Since 2004 the company, under director Alex Petty, have totally changed the landscape of the Fringe, offering a much cheaper alternative to the ticket prices charged by major venues like Underbelly, Pleasance and Assembly Rooms. In those far-off days, entry was free and the performers would take a cash collection at the end of the show, rattling a bucket as the audience filed out of the room. Of course, not all the shows were brilliant, in fact some were undoubtedly awful. However, the same could be said of a lot of the entertainment on offer at the big venues. The difference was that if you went to a terrible show at Assembly Rooms, you’d already shelled out top dollar for your ticket, so were left with the choice of walking out mid-performance or resigning yourself to an hour of boredom. With the Free Festival, you could leave whenever you liked if it wasn’t your cup of tea, and you didn’t have to pay a penny. Obviously, if you had a good time you would stay until the end and leave a generous donation in the bucket. And those donations could be very generous indeed. A lot of comedians did much better financially than their peers at the paid venues and the punters were getting value for money into the bargain. Over the years, more and more big names were attracted to do shows on the Free Festival. In the mid-pandemic Fringe of 2021, very few people were carrying cash and numbers had to be strictly controlled so most shows went over to the “pay what you can” model where the public could reserve a seat in advance and choose their price. The buckets may be less common but the value-for-money ethos still remains. Last week, Alex organised a number of events to mark the anniversary, starting last Sunday when they did two shows in a horsebox in the courtyard of Drop Kick Murphy’s. The Laughing Horse Box ran shows on both Sunday and Monday, with enough room for an audience of six and one comedian inside the box at any given time. Now that’s the true spirit of the Fringe.
Subscribe
Login
0 Comments
