Marlborough Productions at the Brighton Fringe, 2009-2019

With Brighton Fringe 2021 in full swing, we thought we’d have a look back at the last 12(!) years of Marly memories at the Fringe. Read what our Artistic Director Tarik Elmoutawakil had to say…

Taking part in Brighton Fringe at Marlborough Pub & Theatre was a major turning point in the development in our organisation. Spanning the month of May, sometimes teetering into June, Marlborough Productions brought together the best fringe work on tour, over the years producing an increasingly queer, and feminist programme. 

 

Working on the fringe programme was a 10 month job, starting in September with applications and inquiries coming in and ending in late July, once all payments had been made out to artists. It also involved working with an incredible number of artists – one year we had almost 100 performances in the space of 30 days. For a 55 seater venue, with a tiny team that was an incredible feat – and one we came away from both loving and also vowing never to repeat, for fear of burn outs! 

 

We ran programmes from 2009 until 2019 – that’s 11 Fringe programmes. During this time we strived hard to create a programme that reflected the identities and interests of the audiences that frequented the theatre and bar downstairs, eventually developing a programming policy to ensure that no racist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist work was shown in our theatre. That’s not as easy as it seems, as often fringe theatre companies don’t approach venues with a completed script or videos of the show, making screening the work in advance often an impossibility. Instead we relied upon the artists to tell us what the work was about, and put in their contracts and agreement that if any content is deemed to be offensive to marginalised audiences, the artist would have the opportunity to rework the show with support from us, or risk having it cancelled. This was an uncommon yet radical move to make, one that made sense with how the organisation had grown to prioritise the care and wellbeing of marginalised queer people over profit (something fringe shows in our scale of venue struggled to do anyway). 

 

On the flip side to the hard work and long hours, there was an incredible opportunity to not only watch some incredibly powerful and moving shows, but also to spend time with performers and makers, sometimes in the bar, or backstage, or upstairs in the flats about the Marlborough. Learning what made artists tick, and what barriers they struggled with, helped govern how we programmed work in later years, not just in the fringe but throughout the year. 

 

Programming Brighton Fringe also became something that I took on as a distinct role within the organisation. As a disabled queer person of colour, this gave me an agency I had previously not felt, and helped to distinguish my voice as a programmer. This gave me the confidence to establish the boundaries that myself and other marginalised artists needed and to eventually create a concept for a fringe programme that centred marginalised identities in its entirety – this was Crystalz Tavern, and was our last fringe programme before we left the Marlborough Pub & Theatre in 2020. Crystalz Tavern was a concept cabaret, the idea being that the world was in a state of armageddon, and that there was a bar inside a crystal cavern that was a safe haven for “queerdos”, filled with ground breaking radical queer perofrmance, live arts, spoken word, comedy, dance, circus and fusions of all of these art forms. Transforming the Marlborough Theatre for a whole month, hosting residencies so that Queer Black artists could live toegether before and during the fringe, was a poigniant, distinct and affirming end to Marlborough Productions programming for Brighton Fringe. 

 

Creative Director, Tarik Elmoutawakil