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In Edinburgh for the Fringe (2)The Venues and the ShowsFreebies The average ticket price for a Fringe show is about £7 and you can fairly easily fit in five shows a day, making £35 a day, which is £245 a week. Good value for money, yes, but not cheap, so it makes sense to see what you can for free. High Street is free: sit there or wander up and down and you'll be entertained all day by musicians, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, living statues and, of course, actors, singers and dancers publicising their shows. You will be expected to give donations to the acrobats etc. - after all, this is their living - and you will covered in flyers advertising every show in the programme by the end of the day, but it's worth it. Keep wandering and, just before you reach the bottom of High Street (at the junction with North and South Bridge), turn right into Hunter Square for yet more free entertainment. You'll also find lots of free entertainment around Princes Street Gardens, especially in the area of the National Gallery of Scotland. This is where the dreaded pan pipe players gather, atong with henna tatooists, artists of varying calibre, portraitists and people who will write your name in Chinese characters. If you're interested in crafts, don't miss the West End Craft fair in the grounds of St John's Church at the junction of Princes Street and Lothian Road. There are eighty exhib itors every day, and they change every weekend. Fringe Sunday, of course, is the big free event. Held on The Meadows on 11th August, htis is a combination of funfair, food fest and, of course, performances. Here many of the theatre companies, musicans and comedians set forth their wares in marquees and the open air. One year I managed to see extracts from eleven shows in three hours (and to feed my face!) - and I was taking it easy. The Venues & the Shows With so many shows in so many venues, the chances of choosing to see something pretty awful are good. To avoid that - although part of the fun of the Fringe is going from the appalling to the brilliant - you can restrict yourself to a limited number of venues where the chances of seeing something dreadful are reduced from 50% to 5% or even less. The majority of venues have an open door policy: that means that, if you get in early enough and are able to pay the required fee, then you can perform there, even if your show is the worst thing ever to hit theatre in the UK. Others are much more selective. The following venues can be relied on to offer good quality theatre and, if you don't like something you see there, it will almost certainly be because it is not to your taste rather than because it is of poor quality:
These are the ones you an bank on, which get it right 99% of the time. They are also the ones whose shows are most in demand and so you may well find tickets for some shows difficult to get hold of. The Gilded Balloon, by the way, tends not to do a great deal of theatre. Slightly more of a risk, but not much, are the following:
For those with a taste for the international, try The Garage (a lot of dance), Theatre Workshop and St Stephens. For work which is (mainly) from Eastern Europe, try the Apex Hotel in the Grassmarket, programmed by Demarco-Rocket Productions. If you fancy the really exotic - Welsh theatre (joke) - Venue 13, programmed by the Welsh College of Music and Drama, shows much of the best student work on the Fringe, as well as some Welsh professional work. Student theatre, of course, makes up a large percentage of the Fringe theatre shows and you will find examples in most venues. The only one of the top four which regularly shows some student work is the Pleasance. There's more at C, but the place is probably Bedlam Theatre, which is owned (and programmed) by Edinburgh University. As for the rest, it's pot luck, I'm afraid. The most unlikely venues can produce real gems - and awful duds. And it's not consistent from year to year, regrettably. The average Fringe audience, so it is said, is six. Shows at the big four are often sold out, so that means some have tiny audiences. I've never been an audience of one, but on a number of occasions there have been two of us watching. Once or twice these shows were really good: more often the word "rubbish" is the only one to describe them. Finally, some words of warning about certain venues:
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