Are the big names stealing the show again?

We all know the legend; how, in 1947, a group of artists feeling excised from the new Edinburgh international festival came together and forged a space of their own alongside it. Thus was born the Edinburgh festival fringe: defiant, independent and very much counter to the arts establishment.

Fast forward 66 years and this year you'll find 20 major subsidised theatres presenting work at the fringe – and that's discounting the Traverse Theatre, which can hardly help its position in the middle of the melee. The Young Vic has three shows; Soho Theatre is producing three comedians; Northern Stage is running its own venue for the second year running; and two national theatre companies – Wales and Scotland – are represented alongside the very biggest regional theatres across England: Manchester Royal Exchange, Bristol Old Vic and Sheffield Theatres.
These are some of the most successful and well-funded organisations in the country and their presence in Edinburgh this August looks like another instance of the creeping professionalism of the fringe. Do they really belong there? When big-name, television comedians fill big venues with bigger publicity campaigns, we worry they're taking audiences and attention away from their less established peers. Don't theatres have the same impact on emerging artists and independent companies – let alone the hundreds of student, amateur and other grassroots organisations that make up the bulk of the festival programme?

In that context, it's worth questioning the place of subsidy at the fringe. In a recent blog, former Total Theatre creative director Pippa Bailey diagnosed Arts Council England (ACE) as having "a schizophrenic attitude to supporting artists performing at the fringe." Regularly funded organisations (RFOs) are free to put their annual grant towards an Edinburgh run if they see fit – provided it doesn't prevent the fulfilment of their funding agreement terms.

Independent artists and companies, however, can't access ACE's lottery funded Grants for the arts scheme to do the same. With the costs associated with the fringe, a simple discrepancy on paper translates into a significant disadvantage in practice. Besides, don't these theatres have local audiences of their own to serve?

ACE says its hands are largely tied. "Being lottery money, the rules of the Grants for the arts scheme dictate that most of the funded activity happens in England," explains director of theatre Neil Darlison. "If we were to open it up to fringe shows, it would open the floodgates to applications in a time of diminishing funds, because everyone wants to go there, and I think it might just skew the Edinburgh economy – if it's not skewed enough already." In other words: even more subsidy, even more disparity.

A closer look starts to shift the picture. Far from tapping a large, eager festival audience for their own interests, most subsidised theatres with work at the fringe seem to be acting rather more altruistically. Some, such as Bristol Old Vic and the New Wolsey, are sending their youth companies. Plymouth Drum is supporting an influx of overseas artists as part of the inaugural Big in Belgium showcase. The vast majority, however, are supporting independent artists, many at the early stages of Hands free access.

The benefits of a fringe run for independent artists are potentially considerable. It has a theatre-savvy audience on tap, a bevy of critics and industry figures both from around the UK and overseas. It is a fantastic meeting place. As Young Vic artistic director David Lan explains: "Edinburgh's a marketplace. It's where you hope the world will see you."

But it is increasingly expensive. "It's very easy for a young company to go to the fringe, run for three weeks and lose between ￡5,000 and ￡7,000 – even with reasonable critical success and decent audience figures," says Lorne Campbell, artistic director at Northern Stage. "The question for us is how we reduce the financial risk for those artists."

Northern Stage's fringe programme, which hinges on (but isn't entirely unwritten by) an ACE grant through the strategic touring fund offers artists – particularly early-career artists – based in the north of England an Edinburgh run with different terms. "We go a long way to alleviating that risk," Campbell continues. "We provide marketing, accommodation and technical support. We're a solid brand for people to build off and we're offering the kind of financial deal that other venues don't come near."

To demonstrate the benefits, Campbell cites Daniel Bye's experience with The Price of Everything at the 2012 festival. "It's transformed his capacity as an artist. That piece has toured extensively, continued to tour and forged new relationships." The fringe, he says, can turn "a company of regional profile into a company of national profile".

In other words, these producing theatres are almost functioning like funding bodies. Their presence in Edinburgh feeds into a wider narrative of collaboration and umbrella organisations. Lan also flags up the role that support-in-kind can play in that relationship: "What we realised is that if we put a small amount of money into a number of shows that we're interested in, we can look after the show with rehearsal space and other resources. We can feed into them putting the rest of the money together."

But the reasoning isn't solely about outcomes. Campbell firmly believes in the festival itself: "Out of all of those artistic voices, bleating and shouting, and all of us watching, that's where the future is; the way a zeitgeist can emerge out of the wisdom of crowds. This is where society dreams itself."

With a network of producing theatres fuelling it, he believes the fringe gains in its own right: "You have a forum of buildings and organisations putting work onto the fringe which is driven by a creative and a cultural impulse. We're doing it because there is an audience who has an appetite for that and they're an audience that isn't necessarily served by a big upside-down purple cow."

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