Is losing a roundabout a loss?

Well, I suppose if you lived in East Kilbride, it wouldn’t be recognisable as a loss because they have so bleeding many of them. However, in terms of Summerhall and the latest news that’s to come out from there, they will be glad it’s nothing to do with some form of HMRC letter, but disappointed that Paines Plough have decided to remove one of the most innovative venues that the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has been able to promote over the last few years.

In reports of the decision, of the plays noted for being highlights and special in their pop up over the last few years, two out of the three were shows that I had reviewed. The one that got away was Baby Reindeer, and much though I might be gutted not to have had the opportunity to tick that one off a bucket list, it was never on mine.

Paine’s Plough and Summerhall provided us with a number of tremendously decent pieces of theatre. Oftentimes they would be far more traditional in terms of the subject matter or in how they were performed, than the expected fare at the Fringe. The format of Roundabout, as its name suggests, is theatre in the round. It felt instantly theatrical and recognisable as opposed to being stuck in the back end of a taxi or up the top of a bus or indeed in one half of a double-sided toilet, working out what the heck is going on and why it is that you paid a fortune to be there.

Losing this particular aspect of the Festival Fringe is not something I take a great deal of delight in. Whilst I would love to see the Fringe manage to manage itself better and try and reduce the offerings available, the loss of a venue, along with others over the last few years – who can forget or indeed remember Griffyn venues – is something that is unfortunate. If it is a venue that provided a marvellous array of, well, theatrical delight, or if it is something which has fallen short of that there is still a feeling of loss.

Venue 13, Sweet, Spotlite – of curse, these are just management companies no longer managing. In at least two of their iterations things still appear.

There needs to be a look at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe model to find a way in which what happened at Summerhall is risk-lessened. Of course, in a precarious place such as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, within the context of an industry as precarious as the arts, the triple jeopardy of then having an arts festival where you have an average loss rather than an average profit as the main headline and result of your endeavours means that we should be looking at this – urgently. As long as we don’t have to stay over if the meeting runs over…

We should be looking at how this affects people of colour. We should be looking at this as to how it affects disabled performers. We should be looking at this in the light of the fact that so few working class people, and by that I mean genuine working class, not people who find themselves a bit skint claiming they were once or now are “working” class, actually don’t get to access the Fringe in any way possible. Be they visitors or performers, the working class are increasingly being excluded from the largest opportunity to have their lives enriched by the arts.

This is increasingly a privileged event. It is no longer a cliché; it has moved on from that. Are people going to stop coming because they lose faith in what it represents? For a lot of us that faith was gone a long time ago and we did not believe that, with the behemoths of the major venues raking it in, whilst exploiting and using in some cases volunteers or just offering a little bit above the national minimum wage, we were in a nirvana of any description.

And so, unless we’re East Kilbride or Glenrothes or Irvine or any new town that the new Labour government are likely to build, losing a roundabout can never be good for anyone.