The rise and rise of restricted viewing

ANNIE RYAN, the director of Corn Exchange, once referred to the company's early Fringe hit, Car Show, as "the best show you never saw". The series of short plays were performed for just three audience members at a time, who watched from the back seats of the four-wheeled venues, and not even repeat performances could ever deliver a supply to meet the demand for tickets. For many, it became less a show than a myth.

Something similar is happening with a few productions at this year's Absolut Fringe, none more so than World's End Lane. The new show from Louise Lowe's Anu Productions again plays to an audience of just three people per performance and though its run has entirely sold out, by the time it's over, only 100 people will have seen it. That's less than half the audience for one performance of Siren Productions' Medea in the Samuel Beckett Theatre. Tickets for other shows, such as Jenna Logan's similarly sold-out Barista monologue, All This and a Hill of Beans, are based on a similar hens teeth scarcity.

Intimacy can certainly bring intensity to a performance, something Ontroerend Goed's one-on-one performances of The Smile Off Your Facescintillatingly demonstrated at the recent Kilkenny Arts Festival and ought to do again at the upcoming Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival.

But the success of tiny capacity theatre is in danger of making the art form seem like a closed shop.

Last year's Irish TimesIrish Theatre Award winner, No Worst There Is None, jokingly referred to as "No Tickets There Are None", also sold out before it began and this trend for exclusivity, whether accidental or deliberate, flatters people in the know.

Then again, those ticket-holders may swell in their appreciation for the best shows you’ll never see, safe in the knowledge that very few people will contradict them.