Ventnor Fringe 2016: a very different festival experience on the Isle of Wight

Each summer the town of Ventnor turns over its pubs, churches and even launderettes to performances of all kinds, from Shakespeare to DJ sets

This year’s Ventnor Fringe takes over the town from 9-14 August (Shutterstock)

A steadfast drizzle has settled over the seaside town of Ventnor, Isle of Wight, as we begin the slog up one of its many vertiginous hills one August evening. We are grumbling gently. My daughters (aged 16 and 20) and I are off to see Shakespeare’s Richard II at a local church. We’ve been looking forward to it – the London theatre company, Scena Mundi, has had some great write-ups. But none of us know the play. And the weather! Last night’s “outdoor screening” of Pride had to be moved indoors, and tonight we’ve left our rented apartment festooned with sea-and-rain-dampened towels and clothes.

But up ahead is a shelter, with a bench looking out to sea. This week, while the Ventnor Fringe festival is on, it’s framed by comically lavish red velvet curtains, and inside are crammed the six members of a young folk-pop group, oozing optimism, belting out a song called "Summer is Coming", as if it really might be (though I later learn that this exuberant number is about global warming).

The festival line-up features local bands (Lucy Boynton)

“Why aren’t we going to see them instead?” I mutter. But onward – to what turns out to be our best night out at the Fringe. The performance is stunning; we’re all mesmerised by Pip Brignall as the king; and when we repair to the bar afterwards – in a Moroccan tent in a nearby meadow – the rain has cleared and a band is setting up: Winter Springs, the one from the shelter.

What do you do at the seaside when it’s raining? The Ventnor Fringe has come up with an answer. Over six days each August, 400 artists entertain thousands of visitors and locals with a programme of theatre, music, comedy and children’s shows. Like most small towns, Ventnor has few official venues, so shows pop up in churches, pubs, a laundrette. An old underground bunker is transformed into a nightclub. Unpromising outdoor spaces – a field with a Scout hut, the carbuncular Observatory on the sea front – are fashioned into ambient bars.

“Every single one of our spaces is a pop-up venue,” explains festival director Jack Whitewood, “and this means the dynamic of the event changes every year. I love this constantly changing process. It keeps the festival constantly on its toes and fresh for audiences.”

Family-friendly activities such as fireworks displays abound (Lucy Boynton)

Whitewood founded the Fringe in 2010 as a teenager, along with a group of contemporaries who were all off to university and wanted to keep links open with the town and each other. The entire budget that first year was £2,000 (raised after putting on a play, written and directed by the precocious Whitewood, in village halls across the island). Small beginnings. “But then,” he points out, “the first Isle of Wight Festival in 1968 was started as a fundraiser to create a community swimming pool.”

Ventnor is a place of great natural beauty, clinging to a hillside on the island’s southernmost tip. It is, in fact, one of the sunniest places in the UK. I fell in love with it as a child and have been visiting ever since. The swimming is unbeatable (in all weathers) and though it’s a short hop from home in London, you get a pleasing sense of being cut off from the world. “There's a certain lawlessness to the place,” says Whitewood, who was raised there. “Shops open and close when they choose. It’s a little Mediterranean in outlook. There is a magic and energy to the place that is very hard to explain.”

Inevitably, metropolitan holidaymakers from the mainland are beginning to trickle in, and restaurants, such as the cool casual-dining spot Cantina, starting to cater for their tastes. But, crucially, that’s not how the Fringe came about. It is thoroughly homegrown, and has incorporated the annual Ventnor Carnival (the second-oldest traditional seaside carnival in the UK) and the Isle of Wight Film Festival into its programme. In 2015 the carnival procession included, among the marching bands and carnival queens, the entire cast of Richard II, in costume. There is a sense that the event, which uses the available geography in such imaginative ways, could only have been built and nurtured by people who know and love the town.

Venues include an 11th-century chapel (Lucy Boynton)

Still, this is a place with artistic pedigree. Charles Dickens wrote six chapters of David Copperfield here; Edward Elgar spent his honeymoon in the town; and Turgenev, Thackeray and Tennyson were among those who visited during its days as a fashionable health resort. The band The Bees are from Ventnor, and so are newer acts Champs and Plastic Mermaids, and if you’re lucky, you might catch a gig or a DJ set from one of these during the Fringe.

The festival, Whitewood says, is a bit of a hybrid. “We combine elements of a field-based music festival with an urban, metropolitan arts festival. We are very local while also international in outlook.” And new this year, running alongside the Fringe, is the International Festival. Where acts at the Fringe are self-selecting, this will be a curated programme, which Whitewood hopes will grow to become a showcase for emerging talent across the creative disciplines. Meanwhile, the Fringe now has a year-round home in Ventnor Exchange, an old Post Office repurposed into a performance space, record shop and bar.

The pen-pal pop-up lets you make faraway friends

For six days, the Fringe never really “switches off”. The programme, along with the Fringe bars and their rolling programme of mini-gigs mean there’s always something to do. Watching international entries for the Isle of Wight Short Film Competition, in a makeshift cinema in an old church hall, has on occasion actually made us quite glad that the weather’s taken a turn for the worse. Though equally, there have been days, when the sun is out and the tide is high, when we have been known to squander a few hot tickets. Because sometimes a beautiful beach is just too hard to resist.

Travel essentials

Visiting there

This year’s Ventnor Fringe runs from 9-14 August (ventnorexchange.co.uk/vfringe).

More information

visitisleofwight.co.uk