If last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe was haunted by the impressive specter of “Baby Reindeer,” with the Netflix smash by Richard Gadd serving as an exhilarating if daunting reminder of the event’s star-making potential, this year’s edition feels like a collective exhale.
In conversations with performers and prospective festivalgoers before the Fringe’s return on Friday, there was less feverish expectancy, perhaps because of the tough financial conditions that many acts are facing.
So, what’s driving this year’s crop of comedians, theater makers, dancers, circus performers and cabaret acts? My impression is that it’s a desire to entertain in tricky times, to make people laugh, or perhaps make them think, through art.
From homegrown Scottish talent to internationally acclaimed acts, the program for the Fringe, which runs through Aug. 25, is packed with passionate performers. Open to a random page of the festival guide, or scroll haphazardly through the Fringe app, and you’re likely to find one.
Or, simply use this guide.
Live in Concert (Sort of)
The intimacy of the Fringe’s makeshift performance spaces lends itself to self-aware theater that integrates the audience and makes them characters, too. Take “Ohio,” a new musical from the married indie folk duo the Bengsons. Exploring what faith means outside organized religion through a tuneful account of one member’s struggle with hearing loss, it promises moving musical magic.
I yelped at the news that the experimental theater trio In Bed With My Brother would be back at the Fringe after a six-year hiatus: Its raucous 2017 musing on Manchester’s acid house scene, “We Are Ian,” is one of those Fringe experiences that remains in the memory for eternity. Expect more late-night carnage from its new offering, “Philosophy of the World,” in which its members play a fictional ’70s rock band called the Shaggs, with a one-off flop of an album that gets re-evaluated and hoisted to cult status.
The theater makers Alexander Wright and Phil Grainger are meanwhile setting Greek myths to music again with the return of “Orpheus,” a hit production, first performed at the Fringe in 2016, that has toured the globe ever since. Here, the audience members are not so much concert goers as companion drinkers in a dimly lit dive bar as a man bears his soul through spoken word and acoustic song while lamenting his lost wife, Eurydice.
Rom-Coms Under the Microscope
The tropes of the romantic-comedy movie, which set us all up for real-life disappointment, are being dissected onstage this year. In the more dramatic camp — albeit with plenty of levity — you’ll find “Paldem,” a new play from the rising star David Jonsson, billed as an “anti-romantic comedy.” Jonsson is best known for roles in the HBO series “Industry” and the charming British indie movie “Rye Lane” (itself a rom-com). Like all good examples of the genre, “Paldem,” which is Jonsson’s first full-length writing project, centers on modern love — but it also has interracial relationships, fetishization and pornography as the backdrop. (It is 2025, after all.)
Not so much challenging the genre’s clichés as pointing directly at them and guffawing is Linus Karp’s latest parody, “The Fit Prince,” or, to give it its full title, “The Fit Prince (Who Gets Switched on the Square in the Frosty Castle the Night Before (Insert Public Holiday Here)).” Mocking the mass-produced, swiftly churned-out rom-coms of Hallmark and Netflix, this show has the potential to lean more corny than camp. Yet its producers, Awkward Productions, are the masterminds behind the previous Fringe hits “Gwyneth Goes Skiing” and “Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story.” I trust they know what they’re doing.
Classics Retold
Making a canonical play stand out within the tightly stuffed Edinburgh program is difficult, yet a number of intriguing offerings will try. The more highbrow Edinburgh International Festival, which the Fringe is an offshoot of and which runs concurrently, is presenting “Faustus in Africa!” (Aug. 20-23) a collaboration between the South African artist William Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company (of “War Horse” fame) that transposes Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” into a safari setting, with colonialism and climate change crackling in the background.
Back on the Fringe, “Lost Lear” explores the seemingly universal desire that thespians of a certain age have to play Shakespeare’s mad king, through the eyes of an actress with dementia in a nursing home. Via inventive use of sound, visual effects and puppetry, fact merges with fiction and the present with the past. When it played at the Dublin Theater Festival, critics called it a profound reflection on memory, expression and speaking when words fail.
Scotland’s Finest
A wealth of local talent will be on display in the Scottish capital. For dance enthusiasts, there is Barrowland Ballroom’s intriguing meditation on masculinity, “Wee Man” (Aug. 5-17), in which an all-male cast assembled by the company’s artistic director, Natasha Gilmore, will ruminate on what it means to be a man at a time when some expectations and stereotypes are changing fast yet others feel immutable.
Christopher Macarthur-Boyd has felt like a well-kept secret of the Scottish comedy scene for years. But he’s finally breaking out, in part, thanks to the podcast “Here Comes the Guillotine,” in which he more than holds his own against his compatriots Frankie Boyle and Susie McCabe, both legends on the circuit. I caught him testing out material for his Fringe show “Howling at the Moon” recently, and he has seriously fine-tuned his act and turned the offbeat humor up to 11. All being well, this could be his Fringe.
Glorious Comedy Weirdos
There are few greater Fringe joys than stumbling into a random show and leaving disoriented, unable to explain what you saw but convinced that you loved it. Sure to be one of the buzziest shows of this year’s festival is “24 Hour Diner People,” a sophomore Fringe appearance from the inventive character comic Lorna Rose Treen. In her first show, a supremely weird compilation titled “Skin Pigeon,” Treen played a cowboy with guns for hands, a dolphin seeing its own reflection and Sally Rooney as a children’s book author. It’s safe to assume that more strangeness will follow this time.
Toussaint Douglass, a comic and satirist, is making his Fringe debut with “Accessible Pigeon Material,” a show that proudly celebrates his own quirks. Douglass has a delightfully awkward charm and an enviable co-sign from the Soho Theater in London, which is producing his show. Expect ruminations on neurodivergence, Black British history and fatherhood. And pigeons — lots of pigeons.
The Australian comic Lou Wall is returning to Edinburgh this summer with a new hourlong routine called “Breaking the Fifth Wall” and heaps of hype. You might have seen one of her sets go viral: a PowerPoint presentation about a woman who stole her bed from Facebook Marketplace that’s been all over the socials. That clip is a fair reflection of Wall’s very online sense of humor and her extraordinary ability to hurl out tightly written gags at impressive speed. She’s a comedy whirlwind.
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