First it was the Romans and the English; now the cheery residents of Edinburgh have throngs of theater folks invading the capital’s storybook lanes each August for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a three-week arts carnival and showcase of every stripe. An extension of the more formal Edinburgh International Festival, which runs concurrently, the Fringe began at the same time, in 1947, when a collection of theater troupes, excluded from the main festival, formed their own guerrilla program instead.
That scrappy spirit remains to this day: The Fringe is now a proving ground for burgeoning talent, its alums including Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Baby Reindeer’s Richard Gadd, and the hit Broadway musical Six, whose brisk 80-minute runtime owes much to the demands of the Fringe, where all pieces are around an hour.
With some 3,000 artists putting up acts that range from fully produced new musicals to stripped-down stand-up, it is impossible to see everything. The prevailing mood is one of discovery, as Fringe-goers hope to glimpse the next Waller-Bridge in the medieval warrens of repurposed rooms and assembly halls scattered across the city. Here, some highlights from a few days in bonnie Scotland.
A cohort of American comics including Cat Cohen, Jaqueline Novak, and Steven Phillips-Horst cut an inspired swath. Cohen’s Broad Strokes, a hilarious recounting of the stroke she suffered at 31, has the sharpness and warmth of her nights at Joe’s Pub and Club Cumming in New York, while Novak’s stand-up hones her ponderous ad-hoc observations on topics ranging from the human body and ghosts to the existential dilemma of not being Tom Cruise. Phillips-Horst, the cohost of the Celebrity Book Club podcast, went high concept with The Last Mad Man, a delicious and occasionally poignant study of an ad man hired to rebrand the apocalypse, complete with dystopian pitch decks and awkward Zooms before the world ends.
Footballers’ Wives: The Musical, based on the campy British drama from the aughts, is a delightful send-up of the beloved program, playing at Edinburgh’s storied Assembly Rooms. Perhaps too local in theme to translate in the US, its brassy dames, soapy plot twists, and blinged-out costumes make an argument for the inevitability of a Real Housewives musical Stateside in due time.
At a sleepy shopping center in the port neighborhood of Leith, away from the bustle of Fringe proper, the dancer Matthew Hawkins performs a solo piece called Ready. A veteran of Michael Clark’s iconoclastic dance troupe in the ’80s, Hawkins’s meditative choreography, set to a Beethoven piano concerto, happens inside a play area within the mall. Children play with toys or bang on a nearby piano while Hawkins’s quiet motion, sometimes to no audience at all, proceeds undeterred. The background din of the setting, combined with Hawkins’s total calm, combine to make one of the more moving moments of the Fringe.
The acclaimed theater director John Tiffany lends his Tony-winning hand to She’s Behind You, starring Johnny McKnight, a one-man show about the perfomer’s time as a “panto dame.” For all its flamboyance, pantomime—the thoroughly British musical-comedy style that draws on fairy tales and features stock characters in the style of commedia dell’arte—remains conservative, and McKnight’s effort to bring the genre into modernity, particularly as a gay man, is touching and wonderfully camp.
Though the Fringe tends toward the cheeky and outlandish, there are spots of gravity. Priyanka Shetty’s #Charlottesville is a multimedia examination of the violent 2017 protests in Virginia. An MFA student at UVA at the time, Shetty has created a piece the draws heavily on the work of Anna Deveare Smith, whose documentary theater has covered events like the 1992 Los Angeles riots. With #Charlottesville, Shetty reveals, with the distance of eight years, that the hate and violence of that day were not a tear in our social fabric but a feature.
And one very New York moment happening at the Fringe is the one-woman play Red Ink, starring Brooklyn nightlife performer and drag artist Chiquitita. Based on the life of trans activist and actress Cecilia Gentili, whose spirited memorial at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 2024 was subsequently condemned by the Archdiocese of New York, the piece was originally conceived and performed by Gentili herself. Chiquitita ably channels Gentili’s droll delivery and world-weary élan; chatting with friends who knew the late Gentili after the performance, Chiquitita quipped, “Well, she couldn’t make it today, girl!”
On the heels of their 2024 Fringe triumph Gwyneth Goes Skiing (opening at New York’s SoHo Playhouse this November), Linus Karp and Joseph Martin debuted Fit Prince—full title: The Fit Prince (who gets switched on the square in the frosty castle the night before (insert public holiday here))—a satire of treacly Hallmark and Netflix holiday movies in which a single guy or gal implausibly finds themselves in love with an heir to an obscure European crown, the ficticious “Swedonia” in this case. Karp and Martin’s outsized dependence on audience participation gives their productions an exciting tension, and their nothing-is-sacred spoofing—Abba becomes Baam; “Dancing Queen” Is “Movement King” in one vignette—is a signature. One wonders how their pop culture ruminations will play in New York this fall.
Many may recognize the British comedian Christopher Hall from his Instagram Reels impersonating backup singers. Hall’s Work in Progress stand-up, an unfinished and improvised hour, read from notes in a Naomi Campell–emblazoned notebook no less, is quintessential Fringe: rough at the edges, but still razor-sharp. Hall was a professional dancer in another life, and the tightness and precision he brings to his storytelling are its own choreography.