Road show with back-seat appeal is first on Fringe to sell out

The Traverse confirmed yesterday that every 15 ticket for A Mobile Thriller has been snapped up, less than a week after the theatre unveiled its Fringe brochure.

But there is a catch.

The show is staged in a Maserati Quattroporte being driven through the streets of Edinburgh, and has room for an audience of just three.

The Traverse confirmed yesterday that all 84 tickets for 28 performances have been sold.

"We’re delighted. We knew it would sell very quickly but we didn’t think it would be this quickly," a spokesman said.

"We are looking into extra performances. On the Fringe Festival message board, people are already posting appeals for tickets."

A spokeswoman for the Assembly Rooms responded with indignation to news of the sales success.

She said: "I’ve probably booked out my dinner table for August as well, and it takes a lot more people than that show."

The Assembly Rooms has had its own big seller. All of some 660 tickets available for the Perrier Comedy Awards shows have been sold, but it only runs for two nights, not a three-week season.

All seats are gone for two BBC events at the Pleasance, Just a Minute and Dead Ringers, the Fringe box office said. But they are free ticketed events.

At the Edinburgh International Festival, all the tickets for Hanover State Opera’s Il Trovatore have gone.

The first concert to sell out was the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s performance, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, with Alfred Brendel at the piano.

A Mobile Thriller, by the Italian playwright Renato Gabrielli, is a one-man show performed by David Walshe. It is described as a chilling story that becomes a "startling act of voyeurism".

The drama revolves around the actor’s increasingly frantic conversations on his mobile phone and with a fantasy lover.

The car has a chauffeur, and the three audience members sit in the back.

It leaves the Traverse at 9:30pm nightly, and the show lasts just over an hour, with the route and destination still a secret. It has two shows on weekends.

The director, Carrie Cracknell of Hush Productions, said yesterday: "It’s fantastic. I haven’t even got a ticket, so we are going to have to put some extra shows on."

That could prove a challenge. The action demands that the car be driven at dusk. But Ms Cracknell said she would consider performing it in the dark.

She said: "We’ve got two shows on at the weekend, and the weekdays we have only got one. I would be happy to do it when it was dark. We want it to be dark when the car arrives at the end of the destination."

The play’s publicity promises an evening of "fantastical, visceral and darkly comic" drama.

Among the other unusual features of this year’s Fringe is Curry Tales, a show performed in an Indian restaurant, and Mark Watson who will perform his stand up act for 24 hours nonstop at the Cowgate Theatre, making it the longest show in Fringe history - and the best value at only 3.

Last year, 1,184,738 tickets were sold for Fringe events, breaking the one million ticket barrier for the first time.