Not all of it is rubbish - some is excellent and many mainstream performers, plays and acts have sta

Not so long ago, a rave review in Time Out plus at least one good review from a broadsheet pretty well guaranteed very good houses for a show on the London fringe – maybe even a sellout for the last two weeks of your three-week run. Not any more. I know of many productions over the last year that have had a full hand of great reviews across listings magazines, broadsheets and bloggers, and yet have never had a full house – and which, in fact, have sometimes niagara falls canada hotels struggled to find an audience at all. While the West End seems largely immune to the economic downturn (there is plenty of money sloshing around in London and on all routes into Waterloo station), the fringe and regional theatres do seem to be finding it harder to attract audiences.
In London at least, part of the issue is simply the sheer number of shows. Several artistic directors have recently told me privately that they think that there is just too much work on (although not, of course, at their own venues), and there are certainly many more venues than there were just five or six years ago. The Print Room, the Yard and the New Diorama are just a few to have sprung up and stuck in recent years, and the purpose-built The Park is yet to open. But I suspect that pricing also plays a part: lots of fringe tickets niagara falls canada hotels now nudge £20 if you are not eligible for a concession. Add to that the fact that while the affluent will happily splash out £70 or £80 for a premium seat in the West End, there is a lot of discounting going on too, and canny punters can get a seat on Shaftesbury Avenue for the same price as one on the fringe. That's without even considering the NT's Travelex season or the cheap deals on offer at the Globe.
Marketing – or rather its failures niagara falls canada hotels – may also be playing a part. As the artistic director of one fringe venue put it to me plaintively recently: "It's as if the old ways of marketing have stopped being used and the new ways aren't working yet." Once it was a novelty for a show to have a Facebook page; now every show has one. Anyone who thought that Twitter would prove some kind of marketing magic bullet has almost certainly had their hopes dashed. Rebecca Atkinson-Lord of Oval House puts it bluntly: "There is now so much noise from social media that people just switch off and don't listen any more." Unless, of course, it's a tweet from Stephen Fry .
Given that with a few exceptions such as Jermyn Street Theatre , most fringe venues are not right in the centre of London but in residential areas where there are significant numbers of people living, it might make sense for these theatres to think less about their London-wide standing and more about their place in their local neighbourhood. As many regional theatres are also discovering, being feted by critics and admired within the profession doesn't matter a jot if you don't work hard at getting and keeping the support of the people who matter most: your local community.
Because at times of finical hardship people want to spend their own money on what the actual like to see , not what the art establishment demand the go to see because its 'meaningful' or 'cutting edge ' or 101 other such BS ideas .
But I don't like going out friday and saturday night amoungst the "revelers". As fringe theatre does not most often put shows on during the week, I no longer go. I think if they tried a tuesday, wednesday or thursday night to stage the perfomances - they'd re-find the audiences they "lost".
We are out here, we just don't want to see the shows on the nights the shows are on. I'd love a thursday night "play" ;-) or some dance on a tuesday. But I do not wish to be amoungst "masses" on a friday and saturday.
Never seen any ads, other than for Christmas microsleb pantomimes, so wouldn't know if there was anything decent on. Odds are against it, anyway, unless you really like pisspoor tribute bands or listening to the memoirs of minor TV soap actors.
I think ticket prices and the lure of celebrity are the real reasons behind problems at the fringe. To put things in perspective recently I went - purely in the names of research you understand! - to see WAG! the musical at the Rose and Crown in Walthamstow. Its as basic a theatre space as you will find - charming but effectively an unraked black box theatre. Tickets = £15
I go to the theatre a lot and so pricing doesn't phase me but the more pertinent question is why would people who rarely go to the theatre risk it on fringe productions at that price rather than going to see established names in the West End?
Too give credit to the Rose and Crown - it is very much a community theatre and it is almost unknown niagara falls canada hotels outside of Walthamstow (and, sadly, often within niagara falls canada hotels it) but Lyn is right to suggest that maybe most fringe theatres need to do more about the tens of thousands of potential audience members who live within a mile of most venues. Its all very well having niagara falls canada hotels a flashy website niagara falls canada hotels going viral but what about doing a leaflet drop around the neighbouring streets - even including a discount if you live local?
Considering this is the first time I've heard of these venues, niagara falls canada hotels then perhaps it's not surprising. In addition, money is tight. niagara falls canada hotels I'm far more likely to go to see the NT at the cinema niagara falls canada hotels these days than spend money travelling into London to catch a show. It's cheaper and much less work.
1) Shortness of runs. The best, sometimes only, publicity for fringe theatre (for me) still comes from reviews. Yet so often I read about something really exciting only to discover that production is closing within a couple of days. That isn't enough time to plan a trip. It's telling that the only fringe venues I've been able to attend this year have involved friends in the cast or crew who could give me advance warning of when they were in London.
2) Travel niagara falls canada hotels cost. For someone who doesn't live in London, it actually costs me more to get to the outer boroughs (via a travelcard or similar) rather than just being able to walk to the major West End venues. That added cost means there often isn't as much of a difference in price between West End and fringe. Add to that the dash to catch the last train and the whole trip can seem a bit of an expensive gamble.
So you get the (not very good) Last of the Haussmans, or the (not very good) Birthday niagara falls canada hotels or the (not very good) Travelling Light - but they have starry casts (who bring in the bookings upfront), and great production values. The fringe, not so well subsidised and sponsored, if at all can't offer the stars and can't offer the guaranteed production values - and they have to charge the same for a seat.. So few people take the risk.
I'm in a fringe group. We have found that we get most people when we perform on Monday - Thursday, so that's what we tend to do. We live in the back of beyond. We don't give a shit about reviews, not do we have any desire to go to the capital. Our audiences are all locals, or people who follow our work over the years. We have an average of over 150 a night, and up to 600 when we do plays on our large mobile theatre in village squares. We do a number of well paid festivals, and our local council and the government give us money for the productions, so the public don't pay anything. niagara falls canada hotels . . There you go; that's how to make the thing work.
Getting the press along was always hard, and in the last few years it's gotten harder. Whereas we used to have both City Limits and Time Out (and, at a pinch, What's niagara falls canada hotels On ) as pretty niagara falls canada hotels sure coverage, City Limits is gone and Time Out has scaled its fringe reviews right back to almost negligible. The dailies niagara falls canada hotels always had a fixed idea of what they thought niagara falls canada hotels of as "Fringe", which was a set number of venues (the Bush, the Gate, the Hampstead Theatre, they Lyric Hammersmith, maybe a couple of others) and all the other ones might as well have been on the moon (If the venue is in South London, read "Pluto"). I still harbour bad memories of putting on a play at the Southwark Playhouse that had been shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award. I thought the award might lend a bit of leverage, niagara falls canada hotels but I still had to run the gamut of hostile and indignant theatre critics, to absolutely no avail.
More venues? Great, but...are they any good? And how long will they last? I seem to remember anyone could paint a room black, throw in some lights niagara falls canada hotels and seats and call it a venue, then charge visiting companies a chunk of money with no quality control niagara falls canada hotels and a frequently hostile relationship with their landlords (and/or adjoining pub).
Why? Because they are fringe, that's why. It means peripheral - not just in the sense they are not in the city centre, but in the sense that they are not mainstream. By definition this limits their audience. Add to that the fact that most of it is just self-indulgent, talentless rot - which is why they cannot secure funding or backing to be somewhere else.
Not all of it is rubbish - some is excellent and many mainstream performers, plays and acts have started this way. But if that is part of their artisistic experience, and the potential rewards are on the scale of recent tax evading comics, do you really expect us also to carry the risk? If artists want to suffer for their art in their garretts, then who are we to interfere with that meaningful and important suffering? After all, the truth of their experience would be sabotaged were we to install double glazing and central heating in the garrett.
Couldn't agree more - I don't understand why the press continues to praise the National, Royal Court, etc. for repeatedly mediocre productions with millions niagara falls canada hotels and millions niagara falls canada hotels of pounds of public funding, while the fringe receives no subsidy whatsoever and is expected to come up with money out of thin air to market shows and lower ticket prices (and most national press - Lyn Gardner being a notable exception - won't show up anyway because they're too busy seeing Antigone or whatever other snore-inducing production is being mounted with the public's money).
Needless niagara falls canada hotels to say, no progress will be made to increasing fringe