The Edinburgh Fringe: A special place for storytellers

Ahead of this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival (7-31 August) we spoke to producer Francesca Moody about why it continues to be such a vital place for new artists and writers and her Shedinburgh venue, which celebrates the past and invests in the future of the Fringe.

What first got you interested in new writing and new voices? 

I think initially my interest stems from a visit to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival when I was 17. I'd never been anywhere like it before and I'd never experienced theatre like that. I think just being exposed to the breadth and depth of work that is on offer at the Fringe, especially new work, ignited a sort of passion for storytelling in me. And then subsequently, as I became a grown-up and decided to become a producer, I went and worked for a theatre company called Paines Plough, who are a very well-known new writing touring theatre company who have launched the careers of some really well known and celebrated playwrights: Duncan Macmillan, James Graham, Mike Bartlett amongst many. While I was there, I spent all of my time producing new writing, reading plays and developing my dramaturgical skills. So that, coupled with an ongoing love affair for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival cemented a desire to develop new writing.

How do you go about discovering new writers? 

I think I'm in a very lucky position in that I've produced some shows that have done particularly well and gone on to much bigger success than their original relatively humble beginnings. So, I think that gives me as a producer, and the company, Francesca Moody Productions, a kind of visibility to the sector. So, we do get a lot of plays sent to us, which we have to filter and read as a team. We've also spent a long time building relationships with agents and with writers and artists. And I love the theatre. It's a job, but it's also a vocation. You will find me at the theatre two to three times a week. So, I'm also spending a lot of time myself just engaging with work and discovering new writers. 

So, it's not one thing, actually, it's a combination of all of those things. It's building relationships of our own, working with agents, going to see the shows ourselves. And, thinking about the sorts of ideas and subject matters that are interesting to me and us as a company and the tone of work that we really love to make. And then looking for those writers who fit that brief, essentially.

What would be your advice to someone who is starting out on a writing journey of their own? Any top tips or are there any common mistakes that you see people make? 

I think the most important thing when you're starting out on a writing journey is to be true to yourself as a writer and as an artist and not try and make something for somebody else because you think they will like it. Authenticity can be a tricky word to use, because I think sometimes it leads people down this path of thinking that they have to sort of ‘trauma-mine’ themselves to create work. But true authenticity is just about writing from the heart. And yes, that does sometimes mean writing what you know, but I think it also means writing something that you feel deeply passionate about: the show that wants to come out of you, or the play that wants to come out of you. 

For me, I think that's the most important thing as a writer when you're starting out on your journey. I think the mistake that sometimes people make is that is they try and create and make their work for somebody else, when they should be initially just doing the thing they want to do. 

Also, it’s about ensuring that you are giving yourself the opportunity to challenge yourself to write as much in as many different ways as possible. Whether that's through exposing yourself to scratch nights or development programmes at theatres or just setting yourself your own personal challenges or working with your peers. I think in any job in the creative sector we only get better by practising the art that we're involved in. So, I think it's just making sure you're doing that as much as you possibly can. 

Maybe a useful point in that context is that I often think about DryWrite Theatre Company, which is Phoebe Waller-Bridge's and Vicky Jones's theatre company that I joined and became the producer. When Phoebe and Vicky started that company, the concept was these short playwriting nights where they challenged writers with an incredibly specific brief, and they gave them around two weeks to write the plays. And I think through that process, Phoebe and Vicky taught themselves how to be writers. It’s a really great example of how doing something like that can really develop your skills.

How would you define ‘Voice’ in writing? 

I guess, without wanting to repeat myself too much, I think Voice is really about being truthful to who you are, what your style is, what your personal taste is, and what kind of work you want to make, and not trying to bend yourself to somebody else's concepts and ideas. Because I think if you are able to identify and define that for yourself early on in your practice as a writer, it will benefit you hugely as you hopefully become more successful and more people become part of your writing process and ask you to change things and move things and evolve things within your storytelling in different ways.

So, I guess I would define Voice as a real sense of clarity about your authenticity as a writer. But it is a hard question to answer.

What is so special about the Edinburgh Fringe? And what are some of the challenges that it presents for emerging writers? 

If you can get a show to the Fringe, then it really is the great leveller, because it is a really fantastic opportunity to expose your work to so many different people. And the truth is, if you get your show here, anybody could come and see it. That could be the head of new work at the National Theatre. It could be the executive producer at a film and TV production company. It could be me. I think that what's so amazing about the Fringe is that it has the ability to launch people's careers. 

I also think the really fantastic and magical thing about the Fringe is that it's not a place for things to be finished. It's a place for things to start. And so, I think it's not necessarily about something being perfect. At its best, it's a great opportunity for an artist to try and tell a story unencumbered by how other people think they should tell that story, which is why I feel like it has launched so many careers. Particularly, in the earlier days, when it was perhaps a little bit easier to take work to the Fringe, people could come here and just have a go and try and express something through their work. And through that, they were able to define themselves as writers and artists. I think that's the ‘magic’ of it. To state the obvious, it's an absolutely insanely busy, massive place with people doing work of all different types and shapes and sizes. And that is really galvanising for anybody who works in the creative sector, because it means you can develop your own practice through seeing other people's work. 

In terms of the challenges, as I hinted at, it is becoming increasingly difficult to take work to the Fringe. That includes the cost-of-living crisis and the rising costs of accommodation, in particular here at the festival. Funding for work in general across the board is much more challenging, it's much harder to raise philanthropy, there are just challenges in every direction. 

Because of that I think it means that it really has to matter when you come to the Fringe now, which in many ways isn't necessarily the right conditions within which to just try something out, because it puts a particular amount of pressure on people when they bring their work here. It has to matter. That's not great when you're just trying to work things out for yourself. I think for me, that's the biggest challenge. 

It's also just really expensive to get here now which makes it that much harder. I think it's historically always been like that for artists who come from lower socio-economic backgrounds, it's always been more challenging for all of those reasons. So, I think there's a sort of inherent lack of diversity at the Fringe, which means that sometimes work here doesn't necessarily reflect the kind of breadth of talent that exists across the UK. There are obviously loads and loads of fantastic green shoots everywhere in terms of schemes and programmes that are trying to do things differently in order to ensure there's more sustainability here for artists and writers.

Can you explain more about your Shedinburgh project and how it helps to address some of those issues? 

Shedinburgh is our festival that we launched last year at the Edinburgh Fringe. It's an idea that came out of the pandemic when the Fringe was cancelled, and we decided to build a mini digital festival called Shedinburgh based on a pun (because all good ideas start with a pun). And we programmed a bunch of our favourite artists to do their formerly live Fringe show in a shed and streamed that to audiences. We launched it as a live project last year, and custom built a venue within a pre-existing venue, which is like a shed. It's a mixed programme of theatre, comedy and music and everything in-between that represents the breadth and depth of work at the festival. It's a kind of love letter to the Fringe and a type of celebration of the fantastic talent that has come out of it (and still is). 

The artists are doing their shows in a stripped back way, almost like the acoustic gig version of a show, to a really intimate audience of just 120 people. The programme consists of revivals of iconic fringe shows of the past, because I have this strong feeling that with new work, people make these shows and then they sort of disappear. And so that opportunity to bring them back but put them into a slightly new context is really exciting, alongside iconic and emerging artists trying out new things for the first time. We also have a strand of work where we've challenged some fantastic comedians to come in and explore what it means to make a piece of theatre, in the same way, some musical theatre artists are trying out some new songs. Essentially, I’ve pulled together all my favourite artists that I've been able to programme in the festival. 

The sustainability aspect of it is that we have tried to reimagine the Fringe model. So instead of artists having to pay to come up here and spending loads of money on accommodation and having to pay for their venue, we actually pay artists to perform. We give them a guarantee against a box office split and we also offer them travel and accommodation if they need it. So, it means that artists can present their work in a less risky environment, which I think contributes to the long term sustainability of the Fringe and shows people that there's another way of doing it. 

One interesting thing for the BBC Writers audience is we have this strand of work within the festival called Shed Originals. It’s a programme that we've partnered on with four theatres around the UK and Ireland: the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; Theatr Clwyd in Wales; the Traverse in Edinburgh and the Lowry in Salford. We've worked with them to identify one to two artists who they think are really brilliant. And we've curated a small selection of scripts which are provided with a bit of extra development support from us and from their partner venues to perform a kind of ‘work in progress’ performance of their script.

You're well known for a couple of shows in particular that have transferred from the theatre to being massive TV successes: Fleabag and Baby Reindeer. What do you think was the special ingredient that made them move so successfully to TV?  

I think there are two things. One of them is, I think, that neither of those shows were made with the intention of them becoming TV shows. So, they were not made with a sense of cynicism around them, like “I have to make this so that I can make my TV show”. They were shows that came from the heart. They were very authentic to the artists involved, although not necessarily autobiographical. And they were an opportunity to express something that needed to be expressed or told. Going back to what I was saying before about the best version of a show from an artist is the one that they really, really want to write or want to tell. Both of those shows are representative of that, I think. 

And I think the fact that they started in theatre, because I think in theatre, we do create space for artists to tell the stories in the way that they want to. Theatre is a writer's medium. When your work moves into other media, there's more money, but there are also a lot more people involved. And that means there are more notes and ideas and that can affect the direction of a story. I think the fact that these shows were able to start in theatre, so that both Phoebe [Waller-Bridge] and Richard [Gadd] were able to truly make the piece of work that they wanted to make, that led to really successful TV shows because they already knew what they were at their core when they started to be adapted into television, Both of those shows would never have been made into TV shows if they hadn't have been pieces of theatre first. They're just too weird, both stories.

Why is it so important that we continue to seek out new writing talent? 

Well, I think new writing is so powerful! It can reflect and explore all of the complicated things that are happening in the world right now, socially, politically, economically. And I think that there is so much power in telling new stories, in terms of how it can speak to a wider audience and can change hearts and minds and transport people and entertain people. 

It’s really important to support new writing because I think there's nothing else that can truly explore, reflect and help us process all the complicated things that are happening in the world. And I think we need to support new writers because new writers are the future. And without new writers and new writing, we won't have a world-leading cultural sector. It’s vital to keep feeding that ecosystem.