Fringe shrugs off economic gloom as ticket sales hit record 1.8m total

Published on Tuesday 1 September 2009 00:30

THE Edinburgh Festival Fringe broke all records by with more than 1.8 million tickets sold this year, organisers said last night.

As its 63rd year came to an end yesterday, the world's biggest arts festival had recorded sales of 1,859,235 tickets, a 9 per cent rise on its previous record in 2007, and a 21 per cent rise on 2008, when the box office was dogged by technical problems.

This year's Fringe was the first with chief executive Kath Mainland at the helm.

She said: "As this year's Fringe draws to a close we can look back on a month of exceptional ticket sales and one of the best festivals in my 20 years in and around Edinburgh.

"Even in tough economic conditions, festivals chime with people in a way few other events manage to.

"Over the past three-and-a-half weeks I have seen some amazing work, sometimes perfectly trivial and enormously entertaining, sometimes incredibly challenging and often hugely moving."

However, predictions by some Fringe commentators that ticket sales would go above two million proved over- optimistic.

The Stand Comedy Club, one of the main festival venues, also announced record-breaking Fringe sales with numbers up more than 20 per cent, from 35,874 to 43,388. Club director Tommy Sheppard said he was delighted with the results.

"It's been a record-breaking year despite the fact we've had to operate behind an iron curtain imposed by the city's tram builders," he said. "This is a vindication of our strategy of keeping prices down and quality high.

"Most of our shows ran up a good surplus which we were able to use to subsidise the ones which did less well. As a result, we've been able to underwrite the production costs of all shows and not one of our performers this year will lose any money on the cost of doing their show."

Hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the globe descended on the Scottish capital in August, in spite of the economic situation.

A record number of shows, including performances by big-name stars such as Denise van Outen and Julian Clary, were staged at this year's Fringe.

Organisers said the growth of poetry, the spoken word, puppetry and one-person shows were some of the most "striking facets" of the 2009 programme.

An estimated 18,901 performers took to the stage this year, in 34,265 performances of 2,098 shows originating in 60 countries.

Comedy made up 35 per cent of the programme, followed by theatre with 28 per cent and music at 16 per cent.

The rest of the almost month-long programme consisted of musicals and opera, dance and physical theatre, children's shows and other events and exhibitions .