So it begins: A look-ahead at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

On the highs and lows of the world's largest arts festival.

The Disappeared, part of the Danish Showcase at the Edinburgh Fringe

Hello and welcome to Café Europa, a weekly newsletter dedicated to European theatre the Edinburgh fringe. It’s only fair to warn you that while I will still be focusing on European work, the next few editions of this newsletter are going to be very Edinburgh-centric. For the next two-and-a-bit week I’m going to be based in the Scottish capital as part of The Stage’s review team, racing between shows and subsisting on coffee and falafel wraps. You can expect a mix of reviews, potted interviews and other fringe-related stuff, plus a higher than usual likelihood of typos.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world’s largest arts festival. For three weeks every August, it brings together artists and audiences from all over the world to see a diverse programme of theatre, comedy, dance, circus, magic, spoken word and shows that don’t fit neatly into anyone category. It is open access so in theory anyone can bring work here. It is a place where careers are launched and discoveries made, where it is possible to immerse yourself in art from the moment you wake to the moment you tumble into bed in the small hours.

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The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is a meat-market, an entity intent on relentless growth. For three weeks every August, it colonises the Scottish capital, emptying wallets, fraying nerves and breaking spirits. In theory anyone can bring work here, but in reality that’s kind of bullshit. It’s a place where artists often find themselves playing to an audience of three and you can easily spend north of £7 on a pint of Amstel in a plastic glass or £8 on a cheese baguette.

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The thing about the fringe is all the above is true. It’s a place where hope and desperation often walk hand-in-hand. Everyone knows it’s too big and too expensive and too unhealthy, but it’s also fucking seductive and when you’re in its grip, it’s easy to get swept along. As you might be able to tell I have a love-hate relationship with the fringe and yet I can’t deny I’m excited about heading up there (I’m writing this on the train).

The fringe is now far bigger than the Edinburgh International Festival it has grown up around. Like the EIF, it started life in 1947, when a small group of companies put on work outside of the main festival programme. Since then, it has grown and grown – and grown, and grown. As I write this there are 3915 shows listed on the fringe website. This comprehensive explainer by by Fergus Morgan for The Stage gives you a good overview of what the fringe is today and what to expect. I’ve also spent the last few weeks ahead of the festival speaking to artists about their fringe shows – here’s a piece on the artists exploring often very personal experiences of grief in their work.

The fringe’s size is such that, more than anywhere else, word of mouth really matters. While I have an ambivalent relationship with fringe best-of lists, given that they usually consist of a highly subjective mix of relatively familiar names and artists with some form of PR backing, I can’t deny they help navigate the dauntingly enormous programme, so here’s The Stage’s list of picks and below is a list of some of the things I’m looking forward to seeing.

However, every year, as I comb through the fringe programme, I also compile a sort of cut-up poem of the little blurbs that accompany every show in attempt to capture something of the essence of the fringe. This is one of the silliest things I do but also by some way one of the most enjoyable. Here’s the 2024 poem, and here, by way of contrast, is the first one, from all the way back in 2011 (!).  

Sh!t Theatre: Or What’s Left of Us. Photo: Claire Nolan

Fifteen shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe

Sh!t Theatre: Or What’s Left of Us, Summerhall, 1st-25th August

Sh!t Theatre’s superficially chaotic, furiously political Sh!t Theatre Drink Rum with Expats is a show I will still bang on about given half the opportunity, a show which somehow managed to be about the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, about Brexit, and about the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galiza. In the five years since they last appeared at the fringe, Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole have been through some shit of their own, but this piece which promises to knit together folk horror and folk music - complete with post-show sing-around in the Summerhall bar, sounds like it will be cathartic. I’m happy this show exists and horribly sad they ever had to make it.

L’Addition, Summerhall, 13th-25th August

Directed by Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells and created with performance duo Bert and Nasi (whose work I’ve explored in more detail here), this piece consists of one scene repeated over and over to increasingly extreme/frustrating effect. It comes to Edinburgh having been performed at last year’s Avignon Festival, where they toured a French language version to various villages around the medieval city. A German version was recently performed in Vienna (with German-speaking actors) and now the pair bring it to the fringe, as part of the Here and Now Showcase.  

Body politic: The duets of Bert and Nasi

Batshit, Traverse Theatre, 1st-25th August

Directed by Ursula Martinez, Batshit is the work of Australian cabaret artist Leah Shelton and is inspired by the story of her grandmother Gwen, who was incarcerated in an institution in 1960s Australia after announcing she wanted to leave her marriage, where she was subjected to ECT without her consent in order to pacify her. Premiering at the Brisbane Festival in 2022, it’s a salute to all the women who have been medicated and labelled crazy throughout history.

Lynn Faces, Summerhall. Photo: Dom Moore

Lynn Faces, Summerhall, 1st-26th August

Laura Horton’s follows up Breathless, her Fringe First-winning show about hoarding, with another personal piece about emerging from a coercive relationship and starting a punk band inspired by Lynn, Alan Partridge’s put-upon personal assistant. I saw a ten-minute snippet of this at last year’s Summerhall Sessions - an excellent scheme where artists can road-test work in front of an audience of their peers (and get paid to do so) – and it was very funny. There’s a great Guardian article about the show here.

Instructions, Summerhall, August, 1st-26th August

Nathan Ellis’ ingenious work.txt was a play written not to be performed by actors, but by audience members following a series of written and audio instructions. In his latest show, he builds on that premise further, with a text that promises to explore AI, creativity and capitalism, only with an actual actor this time – a different one every day.

Divine Invention, Summerhall, 1st-11th August

As founder of the CASA Latin America festival, Daniel Goldman is one of the UK’s most internationally-inclined directors. His collaborative relationship with Franco-Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco has proved particularly rewarding., Most recently they paired up with When You Pass Over My Tomb at London’s Arcola Theatre. Here, Goldman himself performs Blanco’s metatheatrical, autobiographical text.

Bellringers, Summerhall, 2nd-26th August

Producer Ellie Keel has a great nose for new writing. She previously produced Rafaella Marcus’ Sap and last year’s hit Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz, by Nathan Queeley-Dennis. This year she’s back with a debut play by Daisy Hall, one of five finalists for the Women’s Prize For Playwriting last year, the prize Keel founded. Bellringers, which sounds intriguingly odd, sees her joining forces once more with director Jessica Lazar and her company Atticist - the team behind Sap.

Good Luck, Cathrine Frost! Assembly George Square, July 31-August 25

A huge hit in Norway, this one-woman show from Det Andre Teatret sees performer Cathrine Frost discussing motherhood, pregnancy and the potential physical and psychological trauma of childbirth. She casts Socrates as the villain of the piece.

The Mosinee Project, Underbelly, 1st-25th August

Inspired by a true incident that took place in the Wisconsin town of Mosinee in 1950, when the American Legion staged a mock communist invasion, this show by Counterfactual, written and directed by theatre maker Nikhil Vyas is one of three winners of this year’s Untapped award, which supports and develops the work of emerging artists and has helped launch careers including those of director Ryan Calais-Cameron.

A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First, The Space @Niddry Street, 2^nd-24^th August

The deliciously off-kilter What if They Ate the Baby? by New York duo Xhloe and Natasha was one of my favourite shows of last year, a tightly choreographed and wickedly physical duet in which they played eerily perma-grinning 1950s housewives. This new piece, a contender for best title of the fringe, is similarly steeped in Americana with them dressed as boy scouts, exploring masculinity and idealised American childhood.

The Disappeared, Summerhall, 1^st-26^th August

The Danish Theatre Showcase always offers up something diverting. Last year it helped bring Fix +Foxy’s Dark Noon to wider international attention, This year’s programme also looks interesting. The Disappeared is billed as multimedia burlesque party about the experience of being queer in South America. Created by Danish company Down the Rabbit Hole. I’ve been enthusiastically advised by more than one person that Don Gnu’s Tennis is great too.

Lie With Me, C Alto, 12th-24^th August

I first encountered the Berlin-based international collective Glossy Pain at Dresden’s Fast Forward Festival where they presented a feminist update on Woyzeck, explicitly focused on the violence against women that lies at the play’s heart. They make their UK debut with an English language version of a one-woman show exploring female desire, performed by Riah Knight and directed by Katharina Stoll.

Pleasure is essential: Glossy Pain, the international feminist collective rewriting the canon

Jobsworth, Pleasance, 31st July-26th August

Isley Lynn wrote the Olivier-nominated The Swell and the very fucking excellent Skin a Cat, a smart, sexy and funny play about what is still often unhelpfully termed ‘female sexual dysfunction.’ Jobsworth sees her teaming up with Libby Rodliffe, for a play about juggling multiple jobs, which they’re billing as a modern Servant to Two Masters.

You’re So F**king Croydon, Underbelly, 1st - 25th Aug

As co-director of the Croydonites festival, Katie Hurley is something of a force, someone intent on invigorating the cultural life of her neighbourhood. In her solo show, she looks at the place that shaped her in more detail and shares memories of growing up in Croydon in the 1990s. A paean to a place that is often used as the butt of jokes, the show apparently features an AI-generated David Bowie.

My Mother’s Funeral: The Show, Summerhall, 1st-26th August

Death is expensive. Funerals cost money. Kelly Jones’ play for Paines Plough explores what happens when you can’t afford the funeral expenses. In the case of the protagonist of Jones play, the answer is to turn her trauma into theatre and raise funds that way. Given how aggressively expensive the fringe has become, a show exploring the impact of the cost of living – and dying – feels very welcome, plus it’s performed in the Roundabout, an in-the-round pop-up theatre and one of my favourite fringe spaces.

This week in European theatre

A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.

The Years –Based on Nobel-winner Annie Ernaux’s decades-sweeping memoir, Eline Arbo’s production of The Years was first staged at Het Nationale Theater in the Netherlands. Now she has reworked the production for a UK audience, in an English language version starring Gina McKee and Romola Garai as different iterations of the same woman. It opens at the Almedia Theatre in London tonight and has already made headlines when audience members fainted during a harrowing abortion scene.

Edinburgh International Festival – Though it’s now dwarfed by the fringe, the international festival still contains an eclectic programme of classical music, opera, dance and theatre including Penthesilea by Eline Arbo (again) for EIF regulars  Interanationaal Theater Amsterdam, where she is now artistic director, Please Right Back by 1927, Christiane Jatahy’s After the Silence and a homegrown production of new David Ireland play The Fifth Step, by the National Theatre of Scotland. The EIF runs from 2^nd-25^th August.

Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, or want to tell me about your fringe show, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com