Drama? Musicals? Comedy?
The Fringe is over and one of the facts to emerge is that, for the first time, theatre took second place in the league table of the number of shows in each category. At 29% of shows, it fell behind comedy (32%), following a trend which has been becoming increasingly obvious over the past few years.
The Fringe publicity differentiates between what it calls “theatre” and “musicals and opera” and “dance and physical theatre” (both on 5%) and does not take into account shows for children (4%), some of which (for example, one of our 5 star shows Heartbreak Soup) are equally as appealing to adults as to children). And the “comedy” listings also include plays. But, that aside, the trend is obvious.
On the other hand, the number of shows of each type is not an indication of the size of audience and we have no figures for audience numbers, so really what the Fringe figures indicate is the number of individuals or companies in each area which bring shows to Edinburgh.
What sparked this line of thought for me is the figures for the 2007-2008 season at the Newcastle Theatre Royal which we report in our NE News this week. There the largest audience was for shows for children and families (nearly 108,000 - 32%), followed by drama (just short of 98,000 at 29%). What was surprising was that musicals attracted an audience of just over 74,000 (22%). Comedy (stand-up) accounts for just 1% (just under 3,400).
MInd you, the drama figures include the annual RSC visit which almost always sells out.
Now these are actual audience figures for a theatre which, on average, plays to 70% capacity and are obviously, to a large extent, a reflection of its programming.
So I turned my attention to London (the West End, the Southbank and major off-West End theatres like the Almeida and Sadler’s Wells) and the picture is different. There are, at the moment of writing, 15 plays (31%) running (some, of course, in rep at the National), 27 musicals (55%) and seven comedies (14%), although this category includes the Globe’s Dream and Merry Wives.
Again, we have to take into account that the West End is a special case because a large percentage of its audience is made up of tourists.
Confused? Me too, although I suspect it only goes to show that you can’t rely on statistics which can be made to mean almost anything!
The conclusion must be that it is impossble to generalise about audiences and their preferences, which tends to make discussions about how to build audiences a tad difficult!