August in Edinburgh is like Christmas for arts lovers. The historic and beautiful city of sandstone swells to (according to legend) nearly double its size as performers, producers and punters from all over the world descend, filling up every inch of the pavement, anything that could possibly be elbowed into being a venue – and any and all available accommodation/couches/floor space throughout the near four-week long festival of festivals.
The Edinburgh International Festival takes place from 4-28 August and, alongside it, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, with (this year) a mind-boggling 3535 registered shows. The Edinburgh International Book Festival starts in the second week of August, bringing over 500 writers to the city for a series of events – just in case you’d run out of things to do.
Why so many festivals?
It may seem like a mistake of programming to have all these festivals on at once in the one city, but it was no accident. The International Festival was set up in the wake of World War II to celebrate European culture. While the Fringe dates back to 1947, when eight theatre groups – being somewhat miffed that the International Festival did not make space for the local arts scene – decided to put on their own shows, uninvited. Since then, the Fringe has grown to become the largest arts festival in the world and continues to grow – despite the fact that the competition for bums-on-seats is so stiff, and most people putting on a show will either just break even or wind up in debt from their Fringe experience.
A key feature of the Fringe is that anyone can put on a show – the Fringe Society (set up in 1958 to manage and support the festival) itself does not vet the program, although venues do have a say in what is programmed in them.
What to see at the Fringe?
The Fringe Festival program is enormous – an A4 printed program comes out in early June and it looks a bit like a phone book. Choosing what to see can be incredibly intimidating, which is partly why word of mouth recommendations are so important. It’s also why (when they’re not on stage) performers are out around town, trying to shepherd as many passersby as they can into their shows with the three Ps: performance, pitching and paper.
Despite this, many shows continue to perform nightly to tiny audiences. In the first day of this year’s festival, actor Georgie Grier had a viral moment after posting to X (formerly-known-as-Twitter) about her disappointment in performing to an audience of one, and her following show sold out – a story that perfectly captures both the heady highs and devastating lows of what the Fringe can mean to aspiring artists and performers.
After all, the Fringe is where people can be discovered and it has the potential to launch a career – with the list of famous Fringe alumni as long as your arm. From Emma Thompson, Rachel Weisz, Robin Williams and Rowan Atkinson to the Flight of the Conchords and, more recently, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose show Fleabag (upon which the television series was based) premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013.
My top five Edinburgh Fringe Festival shows are …
OK, yes – to the nitty gritty.
André & Dorine is a truly astonishing work of theatrical art by Basque-based theatre company, Kulunka Teatro. Through mime and with actors wearing masks, Andre & Dorine tells the story of an elderly couple: Andre, a writer, and Dorine, a cellist, as Dorine becomes increasingly confused and is diagnosed with a degenerative disorder affecting her memory. We skip back in time to see Andre and Dorine as they meet, fall in love and raise a son. The story – simple, tragic, full of the tiny moments of awkwardness, hope and love that make up a life – is beautifully crafted through the physical movements of the actors.
The Life and Times of Michael K, based on the 1983 Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name by J M Coetzee, has been adapted for the stage by Lara Foot in this co-production from Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus (Germany) and South African theatre company, Baxter (previous winner of two Scotsman Fringe Firsts), in collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company (of War Horse fame).
Wrought from jaw-dropping craft and artistry, ensemble performance and puppeteering, storytelling and stagecraft, The Life and Times of Michael K is as close to theatrical perfection as is possible. The ensemble work like clockwork, providing animus and breath, voice and personality to the hare-lipped social outcast protagonist, Michael K, and his ailing mother, on their Herculean journey across civil war-torn South Africa to grant her dying wish.
High Steaks was at the historic Anatomy Lecture Theatre at the popular former Veterinary College-turned-arts venue Summerhall. With its curved wooden seating and vaulted ceiling it couldn’t have been a more appropriate venue for such a meaty piece of highly personal performance art. Performed and created by UK-based performance artist Eloina, High Steaks is about the artist’s relationship with her labia, from first awareness and shame at the age of 10 to self-acceptance. Eloina’s personal perspective expands to reflect more broadly on how our culture shames women into thinking their labia aren’t normal, through sanitised porn and the limited variety of labia represented in available anatomical drawings.
Eloina’s powerful presence and honed clowning skills makes this part-anatomy class, part-art class and part-cooking show a no-holds-barred humour-filled tear-jerker that will hit you right in the feels. High Steaks is as naked as it gets: feminist performance art at its most effective.
The Life Sporadic of Jess Wildgoose is a new, darkly comic play by Europe-based physical theatre group Voloz Collective. Jess Wildgoose is an aspiring Wall Street financial trader and the four Jacques Lecoq-trained ensemble members play the other characters Jess encounters on her journey – while also expertly creating the world of the play through seamless movement, their bodies and four black suitcases with embedded LED lighting. Together these become the doors, lifts, vehicles and New York cityscape. A live soundscape is created by the onstage composer and sound designer, working with a synth and laptop. Funny and clever, this is top-class physical theatre.
A Spectacle of Herself is a one-person show by UK-based aerial and performance artist Laura Murphy and directed by British theatre-maker, performer and director Ursula Martinez, which grapples with themes of feminism, queer identity, neurodivergence, living in patriarchy and the paradox of the artist relearning her right to claim her own space while rejecting a colonising approach to demanding space.
The rather intellectual-sounding subject matter is rendered a moving piece of art through deft transition between short performance art vignettes, including spoken word reflections, mime, spectacular aerial work, creative staging (utilising a see-through drop-down screen to project the show’s text and video art) and a healthy dose of the absurd: a space director Ursula Martinez (La Clique, My Stories, Your Emails) knows and navigates well. A Spectacle of Herself is entertaining and thought-provoking – and Murphy is a phenomenon.
Other notable mentions are…
The Ballad of Truman Capote marks multiple Booker Prize nominated author Andrew O’Hagan’s playwriting debut, centred on US novelist Truman Capote. Irish actor Patrick Moy captures the ego and fragility of Capote, his distinctive childlike cadence of speech and grunting laugh, as he reflects on writing, fame and his own moral culpability in writing his genre-defining non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood.
For truly spectacular circus entertainment, which transports the audience through colour, movement, dance, music and song to the daily goings off of ordinary life in Guinea, Afrique en Cirque ticks all the boxes. Created by Kalabanté Productions founder, Yamoussa Bangoura, the high-energy performance features acrobatics and contortion, dance, live drumming and music.
Artist/Muse is a new theatre work by the UK-based Weekly Women’s Writing Collective about artists’ model, Olivia (Caterina Grosoli), and the relationship she develops with an aspiring artist, Paul (Sushant Shekhar), in 1990s New York City. In the wider context of the growing cultural interest in the untold stories of the women behind their celebrated male partners, Artist/Muse provides a contemporary celebration of the feminine muse of Western art history.
A new play written and directed by Lucy Hayes, Bitter Lemons mirrors the experience of two women of the cusp of their big career breaks: a corporate and a professional football player. Hayes’ tightly written and clever script deals with issues of racial prejudice, sexism and what it means to be a woman fighting for what she wants. In the hands of these two thrilling-to-watch actors (Shannon Hayes and Chanel Waddock) it makes for a breathless and riveting hour of theatre.
Hello Kitty Must die is a musical retelling of the darkly comic novel of the same name by US writer Angela S Choi. In it 29-year-old Yale-educated lawyer Fiona Yu is grappling with her immigrant Chinese parents’ expectations of her marrying a ‘nice Chinese boy’. There are some zany, mostly pop-inspired, songs, such as ‘Mr Happy’, a song about Fiona’s new dildo that she purchases to get rid of her hymen.
The Hunger is a claustrophobic dark and dystopian horror about mother/daughter survivalists (formidably performed by Madeleine Farnhill and Helen Fullerton) holding out on their rural northern English farm as a mysterious pandemic rages beyond the trip-wired border of their land.
Oh My Heart, Oh My Home is a joyful masterclass in storytelling, featuring live music accompaniment and a dolls’ house. Casey Jay Andrews weaves a sentimental and deeply moving tale about a woman heading home to her childhood home on the eve of a meteor storm.
What about the Aussies?
The Australian comedy contingent is massive at the Fringe, so I jumped in to catch Lou Wall vs The Internet and Gillian Cosgriff: Actually, Good. Both shows had successful runs at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival this year – and it feels like their respective stars are on the up and up. Wall’s bonkers show about professional jealousy and internet culture is absurdly brilliant and Cosgriff’s group list-making exercise about the top 10 things we like as a structure for her comedy cabaret is like a soothing balm to all that is cynical in the world.
What else?
There are over 3500 more shows on – plus two other festivals – so my advice is: just go. At least once – particularly if you know someone with a spare bed (or floor space if your joints are young enough to allow). Many Edinburghers head out of town during Fringe to capitalise on the jacked-up rental prices they can command, so it can be an expensive endeavour for a tourist.
But, with so many shows, there really is no end to what’s on offer. So, dip your hand in that Christmas stocking, let some stranger pitch you their show or take a recco from someone you meet – and go. While you may catch a stinker, you also may be one of the first to see the next Phoebe Waller-Bridge before they hit the big time. Swings and roundabouts, Fringe style.
