A week and a half into the fringe, and already there are murmurings that this is a far from vintage fringe; even though it’s bigger than ever – the mind-boggling statistics from the fringe office are that there are 1,799 shows in almost 300 venues – quantity doesn’t seem to indicate quality, let alone innovation and surprise.
Predictably, it was the more predictable things that were the first things to sell out, such as The Odd Couple – a 1965 Neil Simon Broadway comedy that is really the antithesis of the fringe, with a top price of £20 in the fringe’s biggest venue, the 800-seater Assembly Hall, former temporary home of the Scottish Parliament. But as that extreme price indicates, the relentless onward march of pricing in Edinburgh (with many shows now routinely costing over £10), will also mean that audiences become far more risk-averse. Who’s going to take a flyer on an act you’ve never heard of before and may not even enjoy at that kind of price? Not that £10 is, in itself, necessarily a high price to pay; but in Edinburgh that usually translates into only an hour’s worth of entertainment, and it’s invariably one of several shows a day that audiences will try to see.
It’s all inextricably linked, of course, to rising costs elsewhere: tickets at the Assembly Rooms are higher than anywhere else, because rents there are so much higher. One producer, who has three shows there and nine at the Pleasance, told me that the minimum rental he was committed to meeting at Assembly was more than the combined total of his Pleasance commitment. No wonder he has to charge more. Another performer, who has appeared at Assembly regularly over the years, tells me that her minimum rental has almost doubled in the two years since she last appeared there, from £2,800 to £4,600. (Both Assembly and the Pleasance set minimum rentals, or once those are met, retain 40% of the box office receipts).
No wonder, then, that the Assembly has the highest prices now – and also the hardest job attracting audiences. Whereas it used to be one of the buzziest, busiest venues around, few shows are marked as sold out now.
Meanwhile, at the chaotic Pleasance – where every available broom cupboard, it seems, is now a venue – the attempts at running so many shows, on very tight turn-arounds, means that the usual pleasure of passing the time in the courtyard is now an obstacle course of queues (and queue jumpers who are de rigueur there now, since the whole thing is so inadequately policed by a hopeless front-of-house squad). Even the press office for the Pleasance (which moved a couple of years ago to the Pleasance Dome up the road in Bristo Square, so that the space it used to occupy in the courtyard could become yet another venue) is not immune to the chaos: yesterday, it didn’t open for business till noon, because the person who had the keys hadn’t turned up.
But Assembly and the Pleasance are both purely commercial venues, and the way they do business (or not) is entirely up to them. There’s a more worrying sense of crisis around the subsidised Traverse, traditional first port of call for anyone interested in serious theatre, whose own in-house productions typically provide the anchor for the rest of the fringe to operate around. This year neither of their own plays has attracted the kind of reviews that make them a must-see destination; and few of the visiting productions have managed to correct the imbalance, either.
