Fringe
It’s great that the Fringe Society is thinking of supporting travel and accommodation in the future, but their finances must already be under a great deal of pressure after two years’ absence and reduced attendance this year. Some of the cutbacks were visible: they would no longer send Fringe Brochures out to the media by post, there was no Fringe banner across the Royal Mile and when I arrived and went to pick up my media pass, I was told the media office was closed on a Sunday, which was unthinkable in the past (the staff of the Book Festival press office looked stunned when I told them).
Bigger absences from this year’s festival that have angered show producers were the Fringe App, which made it easy to find shows and book tickets using a mobile device, and the half-price ticket hut on The Mound, both of which used to produce a considerable number of ticket sales.
Like many theatres post-COVID, the Fringe has gone all-in with e-tickets, which will no doubt reduce their costs—although this isn’t reflected in ticket prices or in the dreaded ‘booking fees’. If you booked for a few different shows, or even multiple tickets for the same show, you received an e-mail confirmation with a single QR code for them all.
If you booked all of your tickets in one go from the same place, this is nice and convenient as you only need to show the one code for every show, but if you book them at different times or at different box offices, it can get quite confusing working out which to show at which event. And this is assuming you have a smart device or access to a printer (a lot of people still prefer to have a piece of paper than to be searching through their phone for an e-mail while in the queue) which not everyone has. Even if you book in-person on the day of the performance, the box office takes your e-mail address and sends you an e-ticket, which isn’t going to work for everyone.
My old system was to have a ticket wallet with the ticket for my next show on top, so I could see at a glance where I was going and when I needed to be there. A QR code tells you nothing, and most of the venues with multiple performance spaces did not have any kind of display to tell you what show was on where, so I often found myself trying to zoom in on lists of shows in a PDF on a tiny phone screen in a packed courtyard just before the show’s start time—sometimes in the rain—just to find where I should be queuing up.
Having said all of that, the process at the venues of checking tickets in the queue was usually pretty quick and efficient, and so the system worked well in this respect. I heard someone ask a member of staff in one queue what would happen if someone’s device didn’t work; they were told you could just give your name and they could check against their list of who had purchased tickets for that performance. That’s one advantage of giving your personal details on buying a ticket.
The one venue that was doing paper tickets, at least for press, was The Stand, so at least I have something for the scrapbook.
The atmosphere, however, was great. After four years away, my memories of the social side and the sense of camaraderie had faded. I often found myself chatting not just with people I know and perhaps don’t see often other than in Edinburgh, but also with people handing out leaflets, who are often performers in the shows they are selling, and even with total strangers I found myself next to in the queue. For one show, I was queuing behind the mother of one of the performers and we had a good old chat. Another time I was behind three people from Liverpool who were going home the next day; on leaving, one said to me, “well that was a clunker for our last show!”—I said at least they didn’t have to write a review of it.