Festival Countdown: Underbelly Co-founder Ed Bartlam’s Edinburgh

Underbelly was first opened in 2000, as a small performance venue for five shows brought to the Edinburgh Fringe by the long-running Fringe company, Double Edge Drama. Double Edge directors, Ed Bartlam and Charlie Wood, now directors of Underbelly, had heard of the venue through a production of Gargantua, performed by Scottish company Grid Iron in the vaults below the city’s central library. The vaults proved the perfect location for all five of Double Edge’s offerings that year, and the company went on to attract sell-out houses and win a Fringe First for its productions of Bent and Marat/Sade.

The next few years saw the Underbelly rapidly grow into one of the most popular venues on the Fringe. Its atmospheric setting in the former bank vaults under George IV Bridge presented performers and public alike with site-specific spaces and a real Fringe experience. The combination of dilapidated crumbling walls, a challenging and often provocative programme of shows and a loyal following of Underbelly regulars drew many, including founder of the Traverse, Richard De Marco, to suggest that it was the first venue in years to sum up the true spirit of the Fringe.

Celebrating its tenth year at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2009, the Underbelly now encompasses 109 shows across 13 performance spaces in four venues, including, for a fourth year, the E4 Udderbelly, the famous upside down purple cow tent, which finishes its inaugural London season at the Southbank Centre this weekend (See Photos, 28 May 2009), before packing up and heading to Edinburgh, where it grazes in its own Cow Pasture in Bristo Square.

When was your first Edinburgh Fringe & what took you there?
My first Fringe was 1997. I was 16 or 17 and I came up as part of a kind of youth school theatre group called Double Edge Drama and did a few shows – I used to be a pretty bad actor! That’s when I first fell in love with everything that was the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe: the energy and the chaos, the number of people and the number of things happening across what’s actually quite a small place – Edinburgh is really a big town rather than a small city. It’s that energy that I think makes people come back and back and back every year.

Double Edge Drama was how I met Charlie Wood, my business partner now, who was then a director – a better director than I was an actor. So I performed for a few years at the Pleasance, and then in 2000 we were bringing up some shows with Double Edge Drama, including Bent and Marat/Sade, and I wanted to find a new venue. Charlie had heard about these amazing vaults which had been used by Grid Iron before. I went and had a look at them, spoke to the local council and got permission to use them. That’s how Underbelly began.

What’s been your most memorable Fringe experience since then?
There have been so many. From a business point of view, 2006 was pretty memorable because it was the first year we had the cow, the Udderbelly, which has become our sort of main venue – which is not to take anything away from our original venue down on Cowgate. 2003 was fantastic because it was the year that Will Adamsdale’s Jackson’s Way, a show we’d produced, won the Perrier. To be involved from the early days and see the show leap-frog from the newcomer list and win the main award was fantastic. Every year throws up new interests and highlights, but those two are key.

How has the Fringe changed since you first attended?
It’s got larger and more competitive. More competitive on different levels actually: whether you’re a performer, a producer or a venue operator. I think that’s a good thing, it’s healthy. There’s also been more of a surge in recent years of people trying to do site-specific shows in interesting spaces, which is how the Fringe started and is important for it to keep reinventing itself. And, obviously the comedy programme has grown a huge amount, even in the last six years.

I know some people have a concern that comedy has overtaken theatre, but certainly from the Underbelly point of view, we’ve always tried to programme interesting new theatre as well. This year it’s pretty much 50-50. Charlie and I both came from a theatre background, and from day one, the Underbelly was very much a venue where we’ve tried to put on new theatrical talent and new writing. We only started doing comedy in 2002. Obviously, that’s grown quickly to be a large part of our programme, but it’s never been ridiculously off balance. We’ve always tried to keep it roughly equal.

And last year – with the Assembly Rooms, Pleasance & Gilded Balloon – you launched the separate Edinburgh Comedy Festival, which drew a lot of criticism. What was the thinking behind it?
The thinking was and is very simple really. All our venues put on a lot of comedy and we wanted to try and market it as a joint operation which would allow us to make the programme more coherent for the Fringe-going audience, but also to create more buzz nationally around what we’re doing. The Fringe is fantastic, but it lacks a large degree of national marketing. That’s through no one’s particular fault. The Fringe Society hasn’t got loads of money, certainly not after last year’s box office problems, and because the Fringe is essentially made up of lots of different organisations, different venues and different producers, there’s no one pot of marketing money. So the idea is to create something that we hopefully will get sponsored. It didn’t happen last year, and it hasn’t happened this year because of the current economic climate, but we hope to get a sponsor so that we can go out and market first the Edinburgh Comedy Festival and then the wider Fringe.

None of us have that kind of surplus money – it costs so much to run and programme our venues, and none of us our subsidised – so we need to find investment from a different source. Sponsorship by a commercial organisation is the best route, and we feel the best way of securing that is to put our comedy programme under one banner. It created dissent last year because people initially saw it as a breakaway. But when we stepped in to help the Fringe sort out its box office problems, it became obvious that’s not what we’re about. We’re just trying to help sell Edinburgh to the wider world and attract new audiences. If that means selling the comedy, which is a main component of the Fringe, then that should be a good thing. I’ve always maintained the belief that it doesn’t matter how you get people up to Edinburgh. Whatever hook you use, whether that’s theatre or comedy or the book festival or the TV festival, just get people up there. What Edinburgh benefits from hugely – which is exactly what happened to me – is that people come up for the first time and they fall in love with it and they come back.

What’s the biggest challenge for the 2009 Fringe?
It’s obviously been a difficult year for a lot of industries. The most difficult thing for us is just to sell the tickets. That said, since the box office opened in June, we – and, I believe, a number of other venues – have been seeing extremely good pre-sales, which is really encouraging. We’re up considerably on where we were at this point last year. I think perhaps that’s because not as many people are holidaying abroad this summer, they’re looking for things to do in the UK. And in the local Scottish area, rather than go away, people are choosing to come see great shows on their doorstep. So the key this year is to make sure that people know about what we’re doing. This is part of the much wider conversation about how we keep on selling Edinburgh and keep on finding a new audience for it. The one thing we can’t do is become complacent. Yes, it’s the biggest arts festival in the world, but there are plenty of competitors, like Latitude, out there doing similar things on a smaller scale.

The Fringe is massive. That’s only a problem – and this goes back to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival idea – in that it can be difficult to market, because it’s got so many different strands, and it’s sometimes difficult to navigate once you arrive. But that’s one of its great strengths too. Part of the fun is being besieged by thousands of different artists and performers and performances from all directions. You don’t find that anywhere else really.

What are you most looking forward to about the 2009 Fringe?
It’s our tenth year so that’s big for us. And we’ve got another new venue. For a year, we’re taking over the George Square site where the Spiegeltent has been. We’re calling the whole site, which used to be the Spiegel Garden, the Hullabaloo, and in the Hullabaloo is the venue, which is called the Bosco. The Bosco tent is a 1908 German touring tent with 180 seats. We’ve got a great cross-genre programme of stuff in there – kids’ stuff, comedy, music and cabaret – and a nice outdoor bar.

We’re also doing some revamps to our original venue, the Underbelly. On Monday and Tuesday of every week, 98% of the shows in Underbelly on Cowgate are selling tickets for just £6.50. Over the last few years especially, ticket prices have increased a lot, mainly because the costs of a production coming up to Edinburgh increase every year. £6.50 was the price of a ticket when we first opened, so it’s great that ten years on, we can still offer £6.50 tickets two days a week. I hope it will encourage people to see more and to take risks on new shows they might not have seen otherwise.

Having the London season at the Southbank Centre for the Udderbelly this summer before the Fringe has been really successful. It’s allowed shows that we’re taking to the festival to have a preview, and it’s been a helpful in marketing Edinburgh as well. We’ve been distributing Fringe brochures from our London box office and bars. I hope in a little way that’s been a help – I think people definitely make the connection. It’s taken us three years to get the cow set up in London, and it’s very much the hope that it will become an annual fixture. We’ve got a series of debrief meetings with the Southbank Centre this week and we’re already thinking about 2010. That’s our aim.

How would you advise keen theatregoers to get the most of the Underbelly programme in Edinburgh?
We’ve got quite a good cross-section of different styles and shows in different venues. The Udderbelly is 400 seats, so there are large-scale productions there, and also in the Cowbarn next door, which is 300 seats. It’s in the various rooms in the Underbelly where we’re really trying to nurture new talent and new writing. My advice is to go and see the big shows but also take a chance on the new stuff at the Underbelly with our £6.50 tickets there. We’ve built up a good reputation over the years of putting on sometimes controversial, sometimes hard-hitting, but usually interesting site-specific work into our Underbelly spaces. This year’s no exception.

What’s your top tip for surviving – and getting the most out of – the festival?
Drink, drink and be merry! And socialise. Word of mouth is everything. You can read loads of reviews, but what helps most is sitting down with people at the end of the day and asking, what did you see? Then, you need to just immerse yourself, knowing that at the end of it you can have a big long sleep – you’re certainly not allowed to sleep during the festival itself! I operate on very little sleep during August. You get into this kind of Edinburgh body clock. Usually I’m in Edinburgh from mid-July until early September. Last year, for the first time in over ten years, I came back down mid-way to go to a good friend’s wedding. It was the most surreal, weird experience. I remember getting to London and collapsing because I was out of that Edinburgh body clock environment. When you’re up there, you just throw yourself into it and ride the wave of adrenaline.

And, beyond the festival, what’s your top Edinburgh city tip?
My favourite pub in Edinburgh is called the Cumberland Bar which is on Cumberland Street in New Town. They do fantastic ales. If you go and sit in there, you’re as far removed from the festival chaos as possible. And I always try and visit the Botanical Gardens because, again, you’re completely out of the chaos that is the festival. They’re my two top tips when you need to escape.

The 63rd annual Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival, runs this year from 7 to 31 August 2009 and involves an estimated 18,901 performers from over 60 countries presenting 34,265 performances of those shows in 265 venues. For full coverage of Edinburgh 2009, including more countdown interviews as well as news, gossip, reviews, blogs, features and video throughout the festival, go to Whatsonstage.com/Edinburgh2009. And for further details specifically about the Underbelly programme in August, visit www.underbelly.co.uk.