The Brighton Festival is England’s largest arts and cultural festival, offering a three week frenzy of theatre, comedy, cabaret, music, musicals, opera, dance, talks and exhibitions, in venues all across our very favourite seaside city (sorry Blackpool). What many people think of as the “Brighton Festival” is actually a number of festivals that all take place in the city during May; in particular the main Brighton Festival and its unprogrammed, ever growing Fringe. Here, ThreeWeeks provides a guide to the festivals that make up the Festival, and offers some tips on how to navigate what’s on offer.

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The Brighton Festival

The main Brighton Festival is itself the largest festival of its kind in England, and it celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2006. But, despite reaching middle age, it doesn’t seem to be in danger of losing any of its sense of fun and adventure.

Founded in 1967 (and getting off to a grand start with year one performances from Lawrence Olivier, Anthony Hopkins and conductor and violinist Yehudi Menuhin), the aim of the festival was originally stated by founding Artistic Director Ian Hunter, who said “The aim is to stimulate townsfolk and visitors into taking a new look at the arts and to give them the opportunity to assess developments in the field of culture where the serious and the apparently flippant ride side by side”. That ethos remains pretty much the same today.

The main Brighton Festival is a fully-programmed event, with a team of programmers each working in a different genre area. Their three-week programme encompasses a wide range of arts and culture, including dance, theatre, opera, classical and contemporary music, talks and literary debates, plus an extensive programme for families and children. In among the programme you will find theatre companies, orchestras, musicians, writers and artists from all over the world. These events are staged in various venues around the city of Brighton, with the Brighton Dome next to the Royal Pavilion forming something of a hub. The main Festival published its programme in February and you should get a copy asap; some of the more popular events sell out quickly.

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The Brighton Fringe

The Brighton Festival also boasts a Festival Fringe, a totally unprogrammed affair that benefits from the audience and profile created by the main festival. There has been an informal fringe alongside Brighton’s May festival ever since 1967, though it was known as the Umbrella for many years, and featured mainly Brighton-based companies. It was rebranded as the Brighton Fringe in 2003, and the whole thing has really taken off from that point, getting bigger and bigger each year, and pulling in an increasing number of artists and performers from all over the world.

As an unprogrammed festival, any theatre company or performer who can raise the cash and find a performance space can appear as part of the Fringe, which makes it very exciting, if also a bit confusing and unpredictable. With no quality control you can expect some rubbish to appear, but the unprogrammed nature of the event means that some genius shows that would not get picked up by conventional festivals get to the stage, and unknown talent who are yet to get proper bookings are suddenly on show.

At the hub of it all is the Brighton Festival Fringe company, a charitable group which works to support and coordinate the Fringe, and everyone involved in it. It doesn’t stage any shows itself, rather it provides an infrastructure to support the venues and companies who stage shows during the three weeks of the Festival. They publish a central programme featuring all the shows that are being staged, copies of which are available all over the city as we speak.

There are numerous venues that stage shows as part of the Brighton Festival Fringe, each independently run and with their own artistic agendas. Some are year-round venues, others; pubs, clubs or galleries which become performance spaces for the duration of the Festival. Some stage a daily programme of shows, with lunchtime, teatime and late night performances, while others host just a handful of events over the month. Key Fringe venues include the year-round Nightingale Theatre, Upstairs at Three & Ten, Joogleberry and Komedia, plus temporary Fringe venues like The Parlure Spiegeltent and UdderBELLY.

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Artists Open Houses

In addition to the main Festival and Fringe, also look out for the Festival of Artists Open Houses. As a city, Brighton is home to a lot more artists than any other place I can think of. Members of that artist community open up their homes for the month of May offering people the chance to view their work in their own homemade galleries. Some of these open houses are affiliated to the Fringe, and therefore appear in the Fringe programme, but most appear in a separate programme published by the AOH organisation, which can be picked up all over Brighton during April and May.

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The Great Escape

And then there’s the music. The Brighton Festival and the Brighton Festival Fringe both have great music programmes, but there is also a separate three day mini-festival called The Great Escape staged by the Barfly people. They take over numerous music venues across Brighton for an extended weekend in the middle of the Festival, presenting over 180 bands, some local, some from elsewhere in the UK, some shipped in from the other side of the world. The Great Escape is great in that you buy one pass and can then get into any of the gigs in the programme (though it is first come first served, so you might have to queue for the bigger name bands, in fact some very dedicated fans of The Kooks queued up for most of the day to ensure they got in to that gig in 2006!).

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The Charleston Festival

And finally, just outside Brighton, there is the Charleston Festival, once a strand of the Brighton Festival and now a separate festival all in itself staged at the home and country meeting place of the so called Bloomsbury Set. Taking place in the latter half of the Festival, this offers a great programme of mainly literary- based events.

As you can imagine, with all this going on, and all these different producers, promoters and venues involved, it can all get a bit confusing. So praise the Lord – if you don’t mind me saying so – for ThreeWeeks, which provides coverage of all of it. Yes, every last bit. Through this preview guide, plus a daily column inside The Argus and via our website and free eDaily, festival-goers can access news, previews and hundreds of reviews courtesy of ThreeWeeks.

Should you want even more coverage, then check out Latest 7 and The Argus who provide their own coverage, especially of the main festival, plus look out for special festival programmes on local radio stations Juice 107.2, Radio Reverb and BBC Southern Counties.