Fringe drama plunged into a crisis after ticket fiasco

Published on Thursday 19 June 2008 10:32

A FRINGE promoter has hit out at the festival organisers over the problems which continue to dog their new booking system.

Simon Peers, venue manager of St Ninian's Hall in Comely Bank, compared the problems which have hit the Fringe website to the disastrous opening of British Airway's Terminal 5 at London Heathrow earlier this year.

He said the Fringe did not appear to be taking the concerns of smaller venues on board, as it sought to repair the problems.

The official Fringe website finally started selling tickets this week, more than seven days after it was meant to go online.

In its first day up and running, the box office handled 21,000 ticket sales, and staff said they were now taking bookings for "the vast majority" of the 2088 shows taking place across 247 venues.

They admitted, however, that there were still problems taking bookings for a small number of shows, including Edinburgh Theatre Arts' performance of Dennis Potter's legendary TV play Blue Remembered Hills, at St Ninian's.

Mr Peers said he had been stunned to find the online description of the show had details of an entirely different performance, describing the "disquieting tale", set during the Second World War, as "Anna Victoria's surprise hit returns. A little play with a big heart".

He said he felt that the smaller venues had been badly let down by the Fringe. "This is an unmitigated disaster on the scale of the BA terminal 5 chaos, and we have had no real assurances from the Fringe," he said.

"They have told us the box office is up and running again, but the details for our show are wrong, and there will surely be others in the same situation.

"We have already lost hundreds of ticket sales through these problems, and while the Fringe sort this out, people will move on to other shows, leaving us in a lot of trouble."

Another mix-up on the website has a classical guitar recital at St Cuthbert's Parish Church posted next to a provocative picture of pole dancers, which venue organisers admitted was not part of the show's official advertising.

The Fringe has blamed the new IT system for causing the problems, which saw long queues build up at the box office on the Royal Mile, while customers trying to buy over the phone or on the internet were redirected to independent venue box offices.

Fringe director Jon Morgan insisted that the "discrepancies" on the website was a problem the festival had suffered in previous years, and insisted his team were working flat out to fix them.

"The Fringe box office is open and we are selling tickets over the counter, on telephone and through the website," he said.

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