Upcoming talent and well-known favourites came together in the collaboration that is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2022. While visitor numbers seemed down compared to pre-Covid levels, the festival’s 75th birthday celebration remained a large one.
- 2.2 million tickets were issued in 2022.
- The 2022 festival delivered 80% of the number of staged shows from 2019.
- 50% of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s print run was cut down in 2022.
- 39% of tickets sold in 2022 were to Edinburgh locals, with 10% of tickets sold to visitors.
- 1, 800 tickets were given to community groups, schools, and charities.
- Comedy made up 1, 362 of the shows in 2022.
- 1, 500 people signed an open letter to the festival in 2022, criticising them for high accommodation prices.
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2022 Edinburgh Fringe Festival Stats
24 days of Fringe festival took place in Edinburgh from the 5th to the 29th of August in 2022.
- 2.2 million tickets were issued in 2022 across all venues and art forms
- 3, 646 shows were performed, with artists hailing from 63 different countries.
- 5, 3117 total performances.
- There were 14% fewer shows in 2022 than in 2019.
- 1, 354 people from 45 countries were involved in the production of the festival; covering roles like programmers and talent agencies.
- 770 of the world’s professional media, from 21 different countries, attended the festival.
- 147 delegates participated in Screen Fringe.
The 2022 program had productions tackling topics like mental health, feminism, lockdown, gender, disability, politics, and more. Most of the shows performed (2000 of them) had a duration of 60 minutes.
3542 of the shows were in person, 75 were online-on-demand and 23 were online-scheduled.
The performances took place over eight different venues, and the street events programme found new space in 2022.
There were 3, 284 street performers and two new sites were added to the venues at St Andrews Square and Cathedral Square.
The eight venues were:
- Assembly
- Dance Base
- Gilded Balloon
- Just the Tonic
- Pleasance
- Summerhall
- Underbelly
- And Zoo
Underbelly’s sales, which was one of the top Fringe venues, went up by 27% compared to 2019. Laughing Horse similarly experienced a surge in ticket sales, which brought them back to 2019 levels. Assembly’s sales were around 10% less than in 2019.
Summerhill experienced 7% fewer ticket sales in 2022 than in 2019, although they did present 30% fewer shows. This indicates that more tickets were actually sold per show at Summerhill in 2022.
Types Of Performances At The Festival:
- Comedy: 1362 shows
- Theatre: 984 shows
- Music: 454 shows
- Cabaret and variety: 180 shows
- Dance Physical Theatre and Circus: 160 shows
- Spoken word: 160 shows
- Children’s shows: 131 shows
- Musicals and Opera: 110 shows
- Events: 60 shows
- Exhibitions: 45 shows
Joining Hands
The Edinburgh Fringe festival is not backed by a single organisation. Rather, it is somewhat of a collective made up of workers, promoters, artists, and venues. This commitment to collaboration was clearly witnessed in the 2022 event where 150 sensory backpacks for autistic children and adults were loaned out by the festival’s Community, Learning, and Access team.
There was BSL interpretation in West Parliament Square for five days of the event. Over 30 charities and community groups in Edinburgh collaborated with the festival to distribute more than £60,000 of Lothian bus tickets and Fringe vouchers. This allowed a broader range of the city’s residents to experience the festival.
More than 900 schoolchildren did outreach work at the festival and over 1, 800 tickets were issued to community groups, schools, and charities that took part in the Fringe Days Out scheme.
Community Outcry
The community of Edinburgh have a large stake in the festival.
39% of the total tickets were sold to residents of the city. This figure was 4% higher in 2022 than it was in 2019. This is compared to 10% of total tickets being sold to international visitors, which went up by 2% in 2022 compared to 2019.
It is estimated that the 2022 festival generated £1 billion for the Scottish economy.
Despite its contribution to the community, locals have raised concerns over certain aspects of the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe festival.
Complaints of overflowing trash and poor waste management began to pour in, as around 250 of Scotland’s refuse workers went on a 12-day strike following an inadequate 2% pay offer. Then came the even louder complaints about the high cost of accommodation and staging of shows.
Accommodation in Edinburgh near the festival’s venues has indeed been doubling. The trend is linked to both the cost-of-living crisis and tenancy reforms that incentivized university students to keep their accommodation over the holiday period.
Some have referred to these high costs of accommodation as exploitation at the expense of artists, who have been seen pitching tents and setting up caravans so that they can have a place to sleep during the festival.
Further, some venues noted huge losses for artists and productions in 2022.
One director of the festival warned that the future of the event itself is being threatened by accommodation prices and that a serious debate about how to find solutions to these problems is needed for the festival’s survival.
These frustrations culminated in 1, 500 people signing an open letter to the Fringe Society in 2022.
To find a solution to the crisis of accommodation, the Fringe Society began working with four local universities in 2022 to make 1, 200 rooms available at a maximum cost of £280 per week.
Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s Future Development Goals
Their 75th birthday not only marked the festival’s comeback, but also a new commitment to becoming more sustainable, fair, and inclusive.
Edinburgh Fringe Festival launched its future development goals in June 2022 as a way of working towards recovering the event from the knocks it experienced during Covid-19 and the subsequent restrictions.
These goals created a new vision for the festival, all aimed at ensuring its long-term renewal. The six goals include:
Thriving artists: The festival should encourage and support emerging artists and talent.
Fair work: Exploitative working conditions to be completely eradicated at the festival.
Climate action: To fall in line with Scotland’s goal of becoming net zero by 2045, the festival aims to become carbon net zero by 2030.
Equitable Fringe: Decrease barriers to access to the festival, both for performers and attendees.
Good citizenship.
Digital evolution: Enhance the digital experience of the festival.
To accomplish these goals, the festival further published a series of commitments for 2022 which included:
- Sourcing new income streams to better support artists facing barriers.
- An annual family event that will be free for Edinburgh residents.
- 50% reduction of the programme’s print run.
- Exclusively use e-tickets in 2022.
Moving Forward
The 76th Edinburgh Fringe festival looms in the distance, and the city’s streets will once more be filled to the brim with the smell of street food, artistic expression, and palpable excitement between the 4th and 28th of August in 2023.
Registration for the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival opened on the 9th of January, but make sure to keep an eye out for some of these upcoming developments:
The first list of shows that will be performing at the festival will be revealed on the 16th of February 2023.
The second batch of shows will be announced on the 30th of March and the third batch on the 11th of May 2023.
The full 2023 programme will be launched on the 8th of June 2023.
Sources
https://www.timeout.com/edinburgh/things-to-do/75-years-history-of-the-edinburgh-fringe
https://www.edfringe.com/learn/news-and-events/key-dates-announced-for-run-up-to-fringe-2023
https://www.planmyfringe.co.uk/FringeStats
https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/edinburgh-fringe-festival-waste-recycle-24675627
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/aug/05/edinburgh-fringe-return-surge-in-sales
Nathan has always been captivated by numbers and patterns. With a Master’s degree in Statistics, he’s honed his skills to decipher complex data sets and discern market trends.
Over the past decade, Nathan has worked with various firms compiling and analyzing industry spending figures to forecast market movements.