A few weeks ago, my daughter came downstairs at midnight and found me on the sofa, phone lit up in my face, thumb going, eyes fixed.
“Dad,” she said, in the tone I usually reserve for her “Oh my god, you absolute hypocrite… Are you doomscrolling?”
In the last ten minutes, I’d discovered a man trapped inside a giant papier-mâché head, reciting utter filth; two superhero plumbers doing battle with something called a Megaclog; and a woman in a flowing white gown, wielding a broadsword.
“I’m not doomscrolling,” I said. “I’m reading the Pleasance programme.” I’d been on the site for a couple of hours, several hundred shows deep, I couldn’t stop.
Doomscrolling and reading the Pleasance programme possibly look the same, I admit, she did have a point. Same posture, same intense eyes, the same faint air of a man who’s lost track of time and possibly his mind. But they are absolutely not the same. Reading the programme is far more joyous and exciting.
One shows you more of what you already believe, forever, until you fall asleep angry with the world. The other shows you three hundred things you’ve never heard of, made by people you don’t know, and asks you to take a chance; that’s a far more joyful way to lose a night’s sleep than doomscolling.
After over forty years working in the festival, and more than twenty years standing here at the start, I ask myself the same question. What is there left to say? You’d think I’d have become more certain about it. But in fact, the opposite is true. The longer I do this, the
less certain I am. Not because I know less. But, because I’ve realised how much here is still left to discover.
Much of what I’ve learned has come from being wrong. The shows I worried nobody would attend, ended up defining a festival. And those guaranteed hits, the radar somehow missed, that quietly disappeared…. Artists who started with nothing but hope, a suitcase, and a handful of flyers have gone on to fill theatres around the world… But none of us truly knows. Certainly not me.
Well that made me think about ‘uncertainty’. Uncertainty… I don’t think it’s a weakness. I think It’s the point.
It seems my doomscrolling phone doesn’t have that problem. It has spent years learning exactly what I’ll want to click on, and it just gives me more of the same. Whereas, here, here at the Pleasance, being in a theatre, well that’s the opposite. A room full of strangers agreeing to let someone they’ve never heard of, try to surprise them with stories they have never heard before.
By any algorithmic measure, that shouldn’t work. Especially now, with so much technology. Everything in our lives seems to be very good at giving us more of what we have already chosen, and never once betting on what we haven’t yet discovered.
Two nights ago, a couple wandered into our courtyard, purely because they heard a buzz and saw a crowd. They weren’t ticket-holders. They hadn’t read a post or seen a thread, they were just people walking up the street, they heard noise, saw colour, and were curious. It’s easy to forget how strange, how improbable, all of this looks through eyes that have never seen it before. This is a city that has, without asking anyone’s permission, turned itself into an act of incredible imagination. Every wall selling you something. Every flyer offering a choice, every doorway leading somewhere you haven’t yet been. Nobody recommended this place to those strangers. No algorithm nudged them toward it. They simply followed something they didn’t understand… because for one moment… ‘curiosity’ was far more interesting than ‘certainty’…. Algorithms are a kind of map.. but one that only ever redraws the streets we’ve already walked along…Artists are cartographers of a different kind….They draw maps for the territories the rest of us haven’t yet had the nerve to explore.
Every August, the Fringe becomes thousands of these maps, laid out side by side, and nobody tells you which route to take. You
choose! And somewhere along one of those unfamiliar roads, you discover that the point was never to arrive somewhere certain. It was to have the curiosity to go looking at all.
Well, that’s the bet the Pleasance exists to make. It isn’t just a bet on shows. it’s a bet on people, on their curiosity. Every summer, I watch young and ‘not so young’ people arrive to work, or perform their first Fringe. Some behind a bar. Some backstage, holding a torch in the dark, having never set foot in a theatre before. Four weeks later, they leave with an intangible confidence, new friendships, a skill they didn’t have in July, and often, it’s the beginning of a career.
None of that happens on its own. It requires what the producer and musician Brian Eno called “scenius”, not a lone genius, but the collective power of creative minds. Technicians, creatives, volunteers, box office staff, artists, and audiences willing to take a chance on an idea and let it shine.
So to the thousands of artists joining us this year, thank you. Everyone of you is curious, you arrive without knowing whether anyone will come, whether the reviews will be kind, or whether this will be the show people are still talking about in ten years’ time. And yet you came anyway. Curiosity isn’t only what we find in our audiences, it’s what gets you here in the first place.
The Pleasance wouldn’t exist at all without one man’s willingness not to know how it would turn out. Christopher Richardson opened the doors to this place with no certainty whatsoever. So, thank you, Christopher, for starting that very long argument in favour of curiosity over certainty, one we at the Pleasance have been having, happily, ever since.
Now, Since the 24th of July, Edinburgh has been charging its new visitor levy. Within a few years, it’s expected to raise over fifty million pounds. Now, I don’t feel any of us begrudge a city wanting to invest in itself…. But..I do have a request.
Nearly six and a half million pounds of that, by the Fringe Society’s own estimate, will come directly from this festival. It will come from theatre companies, artists and venues booking rooms so that they can be here, to put on their shows. Accommodation was already too expensive and these are not people on holiday. They are people who often lose money, so the rest of us can enjoy what they bring, meanwhile, the council can bank a small fortune. Thirty-five per cent of that levy is earmarked, broadly, they say, for culture,
heritage and events. That seems a very good sentence. But here’s the thing about curiosity: it cannot survive without certainty. An
artist can only take a risk on stage if they’re certain they’ll be able to pay the rent.
Certainty for the council’s coffers. Uncertainty for the artists who fill them. That’s not a fair trade! Politicians love a shiny new project and easy headlines. But every one of those projects starts with something as unglamorous as an artist’s rent. So here is the one certainty I ask of this city. Turn that thirty-five per cent from a good sentence into a promise and give this festival the
certainty it desperately needs.
Finally, I want to thank, our audiences. Thank you. Not simply for buying tickets.. but for ‘choosing’ to sit in a room with strangers and let
something surprise you. In a world that’s doomscrolling its way into forgetting how to remain curious, Live Arts just might be the most important thing we have left. Because during this festival, the lights will go down. Someone you’ve never heard of will walk onto a stage. They may fail, but the chances are…. they may change your life. None of you knows which. That’s the whole point. So please, please…. remain curious.
