HOT TICKET
Festival shows sell outin days
More than half of the available tickets for this year's Edinburgh International Festival have already been snapped up – after just a few days of ticket sales.
Organisers say one in three productions in the three-week programme are already totally sold out, including appearances by stars like Nicola Benedetti, Alan Cumming, Domhnall Gleeson and Damon Alburn.
The festival has revealed it will consider releasing more tickets for performances if Scottish Government guidance, which insists that event organisers must enforce two metre social distancing, is relaxed before August.
The EIF will be staging most shows at three pop-up outdoor venues, which will be created at Edinburgh Park and Edinburgh Academy, which have a current capacity of 670, and Edinburgh University's
Old College Quad, which can accommodate 230.
The EIF’S programme will be staged across 10 sites in total, including a free opening weekend fire show at the Royal Botanic Garden and a free dance show in Holyrood Park.
Both the Traverse and the Royal Lyceum will be reopening in August to play host to plays, while the Festival Theatre will be back in action for a major operation production.
More than 170 different music, theatre, dance, opera an spoken word performances are being staged across the city under plans to reboot the EIF, which was forced to go completely online last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
However the festival has only been able to put on sale around a quarter of the number of tickets it usually has available due to the likely prospect of social distancing still being in place in August. Of the 90 separate shows in the programme, 35 have completely sold out.
Scottish Opera’s entire run of its new production of Verdi’s Falstaff has also completely sold out at the Festival Theatre, which will be operating at a fraction of its normally 1900 capacity due to the current social distancing rules.
Allperformancesofgleeson’s newplay,medicine,atthetraverse Theatre have also gone, as havealltheshowsviolinistnicolabenedettiwillbeappearingin during a residency, and the UK premiere of Scots-born Broadway star Alan Cumming’s cabaret show.
Other hot-ticket shows include singer-songwriter Karine Polwart, fiddlers Duncan Chisholm and Aidan O’rourke, indie-rock outfit The Snuts, pianist Steven Osborne and the National Theatre of Scotland play Lament For Sheku Bayoh, which will be staged at the Lyceum, where it was filmed for an online event last year.
A spokesman for the festival said: “We have approximately one quarter of the number of tickets on sale this year, compared to normal years.
“With 2m distancing we are only able to provide roughly one third of our usual ticket capacities.
“If Scottish Government guidance on social distancing changes, we will consider a release of additional tickets, but safety is our priority.
“In terms of sales, we have sold approximately 50 per cent of our total available capacity, 35 events ran out of tickets within two days of our public on-sale.