Directory

Fringe Advice & How-To Guides

Long-form guides to planning an Edinburgh Fringe trip: first-timer orientation, ticketing, money-saving, accessibility, venue geography, genre primers and more.

1. Guide 1The First-Timer's Guide to the Edinburgh FringeThe first thing to understand about the Edinburgh Fringe is that nobody is in charge of it in the way you'd expect. There's no artistic director choosing…
2. Guide 2How Fringe Ticketing Actually WorksThere isn't one single ticketing system at the Edinburgh Fringe, and that trips up a lot of first-timers who arrive expecting something like a single…
3. Guide 3Money-Saving Strategies at the FringeIt helps to stop thinking of Fringe spending as one number and split it into three separate budgets instead: tickets, accommodation, and everything else…
4. Guide 4PBH's Free Fringe & Laughing Horse: How Free Shows WorkAlongside the ticketed venues, a large part of the Fringe runs on a completely different model: shows with no entry charge, where you pay what you…
5. Guide 5Venue Clusters & Getting Around the FringeEdinburgh's Old Town and the streets immediately around it compress into a genuinely walkable area, and that's part of why the Fringe works where it…
6. Guide 6Day-Planning Strategy for the FringeThe best Fringe day plans tend to look slightly sparse on paper and full in practice, and the worst ones look impressively packed on paper and fall apart…
7. Guide 7Accessibility at the FringeThe Fringe's open-access structure, covered in the first-timer's guide, is also the reason accessibility here doesn't come as a single, uniform standard…
8. Guide 8Accommodation Reality CheckOf the three budgets a Fringe trip breaks down into — tickets, accommodation, everything else — accommodation is usually the biggest single line item…
9. Guide 9Weather & Packing for the FringeEdinburgh in August is not the reliably warm, settled month that the height of a British summer sometimes suggests further south, and packing for the…
10. Guide 10Kids at the FringeTaking children to the Fringe works best when you treat it as a working festival city you're visiting with kids, rather than a purpose-built family…
11. Guide 11Getting To and Around Edinburgh During the FringeMost guides to the Fringe start once you're already in the Old Town, working out which venue is nearest which. This one starts earlier: how you actually…
12. Guide 12Festival Overlap: the Tattoo, the International Festival and the Book FestivalThe word "Fringe" only makes sense once you know what it grew up next to. Every August, Edinburgh runs several separate festivals at once, in the same…
13. Guide 13Genre Primer: Comedy at the Edinburgh FringeComedy is the Fringe's largest category by number of shows, and it's the genre most visitors think of first when they hear the festival's name — but…
14. Guide 14Genre Primer: Theatre at the Edinburgh FringeTheatre is where the Fringe's open-access model shows its widest variance. A single afternoon can take you from a solo performer telling a true story in…
15. Guide 15Genre Primer: Cabaret & Variety at the Edinburgh FringeCabaret and variety is one of the harder Fringe categories to describe in a single sentence, because its whole identity is built on mixing things…
16. Guide 16Genre Primer: Music at the Edinburgh FringeMusic at the Fringe rarely gets the attention comedy and theatre do, but it runs right through the programme in forms that have very little to do with a…
17. Guide 17Genre Primer: Musicals & Opera at the FringeMusicals and opera are a smaller slice of the Fringe programme than comedy or theatre, and that's worth saying plainly, because it changes what you…
18. Guide 18Genre Primer: Dance & Physical Theatre at the FringeDance and physical theatre is the category at the Fringe where the least gets explained in words and the most gets communicated through bodies, and that…
19. Guide 19Genre Primer: Spoken Word & Poetry at the FringeSpoken word and poetry is one of the smallest categories on the Fringe programme by volume, and one of the most disproportionately rewarding for what it…
20. Guide 20How Reviews & Star Ratings Work During the RunA star rating on a Fringe show looks like a simple, single number, and it's tempting to treat it that way — four stars good, two stars skip it. In…
21. Guide 21Royal Mile Street PerformancesWalk down the Royal Mile on an August afternoon and you'll find a free show running more or less continuously, with no ticket, no venue, and no programme…
22. Guide 22Late-Night FringeAsk anyone who's done several Fringes what surprised them most on their first, and a fair number will say how late the whole thing actually runs. The…