Miscellaneous observations, recommendations etcetera etcetera from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Distracting myself from my last reviews with an unasked-for mix of tips and musings
My Fringe is over, although I’m now at that weird bit where I’m trying to see how many of the shows I saw but haven’t written up yet I actually manage to write up before my brain gives up (currently this is five shows). Anyway, at the risk of over-exposing my until recently very under-exposed Substack, here is a freeform Fringe brain-dump including the shows I liked the most plus a handful of things that I unfortunately had thoughts on this year.
Joe Kent-Waters, photo by Avalon I guess?
The best stuff I saw
Theatre
1 In Bed with My Brother - Philosophy of the World
2. Ohio
3. oh god idk I liked a lot of stuff like ‘high three’, I do actually think that despite its flaws and high expectations not quite met, Make It Happen is actually really worth seeing (actually EIF not Fringe).
Comedy
1. Joe Kent-Waters is Frankie Monroe DEAD!!! (Good Fun Time)
2. Lorna Rose Treen: 24-Hour Diner People
3. Mr Chonkers (Mr Chonkers?))
In Bed with My Brother, not actually the t-shirts they were selling I don’t think? Photo: Rona Bar and Ofek Avshalom
My trend of the festival? Merch!
It’s impossible to take any sort of comprehensive survey of 3,500+ shows but of the 30 or so I did see, a really very high proportion had something for sale at the end: t-shirts, beer mats, CDs… Obviously it could just have been those shows, but a group of journalists out on a coffee morning agreed with me, as did the PR for Pleasance so… I actually thought a lot of the stuff was really nice, but it doesn’t take a genius to work out why they might be doing this. Edinburgh continues to get exponentially more expensive but only the mildest of ticket price rises are going to be acceptable. So if you can make a grand or two extra per run off merch that’ll probably at least go some way to offsetting the spiralling short term let prices. Doesn’t feel ideal for artists but is nice for fans.
Summerhall basically seems the same which is for the best really.
A LOT of shit went down with Summerhall between last festival and this one and I don’t think it‘s really as simple as saying everyone got paid in the end so no big deal: a friend who’d had a show last year found the experience so trying she wouldn’t go for a drink on the sprawling Summerhall premises this year. However, despite maybe being a bit slimmed down compared to recent years, the eventual programme was very decent – very Summerhall! – and hard to really look at it and say it hasn’t basically been given a pass by 99% of Fringe attendees this year.
I’m still a bit hazy on how long it’s going to be around for (I feel like it IS supposed to be redeveloped into flats but with an arts centre element?) but there’s certainly no real sense of a new Summerhall in the works anywhere else.
The Pleasance Courtyard hoovers up a vast quantity of work, a lot of it very good, and is probably where work would drift post-Summerhall, but it would never itself take on the character of Summerhall, it would just benignly swallow it. And alas poor Trav! I don’t want to pretend to know too much about its year-round programming but in the late ‘00s/early ‘10s its Fringe line-up felt palpably connected to a broader national zeitgeist. Now… it does not, and hasn’t for a while.
Club NVRLND, photo: Mihaela Bodlovic
Club NVRLND is the big talking point show.
Again, this is probably totally subjective: there are 3,500+ shows at the Fringe and my Edinburgh ‘circle’ is about ten people. But there has been a lot of chat about Jack Holden’s Club NVRLND, I think in large part because we recognise that it’s been a huge hit. At a time when many shows are struggling, it’s drawing a few hundred punters to Assembly Checkpoint (aka the old Forest Fringe) every night and many of them - especially the younger ones - seem rabidly enthusiastic about what is I suppose a low budget clubbing musical based around millennial pop bangers and a dodgy riff on Peter Pan. Reactions from people who I know vary from a PR who went along stone cold sober and hated it so much she left after 25 minutes to a colleague who admitted she enjoyed it but didn’t really see it as trying to be great art. Personally I gave it a fairly negative review because I just thought it could have been a lot better, but I didn’t necessarily have a horrible NIGHT – I went with a friend and on the advice of others we had a few drinks first. I guess it’s like a student clubnight: it is perfectly possible to have a great time somewhere shit. I think the most interesting thing about it to me is that this sort of club musical feels like a relatively fledgling new form – I mean there are comparisons I could make but I think the intent between something like this and Here Lies Love or a night at the RVT or even Shunt are all quite different. Clearly there is an audience for it - hopefully as competition hots up there will be better examples of This Sort of Thing.
It’s nice to be sociable!
This is in no way a moan but I’ve been getting progressively more hermit-like at the post-pandemic Fringes, really a combination of I suppose a splash more maturity about physically being there, not having quite so many friends about compared to the Forest Fringe/feral gang of twentysomething Metro hacks days, and maybe the fact the last couple of years I was piling on a lot of comedy shows in the evenings because I was doing the Dave Joke of the Fringe. I actually think if you’re seeing a load of stuff this is absolutely fine and that unless you’re screechingly insecure then spending all night at busy shows scratches the social itch regardless of whether you’re technically hanging out with people or not.
That said I’ve had a bit of a weird last few months and this was probably not the festival to take an aggressively monastic approach to things and I can bring you the revelation that hanging out is great – I didn’t exactly go nuts but I did a couple of hotel reviews and friends ate with me in the restaurants, and there were a couple of ‘nights out’ (a funny term when you’re seeing work that starts well after 10pm and not counting it is a night out) and it was actually really great fun and I had a good time and would do it again. What a scintillating observation!
The very awkward thing that happened
A critic friend randomly bought two for one tickets for what I might as well just say was a show called Cartoonopolis and she asked if I wanted the other ticket so I came along but neither of us were reviewing and while I might have done if I’d love it, I didn’t think it was great: a very sweet show about the performer-writer’s autistic brother, but it felt like it needed a lot of professional development and rigour. Anyway, a few days later the writer-performer had done a Sad Video To Camera about how bad ticket sales were and that he’d not been able to get any critics in and it’s a bit like you did get two critics in… but. I’m not exactly sure what is helpful to say in this situation but if you’re looking for a heartfelt celebration of an autistic sibling, Cartoonopolis is a really sweet show, it just meanders about a fair bit. And there’s certainly a nice story there in terms of the idiosyncratic means by which his brother’s autism manifests itself (despite being from Merseyside, he talks in an American accent, heavily influenced by Toy Story). I’m not sure if is helpful, annoying or just a meaningless indulgence to write this but I suppose it feels mildly better than a) doing nothing b) writing a negative review.
And that was my Fringe!