As curtain falls on Fringe, who beat Olympic effect and who didn’t …

EDINBURGH’S Festival venues have reported a mixed year after many shows went head to head with the London Olympics, The Scotsman can reveal.

EDINBURGH’S Festival venues have reported a mixed year after many shows went head to head with the London Olympics, The Scotsman can reveal.

Theatre shows are widely thought to have had a stronger year than comedy following a Fringe which saw hotel bookings slump and some venues down by as much as 25 per cent in the early part of the Festival.

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While established names such as Assembly, The Stand and Underbelly admitted overall sales were down on last year, others such as The Pleasance said they were unaffected.

Gilded Balloon, Summer-
hall and the Traverse Theatre all reported increased ticket sales, while the founder of the Famous Spiegeltent reported its strongest ever sales.

Tommy Sheppard said the first year of the new-look Assembly Rooms under his stewardship had been a “tremendous success” and vowed to return to the venue next year, despite well-publicised teething 
problems.

There are hopes that the Fringe – which saw a 6 per cent increase in the number of shows staged to a record 2,695 and officially ends today – may still record more ticket sales than ever before after a surge in sales when the Olympics finished.

Festival organisers ran a targeted campaign in London, which launched at the beginning of the year, while dozens of international journalists, in the UK for the games, were brought up to Edinburgh to sample shows from all the major events.

The Edinburgh International Book Festival, which also concludes today, insists its ticket sales are in line with last year’s, while the box office at the Edinburgh International Festival, which has another week to run, is still around 8 per cent up on last year.

Major new additions to the Fringe this year have included the return of the Famous Spiegeltent, to a new location in the middle of George Street.

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David Bates, artistic director, said: “It has gone better than we expected for a first year. We’ve actually sold 20 per cent more tickets for shows than in any of our previous locations and our outdoor bar has been absolutely packed at weekends. It was a gamble, but it really paid off.”

More than 100,000 tickets were sold at the Spiegeltent and the Assembly Rooms, which were promoted under the one banner with the latter’s La Clique show notching up 20 sell-out performances.

Mr Sheppard said: “Overall the operation of the venue has been a tremendous success. We’ve learned from our mistakes, making improvements every day, and we’ve ended up with a bucket-load of ideas of how to make it better next year.”

Mr Sheppard admitted The Stand’s ticket sales would be around 7 per cent down, but this would still be the second-best ever performance at the venue, and was purely down to the impact of the Olympics.

He added: “We were around 23 per cent down at The Stand in the first week and we’ve now almost completely made that up. In the past few years, the last week of the Fringe has been pretty quiet, but that has almost been completely reversed this year.”

Charlie Wood, director of Underbelly, said: “It has been a tremendous year considering the impact of the Olympics. We’re well ahead of our average audience of the last five years. Our theatre shows have done 
extremely well.”

Paul Gillon, publicist at Summerhall, which does not programme comedy, said: “We’ve got three times as many shows on this year as we did last year, but we’ve sold four times as many tickets.”