Edinburgh Festival Playwright Urges Boldness

Leading playwright Mark Ravenhill says stars should be leading the way and making this year's festival inventive and creative.

Video: Has Edinburgh Festival Fringe become too expensive for new acts?

By Lucy Cotter, Entertainment Correspondent

One of Britain's leading playwrights is opening the Edinburgh Festival, calling for performers to be more daring in the current climate.

Mark Ravenhill is the first person to make an opening speech at what has become the world's biggest arts festival. He believes artists here should be leading the way.
"What's exciting about the Fringe is it's all about new work and new ideas and people being inventive and creative and that's what we desperately need at the moment.

 

 

Mark Ravenhill is calling for creative inspiration at the festival "We've had this massive financial meltdown and nobody quite knows the way forward and I think a fresh way is what this country desperately needs."
The Edinburgh Fringe grows year on year and now makes around £140m for the Scottish economy, hosting around 24,000 artists in nearly 3,000 shows.
However Pippa Bailey, a theatre producer and director who has been coming to the festival for many years believes it is now so big that the fringe is actually exploiting performers rather than supporting them.

 

 

Pippa Bailey wants the show to be about performers, not corporate business She has described it as elitist and a "monstrous machine suffocating artists and shows". Ms Bailey also believes it says a lot about the world we live in.
She said: "I think as a system it reflects a society that isn't very fair and it's quite interesting to look at it as a microcosm of society so it is fundamentally a lot of people, the performers who are paying to play and the people who get wealthy are the city if Edinburgh and some of the venue bosses."
Debates about the role of the arts and its value have been raging for months with Culture Secretary Maria Miller recently saying they must focus on economic not artistic value, something Jenny Eclair, who has a show at the fringe this year disagrees with.
The first female winner of the Perrier Award believes this view conflicts with what the festival stands for.
She said: "Edinburgh is a magnificent beast, it's almost mythical, it rears up out of the cobbles every August and you just have to salute it and where is Maria Miller? Has she ever been here?
"The woman depresses me to within an inch of my soul, I don't know why she doing this job."