August - Edinburgh Fringe Festival

As it’s August we thought it only right to shine the spotlight on the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the world’s largest performance arts festival, which takes place every August in Edinburgh. It’s an open-access performing arts festival, meaning that there is no selection process or committee, and anyone may participate with any type of performance.

The festival was established in 1947 as an unofficial offshoot (on the ‘fringe’ of) the Edinburgh International Festival. The official Fringe programme categorises the shows into the following sections. Theatre, comedy, dance, physical theatre, circus, cabaret, musicals, opera, spoken word, music, children’s shows, exhibitions and events. The Comedy section is the largest, making up over one-third of the programme.

The Edinburgh Fringe is the perfect place for new material to be tested and to premiere new work. The annual festival has been the starting place for many well-known shows and has helped establish the careers of many writers and performers including Stephen Fry, Eddie Izzard, Tim Minchin, Jo Brand, and Rowan Atkinson. Many notable shows have originated at The Fringe including Stomp, Ushers: The Front of House Musical, and Fleabag.

One of the biggest West End shows to start at The Fringe is the groundbreaking Six the Musical which is now a global phenomenon. The show first premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe as a presentation by the Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society and consisted primarily of students from the university. The production’s run was sold-out and the musical was invited back the following year. Although it did not win any major awards at the Fringe, it gained a lot of commercial interest. The musical then made its West End premiere at the Arts Theatre in January 2019. It has since moved to the Lyric Theatre before settling in its forever home at the Vaudeville Theatre where it is currently playing.

Another current show that is also an Edinburgh alumnus is Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World. Based on Kate Pankhurst’s picture book, the musical played the Fringe in 2022. It follows the story of a young girl who meets an array of iconic women including the likes of Marie Curie and Amelia Earhart. The show is currently playing at The Other Palace Theatre.

Fringe Venues come in all different shapes and sizes such as regular theatres, churches, bars, pubs, schools, a public toilet, and many more. Some venues are commercial and others are non-profit. Some venues operate all year round and others only run as venues during the Fringe.

There are the ‘Big Four’ venues, which consist of Assembly, Gilded Balloon, The Pleasance, and Underbelly. These venues all operate a multi-room venue, often across multiple sites, and tend to specialise in comedy. There are some free venues that instead of charging performers to hire the venue, and audiences to attend, they make their spaces available for free. They tend to be pubs and clubs, they use the Fringe as a way of boosting bar takings.

The first ever Fringe Festival featured eight companies performing in five venues. By 1959, there were 19 companies; by 1969 there were 57 and by 1979 there were 324. In 1981, there were 494, and by 1999, there were over 600 companies giving 15,000 performances, and in 2010, 1,900 giving 40,000.

The 2024 Festival is scheduled from 2-26 August 2024 and includes a total of 3,317 productions across 262 venues with a total of 51,446 individual performances. The festival has been a staple in the theatre industry for over 70 years and it is just getting bigger and better every year. The Edinburgh Fringe is a real celebration of what theatre is all about.