On the Fringe
Welcome back! It's a new school year, new season, new everything—except Scotland has entered its permacloud grey era that we won't exit until next summer, so each day looks just the same here...
Anyway! There's a lot to update you on (a whole summer's worth of fun and finishing my masters!), but I'd be remiss if I didn't dedicate an entire post to the month of August and the unique experience of living in Edinburgh during Fringe. After all, it's the world's largest Fringe Festival and it ran my life for a good couple of weeks, so let's dive in :)
A Word on Fringe Festivals...
For those who don't know, a fringe festival is type of arts festival, typically to do with performing arts. The world's first fringe festival is, indeed, the Edinburgh Fringe, and it started back in 1947/48, depending on who you ask. The Edinburgh International Festival started in 1947, but it wasn't until the 1950s that 'Fringe' with a capital F began to be used in an official capacity.
The use of the word 'fringe' refers to the location of the festival content in regard to mainstream arts. A fringe festival is often the place where up-and-coming acts get to gain a little traction, where established performers come to workshop new material, or a really weird show gets to perform for a really niche audience. It's all on the fringe, so to speak ;)
Fringe festivals exist all around the world—friends of the podcast might remember that I worked at IndyFringe for two years, one of the largest walkable fringes in the US—but Edinburgh Fringe is the crown jewel of fringes. It's oldest, largest, most famous, etc. As a non-juried festival, any act can enter the festival so long as it pays the entrance fees, which means about a gazillion people flock to Scotland in August. This year, there were performers from 77 countries and over 2.8 million tickets issued. (For reference: Edinburgh has a normal population of ~600,000. You could say it was a little crowded.)
This is all to say Fringe Festivals are cool! They are engaging, explorative, interactive—all these amazing artistic qualities and such a cool experience for everyone. Look into your local Fringe and see what kind of performances catch your eye in the coming years.
Edinburgh in August
But back to my experience! Edinburgh Fringe takes place across three weeks/four weekends in August, so basically the whole month. As someone who submitted her masters' dissertation on August 6 (huzzah), this was particularly good timing. I had a whole month to 1. Recover from Dissertation, 2. Move into My New Flat, and 3. See as Many Shows as Possible. Since I was still on a student budget (student visa work restrictions are tough), I couldn't be totally obsessive and see every show—well, to be fair, there are 2,000+ shows, so I don't think anyone can logistically see everything, but you get the point—however, I still managed a respectable showing.
Fringe By the Numbers
Shows Seen: 13
Money Spent on Tickets: £133 (this includes several discounts & free tickets...)
Venues Visited: 11
Garden Trips: 28
Food Truck Meals: a very disciplined 5
Gelato Consumed: too much to count (yikes)
It was a busy month. And in order to avoid recounting all 13 productions I saw, I'm going to give a one sentence summary of each show, then rank my top five favorites. You know, just in case you stumble across some of these comedians or productions in the future ;)
The Shows
Target Audience: Satire about TV Production companies and the likelihood of nuclear annihilation (cheery)
Not Another Quiz Show: A pub quiz, but make chaotic and schedule it late at night.
Flight: A one-way ticket on Schrödinger Airlines in which you enter a simulation where you plane crashes...again and again and again.
Coma: Same production company as Flight, except this time, you take a sugar pill and fall into a coma voluntarily!
Guy's Girl: Stand-up comedy by Yvette Segan, very "I'm in my 20s in the 2020s" coded.
Joe Lycett & Friends: Emceed by Joe Lycett, bitesize chunks of stand-up by a selection of Joe's comedy friends.
Woody Sez: An intimate show detailing the life and music of folk legend Woody Guthrie.
Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorised Musical Parody: Everyone's favorite Canadian hockey drama set to Rusical-quality songs and gimicks (it slayed).
A World Apart: The Meredith Grey/Christina Yang dynamic circa season 8, if it was an Australian musical and instead of being surgeons, they were fitness gurus and aspiring writers.
Kiell Smith-Bynoe: Kool Story Bro: Improv comedy with an all-star troupe and lots of audience suggestions.
Tom Cashman: NPC: In this case, NPC stands for 'Nearly Proficient Comedian'...Powerpoint stand-up comedy by Taskmaster: Australia's assistant.
Girlz: Netflix's Pop Star Academy if it was British and trying to be an HBO show and there's a secret pregnancy trope too.
The Black Blues Brothers: Classic acrobatics by five brothers set to classic blues music.
The Favorites
It'd be impossible to rank some of these against each other, what with how different the genres are, so it's an all-around top five!
Woody Sez: Okay, not to play favorites, but this show was easily my favorite thing I saw all month. Incredible musicianship, incredible performers, and a story that needs to be told. I was already a little familiar with Woody Guthrie's story, particularly with his Huntington's Disease connection, but this performance blew me away. Small, black box theater vibes with an incredible core cast telling the poetic injustice of a voice for the people losing his voice while maintaining his spirit. I'm obsessed, I'm their #1 fan, I'm now in possession of three Woody Guthrie stickers from their merch booth. This production is in London for a few weeks and will travel to BLANK later on. Keep it on your radar—this is a show you need to see.
Coma: A complete 180! I'll be the first to admit, I'm not always into immersive theater and it's...pecularities. Coma completely stunned me. It's set up in a old shipping container, one of those huge metal boxes, and when you walk in, it feels like you've entered a 1950s submarine or something. There's a small aisle and rows of triple bunkbeds. You're instructed to lay down on the bunks, put on these headphones, and take a sugar pill. From there, the lights go out and your imagination turns on. With some of the best audio engineering as a featured character, you genuinely feel as if you're hypnotized, exploring new levels of your own consciousness. At one point, the audio asked me if I could lift my hands up, and I genuinely thought I couldn't. I was, shockingly, in a *coma-like state* and more akin to a mannequin. But as soon as the lights came back on, everyone was completely normal again! This is the kind of immersive I want, the kind where I feel like I'm unlocking new depths of my subconscious while being totally awake. So cool.
Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorised Musical Parody: For the girls/gays/theys & anyone who wants to laugh for sixty minutes straight! Seriously, I didn't stop smiling the entire show. It's campy and kitschy and ridiculous in all the best ways. Whether you're a fan of the show or not, you will giggle so much your face hurts. And the songs are unfairly catchy, to the point where my friends and I have been humming them for weeks. This production is from an very successful off-Broadway show, and I believe it's making its way to London soon. Go see it!
Kiell Smith-Bynoe: Kool Story Bro: Anyone remember the dark days of their high school improv era? Yeah, this was so much better than that. Take a handful of the best comedic improvers in the UK and put them on a late-night stage in front of 1000 slightly tipsy audience members; you belly laugh until you cry. The concept of the show relies on the improvers getting stort suggestions from the audience, meaning each show is completely different. Our performance saw stories about someone's mother-in-law who is a self-proclaimed witch laying hexes on people with frozen fish, an awful Australian art teacher obsessed with drinking milk, and an awkward breakup with a guy who...can't take a hint ;) 10/10 would see again.
The Black Blues Brothers: My last show of the festival, coming in at 5:00 pm on August 31st, and a great one to end on. A pure acrobatics, good-time show set to the blues music of the 40s/50s/60s. At the geriatric age of 24, I cannot fathom how all of these real grown ups continue to flip and twist and throw themselves around the stage, especially considering that they did this everyday for a month straight. That's absolutely ridiculous. It was silly and cheesy and reminiscent of happy days. Amazing physicality, incredible energy, and gravity-defying gymnastics. A great time for all ages, and a wonderful way to end my first Fringe :)
Honorable Mentions
A gallery of other fun memories from the last few weeks! Not necessarily Fringe-related, but Fringe associated. Having an almost-total eclipse was slightly anticlimactic because—you guessed it—it was cloudy in Edinburgh...but several other memorable moments and time spent with friends.
celebrating end of diss @ Calton Eclipse Day @ the Meadows eclipse sleep paralysis demons winning 3rd place @ NAQS Apple Crumble @ Ciccetta's celebrating Fringe @ PLC
Garden Parties!
As I mentioned, there's basically an endless supply of shows that come to Edinburgh for Fringe, which means there's a million gazillion different people who take up residence in the city for the month. To help supplement the influx of tourists and artists, Fringe does a fantastic job of creating third spaces for people to enjoy.
The three main Fringe production companies are Underbelly, Assembly, and Pleasance, all distinguished by their own color and branding. For example, Underbelly is known for its purple venues and giant inflatable cow stage—you literally go under the belly for the performance venue—while Pleasance is the color yellow and boasts the most comprehensive comedy lineup. Each of these three groups curate their own outdoor hangout spaces. They have official names, but my friends and I referred to them as 'The Gardens.'
As it turned out, when I moved to Scotland last September, I had unknowningly won the Fringe Accommodation Lottery. I was never more than five minutes away from one of the flagship Fringe Gardens, and after finishing my coursework the first week of August, there wasn't much keeping me from milling about in George Square, Bristo Square, or Pleasance. In a funny way, it reminded me a lot of the Indiana State Fair. Just a ton of people, food trucks, music, good vibes all around—only swap out the terns for pigeons!
Some of my favorite garden moments include:
The Woody Sez Hootenanny at the Underbelly Bristo Square Redbull Bar (a totally unique sentence that has never been said before!)
Finding the yummiest chunky cookie stand at the Assembly garden—warm stuffed s'mores cookie heated up with whipped cream on yop = instant happiness
A series of sunny afternoons spent at the picnic tables outside Teviot while working remotely. A fabulous way to people watch the flyerers in pink shirts approach strangers with a sales pitch about a random show!
August went by in such a blur, but I can confidently say I spent a serious chunk of time under the rare sunshine in the gardens.
The End of August
Fringe wound down at the end of the month, and there was a serious season of change in the air. Not only would the artists/creatives/fringe fanatics be leaving town, but the new crop of university students would be arriving two weeks after the official end of the festival. Of course, that also meant that the 2025/26 cohort of postgraduate students would have officially completed their coursework and could no longer refer to themselves as students...
For me, this meant a couple of things: since I was no longer a student, I could hardly live in student accommodation anymore, and I moved into a new flat with Friend of the Podcast Julianne! And since I no longer had classes to fill my schedule with, I had to begin the classically awful canon experience of postgrad job hunting—but since I'm not entirely sure which continent I'll be living on come January, it makes finding a long-term position a bit trickier...As such, I've answered the age-old Avenue Q query: what do you do with a BA (or a masters) in English? Keep working part-time for the Media Captioning Department and paper every retail and foodservice business in a two-mile radius with your resumé.
I am very much enjoying the new flat. It's such a privilege to have a couch, or, you know, only share the kitchen with one other person as opposed to ten. Also, we have the prettiest view of the Crags from our living room window AND I can see the sun from my bedroom window. This is the lap of luxury, basically.
gelato to celebrate dissertation! moving out of Churchill House Linlithgow Palace regal vibes at Linlithgow Linlithgow w/Julianne! Piña Coladas @ Paradise Palms
What's been weird has been the abundance of time on my hands now. Sure, I only had ~6 hours of classes a week throughout my masters, but there was always a laundry list of things to do, places to be. Now, I've still got an endless to-do list, but it's full of dreadfully mundane adult things: message the landlord about the broken mailbox key, write and rewrite and rewrite cover letters, try to determine which appliance is an energy ghost, etc. This is the first fall in twenty years that I haven't been walking back into a classroom. It's unsettlingly. But, you know, also fun that I can hop on a train and go see a castle on a whim!
Logically, I know this limbo period is only for the next few months, and I should take advantage of my temporal flexibility while it's here. How many people get this much freedom to explore on a day-to-day basis? It's odd, nonetheless, to be categorically untethered by a classroom schedule after all these years...
I'll wrap things up for now! With my schedule shifting from academics back to real-life adulting, I'm optimistic I'll be able to keep up with a more regular posting schedule.
My days in Scotland may be coming to a close, but there are still plenty of adventures and day trips to squeeze around my work trips. I have to take advantage of having palaces down the street and public transport at my disposal while I still can ;)
For example, Linlithgow Palace! Twenty minutes from Edinburgh and absolutely adorable. Got super lucky with the weather and felt like a princess the whole morning (though hopefully with a better fate than Mary Stuart)
Thanks for reading!
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