Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
1
THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL FRINGE
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is easily the world's largest
arts gathering, and dealing with the logistics of it all can be
bewildering. We set out the basics below, but as dates,
venues and acts change from one year to the next, be
prepared for the unexpected. The Fringe starts and finishes
before the International Festival, kicking off in early August
and ending on the last weekend of the month.
FRINGE VENUES
While the Fringe is famous for its tiny and unexpected
auditoriums, most of the venue spaces across the city
are colonized by the four dominant Fringe companies -
Assembly, Pleasance, Gilded Balloon and Underbelly. If
you're new to the Fringe, these are all safe bets for decent
shows and a bit of star-spotting.
The Assembly Rooms
54 George St, New Town
T
0131
220 4348,
W
assemblyroomsedinburgh.com.
Provides a
slick, grand and newly renovated setting for top-of-the-
range drama and big-name music and comedy acts.
Crowds spill out of here onto the temporarily pedestrianized
George St where there are makeshift beer gardens.
Gilded Balloon
Teviot Row House, Bristo Square,
Southside
T
0131 622 6555,
W
gildedballoon.co.uk.
Basing its operations in a Fringe hot spot housed in a
beautiful Victorian building designed to look like a
sixteenth-century palace, this is the most elegant of the
main Old Town venues.
Pleasance Courtyard
60 The Pleasance, Old Town
T
0131 556 6550,
W
pleasance.co.uk.
The atmosphere in
the courtyard surrounded by the sixteen auditoriums here
has a slightly raucous feel thanks to its busy courtyard bars
and kids' zone. Indoors you'll find offbeat comedy mixing
with whimsical appearances by panellists on Radio 4 game
shows.
Pleasance Dome
Potterrow, Bristo Square, Southside
T
0131 556 6550,
W
pleasance.co.uk
Located in one of
Edinburgh University's student unions, there are four small
auditoriums here all accessed from the sky-lit dome room.
BOOKING TICKETS FOR THE FRINGE
Festival Fringe O
ce
180 High St, Old Town
T
0131 226
0000,
W
edfringe.com.
The full Fringe programme is usually
available in June from the Festival Fringe O
ce. Online and
telephone bookings for shows can be made immediately after
its release, while during the Festival, tickets are sold at the
Fringe O
ce, as well as online or at venues. Ticket prices for
most Fringe shows start at £5, and average from £8 to £12 at
the main venues, with the best-known acts going for even
more; there are often cheap deals on the opening weekend.
Performances are staged around the clock, with most
scheduled to run for an hour. A downloadable app is available
from the edfringe website where you can find shows and book
tickets, including those from the Half Price Hut (see below).
During the Festival daily 10am-9pm.
Half Price Hut
Mound
Precinct, beside the National
Gallery of Scotland.
This is the place to head for bargains,
where Fringe shows that are struggling to woo audiences
cut their prices in two. There's a downloadable app
available from iTunes linked from the edfringe.com
website.
During the Festival daily 10am-9pm.
THE FRINGE
Following decades of war, economic turmoil and racial intolerance, a few wise civic leaders were
offered an opportunity to create a festival that would celebrate diversity and “provide a platform for
the flowering of the human spirit”. When a handful of theatre companies turned up uninvited to
the International Festival's 1947 inauguration, the seeds of the Fringe festival were unintentionally
sown. In the following years more and more performers began showing up, culminating in the
formation of the
Festival Fringe Society
in 1958. A charitable union, it provided unbiased
assistance to artists and companies who wished to perform in Edinburgh during August. Today it
still provides the same service, but on a much grander scale. Even standing alone, the
Edinburgh
Festival Fringe
is now easily the world's largest arts gathering. Each year sees over thirty
thousand performances from some seven hundred companies, with more than twelve thousand
participants from all over the world. There's something in the region of 1500 shows every day,
round the clock, in two hundred venues around the city. While the headlining names at the
International Festival reinforce the Festival's cultural credibility, it is the dynamism, spontaneity and
sheer exuberance of the Fringe that dominate Edinburgh every August, giving the city its unique
atmosphere. These days, the most prominent and ubiquitous aspect of the Fringe is
comedy
,
having overtaken theatre as the largest genre in 2008. As well as sell-out audiences and quotable
reviews, most of the comedy acts are chasing the
Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Award
, given to
the outstanding stand-up or comedy cabaret. At the same time, the Fringe's
theatre
programme
shows no signs of dying out, with hundreds of brand-new works airing alongside offbeat classics
and familiar Shakespearean tragedies. The venues are often as imaginative as the shows
themselves - play-parks, restaurants and even parked cars have all been used to stage plays. The
Fringe also offers fine musicals, dance, children's shows, exhibitions, lectures and music.
