Let me begin with the important bit: I expect Bliss to be very good.
In fact, everything about it suggests that it could become one of the biggest hits of this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
It arrives from the Olivier Award-winning producers behind Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It has a cast of 17 performers, including established West End talent, an experienced creative team and the sort of production credentials that will inevitably attract attention.
Its story sounds fun, too.
Four princesses escape from their tower and discover a world in which fairy godfathers rule and happy endings come with conditions. With pop-rock music, comedy and a message about perfection, Bliss appears designed to be bold, energetic and enormously entertaining.
I am not avoiding it because I expect it to fail.
I am choosing not to see it because I expect it to succeed.
There Is Only So Much Fringe One Person Can See
Nobody can cover the entire Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Even if I abandoned sleep, survived entirely on meal deals and developed the ability to teleport between venues, I would still only see a fraction of the work being performed.
Every ticket therefore becomes a choice.
Do I spend that time watching a major production with recognised performers, substantial resources and an established team behind it?
Or do I walk into a smaller room and take a chance on someone whose name I have never encountered before?
For Theatre Village, the answer is increasingly the latter.
I want to find the performer staging a show with borrowed furniture and a suitcase full of props.
I want to find the company that has spent months fundraising simply to afford accommodation in Edinburgh.
I want to find the writer who has sold possessions, called in favours and possibly placed their grandmother on an online marketplace to get the production onto the stage.
For legal purposes, Theatre Village does not endorse the sale of grandmothers.
But you understand the point.
Today’s Unknown Performer Could Be Tomorrow’s Star
The Fringe has always been a place where artists can arrive without household names and leave with careers transformed.
Robin Williams appeared at the Fringe in the early 1970s as part of a student production of The Taming of the Shrew. John Cleese performed there with the Cambridge Footlights before Monty Python existed. Decades later, Phoebe Waller-Bridge brought Fleabag to a small Edinburgh venue after helping to fund the run through Kickstarter.
At the time, none of those performances arrived with the full weight of what those names would later mean.
That is part of the magic.
Somewhere in Edinburgh this August, a future star may be performing to 3 people in a room above a pub while a faulty air-conditioning unit attempts to provide its own experimental soundscape.
That is the room I want to be in.
Not because a small show is automatically better than a large one. It is not.
Not because success should be treated with suspicion. It should not.
But because the smaller production may need Theatre Village more.
Bliss Deserves Its Place at the Fringe
This is not an argument that Bliss does not belong in Edinburgh.
The Fringe is open by its very nature. Its founding spirit is based upon artists turning up and creating their own opportunities.
A production should not be excluded because it is polished, commercial or filled with West End performers any more than another should be excluded because its scenery fits inside a carrier bag.
Every artist who wishes to perform deserves the chance to find a stage and an audience.
The presence of large productions can also bring new audiences into the Fringe. Someone may book Bliss because they recognise a performer or producer, then take a chance on three smaller shows while they are in Edinburgh.
There is room for both.
However, there is a difference between whether a show deserves to be at the Fringe and whether Theatre Village needs to cover it.
Bliss will attract attention.
It has the names, the scale and the publicity machine to ensure that people know it exists.
Other productions do not have those advantages.
Theatre Village Chooses the Underdogs
Theatre Village actively supports independent theatre.
That does not mean ignoring quality, and it certainly does not mean automatically praising a production because it has no money.
A bad show does not become brilliant simply because its lighting desk was transported to Edinburgh on a Flixbus
It means looking beyond production budgets when deciding whose work deserves attention.
Theatre should not become a system in which the shows with the most publicity receive even more publicity while everybody else waits quietly outside.
Sometimes the most valuable thing a small publication can do is point its readers towards the production that does not already have hundreds of people pointing at it.
That is where Theatre Village can make a difference.
Grace Now Enters the Debate
Now, Grace Hatchell has been listening to all this while holding her postbag and looking increasingly concerned that nobody has offered her a complimentary programme.
Her verdict is characteristically direct.
“Seventeen West End performers? They’ll be all right, love.
“They’ve got Olivier Award-winning producers, electric vocals and costumes that probably haven’t been assembled with safety pins in somebody’s Travelodge bathroom.
“I’m off to see the woman doing a musical about divorce with one lampshade and a kazoo.
“She might be dreadful. She might be magnificent. Either way, nobody else from the press has turned up, so shift along and save me a seat.”
Grace has a point.
The greatest joy of the Fringe is not always knowing exactly what you are going to get.
It is entering a room because the premise sounded intriguing, the performer sent a thoughtful email or something in the listing made you wonder whether this could be the show everyone is talking about next year.
There is excitement in discovering something before it becomes polished, packaged and widely known.
I hope Bliss is everything its creators want it to be.
I hope audiences love it. I hope it sells out, earns excellent reviews and enjoys a long life beyond Edinburgh.
But I will probably be somewhere else.
I will be watching the performer nobody recognises yet.
The company without a major producer.
The artist handing out their own flyers in the rain because there is nobody else available to do it.
The Fringe is large enough to accommodate the glitz, the glamour and the future commercial hits.
Theatre Village is choosing to search among the underdogs.
Because the next Robin Williams, John Cleese or Phoebe Waller-Bridge will not arrive with a sign above their head announcing what they are about to become.
Sometimes you simply have to walk into the smaller room and find out.
Bliss | Edinburgh Festival Fringe
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