Visiting the Edinburgh Fringe
A Brief Guide To the World's Largest Performing Arts Festival
Jul 26, 2009
Edinburgh is a beautiful and vibrant place to visit at any time of year, but in August it erupts into life as several festivals run concurrently all over the city: the International, Jazz and Blues, Book, Art Festivals and the largest of them all – the Fringe.
While it is great to have all of this choice as a visitor, it is also quite daunting to be confronted with a catalogue of over two thousand events in the Fringe alone when deciding how to fill your time.
Background To the Edinburgh Fringe
The Edinburgh International Festival began in 1947, and on that very first year a group of performers created an unofficial fringe of events running parallel to the main festival.
That fringe grew and was eventually formalised and organised, and is now co-ordinated by the Festival Fringe Society from its headquarters on High Street, the upper portion of the famous Royal Mile. Performances take place every day and night all over the city in church halls, university buildings, tents, offices, shops, pubs, in the open air and even in one or two theatres.
The Fringe Society publishes the programme and provides a centralised ticketing and support service for performers, venues and visitors as well as organising the street entertainments outside its doors, but this is an open access festival with no requirements about type or quality of performance to achieve entry into the programme.
What to See at the Fringe
The Fringe brochure contains a single paragraph to describe each of a couple of thousand different shows, and so choosing what to see can be bewildering even for a seasoned Fringe-goer.
If you walk along High Street outside the Fringe Office, hundreds of people in costume will eagerly tell you all about their shows and give you a flyer, plus there are regular performances of excerpts from shows on outdoor stages along the street.
Many of the major venues have a particular character that is reflected in their shows: shows at The Traverse tend to be from highly-regarded, established theatre companies; The Pleasance, Assembly Rooms and Gilded Balloon feature mostly stand-up comedy and small-scale theatre productions with a bit of music; C Venues host a lot of student theatre groups; Quaker Meeting House has performances mostly by youth theatre groups; The Scottish Storytelling Centre features children's theatre and storytellers.
An army of reviewers descends on Edinburgh every August, and their opinions can be read in national newspapers, specialist Fringe publications and online, and the positive reviews are posted up by the venues after the first week.
Reviews appear in English and Scottish national newspapers such as The Scotsman, The Guardian and The Times plus performing arts newspaper The Stage. Web sites such as British Theatre Guide, What's On Stage, Broadway Baby and Chortle have extensive coverage of the Fringe, and specialist publication Three Weeks publishes a free daily sheet of reviews that can be picked up at many of the larger venues.
The Fringe Experience
There are some features that Fringe venues have in common that may be unfamiliar to regular theatre-goers.
For one thing, seating is generally unreserved, so even if you buy a ticket in advance, you need to queue early to be sure of getting a good seat. At most venues, audiences are not admitted until around five minutes before the published start time and queues are generally outside the building, so an umbrella is recommended, just in case the weather turns nasty.
The central Fringe box office is a good place to go for tickets for all venues, but it is better to book online or by telephone and collect your tickets as you can wait in line to buy them for half an hour or more at busy times. If a show appears to be sold out, it is still worth trying the venue's own box office as the Fringe office only has a limited allocation for each performance, however some special offers may only be available from the Fringe box office and not from the venue.
Most venues are within reasonably easy walking distance of one another, but make sure you allow comfortable travelling time between shows, bearing in mind that pretty much everywhere in Edinburgh is up a very steep hill.
Many seasoned Fringers think nothing of seeing five, six or more shows in a day, but it's easy to forget to schedule in things like eating and sleeping if you get carried away.
The Edinburgh Fringe experience can be hectic and exhausting, but it should also be lively, stimulating, varied and great fun. There are now many festivals in every part of the globe calling themselves "fringes", but there is still nothing else on earth quite like the original Edinburgh Fringe.
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