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The Fringe Blog - Sort Of! (3)What I find really odd is that the big hit of the 2005 Edinburgh Fringe is a play that's forty years old this year performed by a cast who are primarily stand-up comedians rather than actors. Yes, The Odd Couple is a good comedy but it's middle-of-the-road and safe, not what we normally consider the Fringe to be about. Yet it has sold out every one of its twenty performances and two previews, a total of 17,380 tickets. Even allowing for the fact that there will be some no-shows, that's still an enormous number of people paying an average of (probably) £16, almost twice the average Fringe ticket price. That's a box office take of well over quarter of a million pounds! I'm not saying that it's not a good show: it is (see my review: the link above is to Philip's) but I suspect that its appeal has much more to do with the current cult of celebrity than with theatre. It's the names that pull the punters. While I was standing in the (very long) queue, Alan Davies arrived and was mobbed by people wanting his autograph. These autograph hunters weren't all starry-eyed youngsters - indeed most had probably forgotten their teenage years long ago! I wonder how many of the audience for The Odd Couple go to shows which we might consider to be more the real Fringe? Some certainly - I was sitting next to someone who is performing in just such a show - but the majority? I have been more conscious than ever this year of the fact that we have a number of very different Fringes going on at the same time, each with its own audience. There is one mainstream audience which centres itself around the Assembly and the Traverse; another which seeks out the experimental and avant-garde, and they are to be found frequenting venues like Aurora Nova; a third which certainly seeks out new voices but likes to be sure that the quality will be there, and you'll find that their spiritual homes are the Pleasance and the Gilded Balloon; and then there's an audience which is prepared to take risks, who will cherry-pick from any venue. The latter is probably still the biggest but it is probably (and this is just based on observation and listening to people) shrinking in percentage terms. I suppose it is inevitable, given the growth in the number of companies and venues, that there will be a degree of audience fragmentation. There always has been - there are those who come purely for comedy, or theatre or music - but it seems to me that it has increased enormously in the eight years I have been reporting on the Fringe. This was my last day of stint one at the Fringe. I hopped on the last train south at 9pm, arriving back home at about 11.30, ready to take off my critic's hat and replace it with the editorial headgear. But, in the words of Arnie, I'll be back! On Monday 15th, to be precise, for three nights.
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