that he was poorly paid by a promoter. A long letter was returned saying that they deeply regretted the incident.

Precisely because the precarious situation of artists at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is so omnipresent, it threatens to congeal into an empty phrase (“Please recommend my show!”), a punchline or even festival color, without any consequences. But there is one thing that the material conditions are really not: a joke.

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