A website has been described as 'exploitative' by a Fringe producer after charging festival performers up to £50 to have their shows reviewed.
According to the site, the Mumble, artists appearing at this year’s festival can pay for “a digitally sophisticated Skyflyer” deal, comprising a review and interview, for £50. Opting for just a review would cost £30.
In a report carried out by theatre publication The Stage, Luke Emery, a producer at the Fringe, said that the Mumble had made an approach to one of his acts.
“I have been doing the Fringe for six or seven years and have not encountered this before,” he said, adding that his biggest concern was that people from outside the UK might be persuaded to pay to have their shows reviewed for promotional purposes.
“They are going to go for people who are inexperienced, don’t know better and are desperate,” he said.
Although £30 may not seem like a grand sum to have a show reviewed, Emery has said that the practice is "nonetheless unscrupulous".
Responding to his concerns on Twitter, people have question how a review can be impartial if it is paid for by the act themselves.
According to The Stage, one PR also said she had stopped giving tickets to the website for review purposes because of “passive aggressive” emails from the company.
In a response to the magazine, the Mumble editor Damian Bullen said the fee was fair as it covered travel expenses for reviewers.
“Reviewers are actually surveyors. Their reviews perform for an artist in the same way that an artist performs for the public,” he said.
“If you’re trying to sell your house in a crowded market, you get the surveyors in. The same applies to the Edinburgh Fringe and its thousands of shows,” he added.
He also said the people “complaining about what we do have generally spent thousands on publicists to get them a review”.
“They should really be spending that money on the reviewers,” he added.
A spokeswoman for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society said it did not “condone paying for reviews and would not advise participants to do this”.
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