The Fringe is two days old, officially. Unofficially it's been rumbling since the previews started midweek, and already the patterns are forming. You can tell a lot from an opening weekend. Which queues snake round the courtyard. Which titles you hear twice in one bar. Which shows people are booking on a stranger's say-so before a single proper review has landed. I've been listening. Here are the five making the most noise.

Tom Read Wilson: The A-Z of Me

Gilded Balloon at the Museum, 7.30pm, until 16 August

The nation's favourite logophile has finally brought a full show to Edinburgh, and the timing is canny. This is the try-out for his first ever UK tour, which kicks off in September, so Fringe audiences are getting the thing while it's still warm from the oven. The format suits him perfectly: an alphabet revue, working from A to Z through songs, sonnets, stories and what the blurb cheerfully calls smut, each letter peeling back another layer of the man behind that extraordinary voice. Anyone who knows him only as the impossibly courteous receptionist from Celebs Go Dating is in for a recalibration. He trained in musical theatre, and word from the early performances is that the singing is the revelation. A short run, note, just twelve dates, which is doing the ticket sales no harm at all.

Swamplesque

Assembly, until 31 August

At what point does a cult hit stop being a cult hit? Swamplesque sold out its 2024 run, did it again in 2025, came back for Christmas, and returns this year with the swagger of a show that knows exactly what it is. If you've somehow missed the premise: it's a burlesque and drag parody of a certain beloved ogre film, built by a riotously talented Australian company, and it is considerably filthier and considerably better made than it has any obligation to be. The pull this year is partly the ticking clock. The company have been saying the swamp can't stay open forever, and their Perth dates are being billed as a farewell season, so the smart money says this is your last August to see it in Edinburgh. The opening weekend crowds suggest the smart money is already queuing.

Bliss

Pleasance Courtyard (The Grand), 1pm, until 31 August

Every Fringe needs its big commercial gamble, and this year it's Bliss, arriving with the sort of firepower that makes the rest of the musical theatre programme quietly nervous. Seventeen West End performers, which makes it the biggest new musical on the Fringe by some distance, produced by the Olivier-winning teams behind Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club and Benjamin Button, directed by Tony nominee Sheryl Kaller. The story turns the princess mythology inside out: four sisters escape their tower and collide with a world of fairy godfathers and happy endings that come at a price, all delivered with a pop-rock score and, in Tom Bennett's Glimmermore, what early word says is the campest turn of the festival. The lunchtime slot is the tell. This is a show hunting the Six trajectory, Fringe first, franchise later, and the room it needs to fill is enormous. So far, it's filling it.

Elf Lyons Is the Woman on the Edge

Pleasance Courtyard (Beyond), 9.30pm, until 31 August

Elf Lyons arrives this year with a mantelpiece problem. Sky Arts Award for comedy last year, Chortle's Comedian's Comedian this year, and a New York transfer for this very show already signed and announced before the Fringe even opened, which rather takes the suspense out of asking whether it's any good. The show itself sounds like peak Lyons: a stand-up hour about love, inspired by the collapse of her own engagement, which fell apart while she was touring Australia. The conceit is that Elf herself cannot face performing it, so one of her characters does it for her, with Vertigo, Apollo 13 and Pagliacci all swirling in the mix. On paper that's chaos. In her hands, on past form, it will be chaos with the precision of ballet. The late slot is perfect for her, and the buzz around the courtyard on Saturday night was the loudest I heard all weekend.

Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It

Summerhall (Main Hall), 9.10pm, until 30 August

The title of the festival, obviously. But the reason this one's moving tickets is the names above it. Xhloe and Natasha won a Fringe First with every single show they've brought here, three in a row, a streak nobody saw coming from two self-produced New York clowns, and this is their first new work in two years, now with Soho Theatre muscle behind it and the Main Hall to fill. The premise is delicious: a flood-ravaged Appalachian town in the nineties, two teenagers faking Bigfoot sightings for a laugh, and then a neighbour's dog turns up in pieces and the joke curdles into full-blown conspiracy panic. There's a nine-foot Bigfoot puppet, built and operated by the pair themselves. Anyone who saw their Lyndon B Johnson show knows what these two can conjure from a bare stage and a single prop; the prospect of them with an actual budget is frankly a little frightening. The world premiere expectations could crush a lesser company. I don't expect them to be crushed.

That's the opening-weekend picture, anyway. Three weeks is a long time at this festival, and the joy of August is that some show nobody has mentioned yet, in a room above a pub, is currently about to ruin all our predictions. Good. That's what we're here for.

I can't tech your show or make your poster better at this hour. What I can do is hand you the things performers only work out by losing money and sleep, distilled into the stuff that actually matters once you're here. Almost none of it is about your material. Your material is the least of it now. It's ready or it isn't, and either way the sun comes up over Arthur's Seat tomorrow and off you go.

Decide tonight why you're actually here

Before the madness takes the wheel, answer one question and write the answer on the inside of your flyer box where you'll see it every morning. Why are you doing this?

The producer Francesca Moody, who has shepherded breakout hits from Fleabag to Baby Reindeer out of Edinburgh, says performers have to know what they want from the festival or they get swept up in the chaos and lose the plot entirely. The Fringe Society's own advice to artists opens on the same beat. Are you here to sharpen an hour in front of a real crowd? To be reviewed? To land an agent, a tour, a clip that travels? All of it is possible. It is almost never possible at once, and the people who arrive without a reason are the ones you'll see in a fortnight, hollow-eyed at a bar, wondering where August went.

Jonny Patton at the Pleasance says it shorter still. Go in as prepared as you can, with a goal you can name. You've done the preparing. Now name the goal, tonight, while your head is still clear, because it won't be by Tuesday.

Make peace with the money before it hurts you

Nobody up here is getting rich, and it's better to know that tonight than to learn it from your bank app in September.

Patrick James Withey of Black Hound Productions has brought three shows to the Fringe and is honest about the ledger in a way most aren't. One year his company just scraped to break even after a hard fundraising push. The next, they lost a shade over a thousand pounds. That is a normal, even respectable, result. He also points out that a single prime billboard once cost his company more than their entire production, which tells you precisely who the economics are built for.

And it doesn't get easier at the top. The Glasgow comic Larry Dean, a repeat Best Show nominee, has described the peculiar triumph of selling out a run and, if he's lucky, breaking even on it. So hold two facts close over the next month. Most venues pay on a box office split, and that money doesn't reach you until September, so you need to survive August without it. And the costs that will actually sink you are the dull ones: the flat, the trains, the insurance, the emergency paracetamol. If you haven't already, order a food shop to the accommodation for the morning after you arrive. Withey swears by it, with one hard-won warning: change the delivery address off your home one first.

Your title and poster are doing the heavy lifting now

It's too late to rebrand, but not too late to understand what your shop window is doing for you. The London comic Adam Greene, whose last show rode a title too good to walk past, reckons that without fame or money behind you, you need a striking title and a great poster and not much else will save you. He's right. Out there tomorrow, punters with a fist full of flyers and eleven minutes to their next show are deciding on your name, your image, and one line of copy. That's the entire pitch. If it makes a stranger smirk on the Mile, you've done more than a week of earnest posting online ever will.

Flyering starts tomorrow, so treat it as the gig it is

You're about to spend hours handing paper to people who didn't ask for it, and how you do it matters far more than how much. The knack, according to the performers who are good at it, is to treat flyering as a performance and not a punishment. Keep moving, keep smiling, stay alert to the whole street, and above everything play. People can smell desperation at forty paces and they can just as easily feel it when you're actually enjoying yourself. One empties a room. The other fills one.

And find your buddy this week. Pair up with another act, ideally in a nearby slot, and flyer for each other. A stranger raving about your show lands harder than you ever can about your own, and it gets you off the lonely island of self-promotion for an hour a day. The Fringe runs on this kind of quiet mutual aid far more than the glossy venue brochures will ever admit.

Guard your head from day one

The reviews, when they come, will mess with you, and so will their absence. The universal advice is to read each one once if you must, then put the phone face down. The Fringe Society gently notes that obsessively refreshing for stars is nobody's healthy option, and there is no version of this month where doomscrolling your own name improves the show.

Mind the body too, starting now. Fringe Flu is real, it tends to arrive around week two, and it flattens the performers who decided sleep was optional. Space out the friends who want to visit so they bring fresh energy instead of one relentless fortnight of you playing host. See other people's work, not from duty but because it's the thing that reminds you why you liked any of this. And build in an actual pause. A sorbet and a look up at the castle counts. Twenty minutes flat on your back on the Meadows counts double.

Remember this isn't the only August you'll ever get

One last thing to sleep on. Some of the smartest acts working, people like Jordan Brookes and Helen Bauer, have stopped treating Edinburgh as the only game in town and now spread their year across other festivals and tours. You do not have to load every hope you own into one very expensive Scottish basket. The Fringe is a brilliant launchpad, a workshop, a shop window and a month-long networking marathon. It's a terrible pension.

So finish the wine, set three alarms, and go. The connections you'll make are real, the exposure genuinely is priceless on the days it lands, and there's nothing else on the planet like a whole city handing itself over to performers at once. It will cost you money and probably your voice. Nearly everyone who's done it would tell you it was worth every penny of the loss.

Get some sleep. It starts tomorrow.

References

• Patrick James Withey (Black Hound Productions), on costs, break-even and first-timer tips — Get Into Theatre: https://getintotheatre.org/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-taking-a-show-to-the-edinburgh-fringe-festival/
• Adam Greene, on titles, posters and flyering — The World / PRX, "With nearly 4,000 shows, all the world's a stage at Edinburgh Fringe": https://theworld.org/stories/2025/08/25/with-nearly-4000-shows-all-the-worlds-a-stage-at-edinburgh-fringe
• Francesca Moody and Larry Dean, on objectives and Fringe finances; Jordan Brookes and Helen Bauer, on splitting the year — The Independent, "'You absolutely can't make money': can the Edinburgh Fringe survive?": https://www.aol.com/news/absolutely-t-money-edinburgh-fringe-053000458.html
• Jonny Patton (Pleasance Theatre Trust), on going in prepared with a goal — Spotlight, "Tips for Planning Your Edinburgh Fringe Show": https://www.spotlight.com/news-and-advice/the-essentials/edinburgh-fringe-planning-your-show/
• Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, on knowing your "why", self-care and reviews — edfringe.com, "Five tips for first-time artists at the Fringe": https://www.edfringe.com/about-us/news-and-blog/five-tips-for-first-time-artists-at-the-fringe/
• Buddy-flyering and September box-office payouts — Playbill, "So You Want to Take a Show to Edinburgh Festival Fringe": https://playbill.com/article/so-you-want-to-take-a-show-to-edinburgh-festival-fringe-2

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

I did my first Fringe in a pair of white trainers. By the second afternoon they were grey, by the fourth they were leaking, and somewhere around day six I paid £38 in a shop on South Bridge for walking shoes I still own. Start there, honestly. Whatever else you read in this piece, sort your shoes out first.

The Fringe is enormous in a way that doesn't come across in numbers, although the numbers are silly too. Nearly four thousand shows last year. What the numbers don't tell you is what it feels like standing halfway up the Royal Mile while a woman dressed as Mary Queen of Scots tries to hand you a flyer for a musical about Brexit, a pipe band tunes up somewhere behind you, and you realise you have eleven minutes to get to a venue you can't pronounce. You will feel lost. Everyone does for the first day or so, and then the city starts to make sense, mostly.

The weather will insult you

Edinburgh in August is not summer as understood anywhere else. You can leave your flat in sunshine and be soaked before lunch, then sunburnt by four. Locals say four seasons in one day and they say it because it keeps happening.

So: a waterproof with a hood, worn or carried at all times. Not an umbrella. I want to be firm about the umbrella. The wind coming over North Bridge treats umbrellas as a personal challenge, and the pavements are far too packed for one anyway. You'll see broken ones stuffed in bins all over town like shot pheasants.

Layers, because the venues run hot. A lot of Fringe rooms are caves, shipping containers, converted lecture theatres or the upstairs of pubs, and after fifty people have laughed in one for an hour you'll want to be down to a t-shirt. Then you step outside at 10pm and it's eleven degrees.

Also a battery pack. Your phone is your tickets, your map and your camera, and it will be dead by teatime without help. The signal drops out around the Mile and George Square exactly when everything is busiest, so download an offline map before you travel, not when you arrive.

Don't build the spreadsheet

You'll be tempted. Resist it. I've watched people arrive with six shows a day planned out in colour-coded blocks and by Tuesday the plan is dead and they're too knackered to enjoy what's left of it.

Book the two or three things you'd be genuinely gutted to miss. Big names sell out, and anything that picks up a run of five-star reviews in the first week goes the same way. Everything else, leave open. My favourite show last year came from a flyer I took out of politeness from a man in a wet cagoule outside Summerhall. The year before it was a tip from a woman in a queue who'd seen forty shows and had opinions about all of them. Queues at the Fringe are basically an unpaid recommendations service, use them.

On numbers: three shows in a day is lovely. Four is a lot. Five, and you'll spend the last one doing sums about how long until you can sit somewhere quiet. There's no prize for volume.

And take the flyers. It costs you nothing and half the people handing them out have spent their savings to be there. Some of the pitches are better than the shows, which is its own kind of entertainment.

Money, and where it goes

Tickets top out around twenty quid for the famous names but most sit well under that, and plenty cost nothing at all. Things worth knowing: loads of shows do 2-for-1 on the first Monday and Tuesday of the festival, previews in the opening days are cheaper, and the Half Price Hut on the Mound is exactly what it sounds like and worth a daily look.

Then there's the Free Fringe, hundreds of shows in the backs of pubs where you walk in, sit down, and someone passes a bucket at the end. Some of the best hours I've had at any festival were free ones. If you laughed, put money in the bucket. Most acts take cards now but change is quicker and the queue behind you will thank you.

The street performers work the same way. The fire jugglers and escape artists on the Mile aren't being paid by anyone except the crowd watching them. If you stayed for the finale, you were the audience, so chip in.

Budget more for food and drink than you think. Everything near a big venue costs festival prices, and a pint in a venue bar will make your eyes water.

Eat weird hours

Every restaurant within ten minutes of a major venue is heaving from six o'clock onward, and dinner queues have killed more show plans than any hangover. Eat at five, or nine, or grab something and keep moving. The good cheap food starts about two streets off the main drag in any direction. A curry eaten sitting on the Meadows while the light goes down over the tents beats most table service, and I'll defend that position.

The Meadows generally is your safety valve. When the crowds get on top of you, and at some point they will, twenty minutes lying on the grass with your eyes shut sorts you right out.

Distances lie

The map says your next venue is four minutes away. The map was drawn in February. In August, with the Mile at full capacity and half the streets doubling as stages, four minutes is fifteen, and it's uphill, because in Edinburgh it is somehow always uphill. Doors close on time and most venues won't let you in late, so give yourself slack between shows. If you end up early, sit in the courtyard with a drink and eavesdrop on the people next to you arguing about what they've just seen. I'd pay for that on its own.

You will see something dreadful

Everybody does. An hour of devised theatre with no discernible subject, or a comedian dying so completely you start sweating for them. Stay. Clap at the end, they've earned that much for continuing. Years later you'll still be describing it to people at parties, which is more than can be said for plenty of decent shows. The bad ones are the tax you pay for the good ones, and the good ones, when they land, land harder here than anywhere.

On nerves

If you're anxious about your first Fringe, fair enough. It's the biggest arts festival on the planet and nobody's issued you a manual. What I can tell you is the nerves last about an hour. Somewhere between the first flyer and the first roar of laughter coming up through a grate in the pavement from a venue that turns out to be underneath the street, they turn into the other thing, the good thing, the reason people come back every August for decades.

Loose plan. Dry socks. Take the flyer. You'll be fine.

Our 10 Unmissable Free Fringe Shows at the Edinburgh Fringe 2026

The Fringe runs from 7 to 31 August this year, and while the big paid venues fight over your ticket money, there's a whole festival running alongside them that doesn't want any of it up front. PBH's Free Fringe, founded by comedian Peter Buckley Hill more than two decades ago, works on a beautifully simple principle: venues give their rooms for nothing, performers pay nothing to use them, and audiences pay nothing to get in. At the end of each show a bucket comes round, and you give what you think the hour was worth. That's it. No booking, no ticket, no gamble on a £14 punt that turns out to be someone reading their diary. Just turn up early for the popular ones, grab a seat and settle in. John Kearns won the main Edinburgh Comedy Award on the Free Fringe. Richard Gadd did too, years before Baby Reindeer. The model produces winners, is the point. Below are the ten shows we'd be putting in the diary first, spread across comedy, magic, music and cabaret. PBH runs 8 to 30 August, so check dates and times at freefringe.org.uk before you set out, because free show schedules shift about even more than the paid ones.

1. Mark Simmons: Jokes At Noon

The obvious place to start. Simmons won Dave's Funniest Joke of the Fringe in 2024 ("I was going to sail around the globe in the world's smallest ship, but I bottled it"), picked up the Victoria Wood Panel Prize the year before, and is midway through a sold-out national tour. He could charge whatever he liked. Instead he's doing lunchtime one-liners on the Free Fringe, which tells you most of what you need to know about the man and the model. If you like jokes, actual jokes, dense and finely machined, this is an hour of nothing else. Get there early. This will be one of the fullest free rooms in Edinburgh.

2. Emmanuel Sonubi

3. Stuart Lightbody: The Man With the Golden Hands

Our pick of the festival's magic, and it's not at the Pleasance or McEwan Hall, it's on the Free Fringe. South Africa's most decorated sleight-of-hand artist tells the true story of a magician recruited by the CIA, folding espionage history into close-up work of the quiet, elegant sort that makes you forget to breathe. Magic shows built around a real story are rare. Magic shows built around a real story this good are rarer still. If you see one conjuring hour in August, make it this.

4. John Otway

Rock and roll's 'most beloved failure', in the flesh. Otway has spent nearly fifty years mining comedy gold from a career containing exactly two hits, and his live shows remain chaotic, joyful and faintly dangerous in a way most of the festival can only imitate. There is something perfect about a man who once crowdfunded his own hit single playing rooms where the payment comes at the end, in a bucket, if you feel like it. National treasure status long since achieved. Go and pay your respects, literally.

5. Arron Jones: #1 Greatest Hit Rock'n'Roll Magic Show

The Britain's Got Talent semi-finalist brings the daftest high concept in this year's magic listings: a trick so good it charts, soaring to number one in the UK singles rundown. Jones has form for big, loud, crowd-pleasing magic with an actual sense of humour, and the rock and roll framing suits him. This is the party end of the conjuring spectrum, the one to bring your mates to after the pub rather than the one to study. Both kinds have their place, and this kind tends to leave the bucket heavy.

6. Alastair Clark: On The Record

Clark spent the best part of a decade behind the counter of an independent record shop, and this show tells the stories that came with the territory. The twist is the venue: he's performing it in an actual record shop. The Free Fringe has always been good at putting shows in strange rooms, and this is the year's best example of the venue being part of the joke. Warm, well-crafted storytelling comedy from one of the people who keeps the Free Fringe machine actually running. Support the staff, as it were.

7. Lorraine Hoodless: Mean

An hour on burnout, billionaires, consumer guilt and the slow collapse of everything, which sounds heavy going and apparently isn't. Hoodless was picked out by the Fringe Society itself when the programme launched, which is about as strong a signal as a free show gets before the reviews land. State-of-the-nation stand-up lives or dies on the quality of the anger, and early word suggests this one has the good stuff. The kind of show the Free Fringe exists for: too spiky for a telly slot, too smart to miss.

8. Burke'n'Hare: Let The Bodies Hit The Floor

Horrible Histories for grown-ups, done as musical comedy, about Edinburgh's own celebrity corpse merchants, performed a few streets from where they did the deeds. Song, parody and genuine historical fact about the bodysnatching trade, with a title that deserves an award on its own. Edinburgh audiences never tire of their own dark past, and this looks like the most fun way to consume it this August. Take the visiting relatives who claim not to like the Fringe. They'll fold.

9. The Upside Down Cabaret

Cheshire's finest variety night makes its Fringe debut, led by Mr Brake Down, the narrowboat drag king you may know from Channel 4. Local divas, nervous first-timers and established acts share a stage in a celebration of LGBTQIA+ talent of every stripe, and the whole thing runs on the kind of scrappy communal warmth that big paid cabaret bills spend fortunes trying to fake. Line-ups change, which is half the appeal. Cabaret belongs on the Free Fringe, frankly. This is why.

10. Elizabeth I: Regina Vagina

The other half of this year's history-comedy strand, and the braver half. A funny, furious look at a monarch whose body and love life got documented as thoroughly as anything she actually achieved, and what that says about how we write about powerful women now. The title will either sell it to you or it won't. We'd gently suggest the shows with titles like this are usually the ones with something to say, and the polite ones are usually the ones without.

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A note on the bucket

A word on etiquette, since the model only works if audiences hold up their end. Free entry doesn't mean free show; it means you decide the price afterwards. Most acts take cards now as well as cash, and a fiver a head is a decent baseline for anything you enjoyed, more if it was your show of the day. The performers see every penny, which is more than can be said for most of the festival. Check venues and times at freefringe.org.uk or in the printed Free Fringe programme (the wee blue book, another Fringe institution), and leave room in your schedule for at least one complete gamble on a title you like the sound of. That's how everyone found Kearns and Gadd, after all. One extra pick if you find yourself at a loose end: Scott Manley Hadley: Bald Personality Disorder, an alternative hour on mental health, hair loss, money and parenting from the cult literary blogger, and precisely the sort of oddity the Free Fringe does best.

 Franks Skinner returns to the Fringe with two shows

There are comedians who treat the Edinburgh Fringe as a victory lap. Frank Skinner has never really been one of them. Thirty years into a career that most stand-ups would happily retire on, he's coming back to Assembly this August with not one show but two, and neither of them is the safe option.

The first is billed simply as Frank Skinner: Work in Progress, and the title is doing honest work. This is not a polished hour being wheeled out for the festival crowds. Skinner has always built his shows the old-fashioned way, trying half-formed ideas in small rooms above pubs, keeping what lands and quietly burying what doesn't. The difference this year is that he's doing the building in public. The show's own billing compares it to watching Doctor Frankenstein stitch his monster together, which sounds about right. Audiences at Assembly George Square will see the experiments, the misfires and, if past form is anything to go by, some of the sharpest new material of the festival before it's been sanded down for a tour.

There's something rather generous about that. Plenty of household names use a work-in-progress label as cover for an under-rehearsed greatest hits set. Skinner, by contrast, has spent three decades treating stand-up as a craft to be worked at rather than a status to be defended, and the show promises a look at both the successes and the struggles that come with it. For anyone curious about how a comedy hour actually gets made, this is as close to the workshop floor as you're likely to get.

The second show is a different beast entirely. Crowd Work with Frank Skinner arrives at Assembly George Square Studios from 17 to 26 August, making its Fringe debut after a run of sold-out nights at London's Leicester Square Theatre. The premise is beautifully simple: Skinner and two guest comedians, a room full of strangers, and no script whatsoever. Whatever the audience brings through the door, the three of them have to run with it.

The guest list alone would make a decent festival line-up. Sara Pascoe, Mark Watson, Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Catherine Bohart, Vittorio Angelone, Felicity Ward, Ania Magliano and Dan Tiernan are among the names confirmed to rotate through the residency, with the pairings changing night by night. The producers promise that no two shows will be the same, which for once is not marketing puffery but a plain statement of fact. When your raw material is whoever happens to be sitting in row three, it can hardly be otherwise.

It's a shrewd bit of programming, too. Crowd work has quietly become the most watched form of comedy on the internet, clipped and shared endlessly, and there are few people alive better at it than Skinner. Long before social media discovered the art of the audience put-down, he was picking apart front rows with a warmth that somehow made the victims enjoy it. Seeing him do it live, flanked by two of the best improvisers on the circuit, should be a treat.

The shows also make an interesting pair. One is Skinner alone with his notebook, showing you how the sausage gets made. The other throws the notebook out of the window altogether. Between them they cover just about everything stand-up can be, which feels fitting for a performer whose relationship with the Fringe goes back to the days when he was an unknown Brummie playing to single figures.

Crowd Work runs at 6.10pm each evening from 17 to 26 August at Assembly George Square Studios, Studio One, with tickets from £13.75. The Work in Progress dates sit within Assembly's wider programme, which runs from 5 to 31 August as the venue marks its 45th year at the festival. Both are on sale now through Assembly and the Fringe box office.

On this evidence, Skinner's fourth decade in the business looks rather more restless than most people's first. Long may it continue.

 The Famous Spiegeltent not returning for Fringe 2026

There are venues, and then there's the Spiegeltent.

If you've never been inside it, I'm sorry, because right now it looks like you may never get the chance. Picture a big top that got lost on its way to a Weimar cabaret. Teak dance floor worn smooth by a century of feet. Booths upholstered in velvet the colour of spilled wine. Mirrors everywhere, bevelled and slightly warped, so that wherever you sat you could watch the whole room watching the stage. Marlene Dietrich sang in it. That's not marketing guff, it actually happened, sometime in the 1930s, decades before the tent first rolled into Edinburgh.

And this August, for the first time since its triumphant comeback last year, it won't be here.

The short version of why is almost insultingly boring. Paperwork. New building regulations in Scotland say that any structure standing for more than 28 days counts as permanent, and permanent structures need a building warrant and a structural engineer to sign off on them. David Bates, the Australian showman who has hauled this thing around the world since spotting it at the Book Festival in 1996, made the obvious point: it's a tent. A 106 year old tent made of wood and canvas and stained glass. You cannot certify it the way you'd certify an office block, because it was never meant to be one. The council says the paperwork simply wasn't submitted in time. Bates says the rules were never written with something like this in mind. Both things can be true and neither helps.

The infuriating bit, for those of us who care, is that this is the second time the tent has been shown the door from St Andrew Square. Back in 2017 it was the corporate neighbours who wanted their "relaxation space" back, and the tent vanished from the city for eight long years. Then last summer it returned, La Clique came home for its 21st birthday, the queues snaked round the garden, and it felt like a wrong had finally been put right. Thirty years at the Fringe. One glorious homecoming. And now this.

Spare a thought for the acts. Bates has admitted there's no plan B for La Clique this year, and told the performers booked into the tent, with barely four months' notice, to go find other stages. Some will land on their feet. Fringe folk usually do. But La Clique without the Spiegeltent is like whisky out of a paper cup. You can do it. Why would you.

What stings most is the unfairness of the thing. Assembly's spiegeltent in George Square carries on regardless, sitting pretty on a three year permission that doesn't expire until 2028. Nobody begrudges them that. But it does rather prove the point that this wasn't inevitable, just badly timed and badly handled, by whom depending on which account you believe.

Rules exist for good reasons. Nobody wants an unsafe venue. But somewhere in Edinburgh there is a filing cabinet that has managed what neither war nor a hundred years on the road could do: it has kept the Famous Spiegeltent dark in August.

The council says it's still exploring options with the organisers. Let's hope somebody in that room remembers what this city's festival is actually for. Because a Fringe without the Spiegeltent isn't a disaster. It's worse than that. It's a little bit less magic, and magic is the only thing we were ever really selling.

Our 10 Unmissable Music Shows at the Edinburgh Fringe 2026

The Fringe runs from 7 to 31 August this year, and as usual the comedy and theatre listings will hog all the attention. That's fine by us. The music programme has quietly become one of the best reasons to be in Edinburgh in August, and you can usually still get a seat. Below are the ten shows we'd actually pay for, from big-tent spectacle to one man with a guitar in a back room. Check dates, times and prices on edfringe.com before you book, because festival schedules have a habit of shifting.

1. Ndlovu Youth Choir at Assembly

The South African choir who stole hearts on America's Got Talent are finally coming to the Fringe, and honestly, it's about time. The show mixes African music, choreography and pop hits into something properly joyous. Choral singing at this festival usually means pews and polite applause; this is the other thing entirely. We'd be amazed if it isn't one of the talked-about runs of the month, so get in before everyone else catches on.

2. Hot Dub Time Machine Presents House Party at Assembly

Hot Dub has been the Fringe's big night out for well over a decade now, and the formula hasn't changed because it doesn't need to: a chronological trip through the bangers, starting in 1970 and landing in 2026. Is it a gig? A DJ set? Neither, really. It's the thing you book when nobody in your group can agree on anything except wanting to dance, and in all our years of going we've never met anyone who came out disappointed.

3. Lindisfarne at The Queen's Hall

Genuine legends, this lot. The 70s folk-rock pioneers return with a classic five-piece line-up fronted by founder member Rod Clements on vocals, mandolin, fiddle and slide guitar. If you grew up with Fog on the Tyne, you don't need convincing and have probably already booked. If you didn't, go anyway and hear where a whole strand of British music came from. The Queen's Hall is a lovely room for this sort of thing, too.

4. 1954: Ella, Etta, Eartha at Assembly

It's 1954. Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James and Eartha Kitt are at the dizzy heights of their careers, and this celebration of the three of them moves between swinging jazz, powerful soul and a bit of cheeky kitsch. There's plenty of sparkle, but it's the stories of three women breaking new ground that stay with you afterwards. Returning for a second year, so the word is already out; book the weekend shows early. And take your mum.

5. Brian Molley Quartet: Tùs / Origin at The Jazz Bar

Part of this year's Made in Scotland showcase. Glasgow's much-garlanded, well-travelled quartet are exploring the Scottish roots of jazz: folk tunes, sea shanties, gospel, even the odd hornpipe. It sounds like a lecture. It plays like anything but, a proper swinging set that just happens to leave you hearing both traditions a little differently on the way out. The Jazz Bar remains the best jazz room in the city, and BMQ have a Brazilian-flavoured companion show there as well if one visit isn't enough.

6. Salty Brine: How Strange It Is (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show) 

The wildcard, borrowed from the cabaret listings. New York's Salty Brine has built a cult following with shows that splice a classic album with a classic book, and this one takes on Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea alongside Anne Frank's diary (which, if you know the album at all, is exactly the right pairing). Covers, biography, strange flights of fancy. Not for everyone. For the right person, though, this will be the show of the festival.

7. Nosferatu with Live Score at Leith Depot

Murnau's 1922 silent classic with a live score, down at Leith Depot. Live-scored cinema always feels like an event in a way an ordinary screening doesn't, and the vampire has lost none of his power a century on. It also gets you out of the festival crush and down to Leith for the evening, which by week two you will thank us for.

8. The Show Choir at theSpaceUK

The Show Choir come back off two sold-out years with a new programme of the great British musicals, Gilbert & Sullivan and Lloyd Webber through to Six and Operation Mincemeat, all in multi-part a cappella. "The UK's number one show choir for a reason," said the Scottish Daily Express, and the ticket sales rather back that up. Three quarters of an hour, works for the whole family, and a nice breather between bigger bookings.

9. Claude Bourbon: Progressive Blues at The Speakeasy at The Royal Scots Club

One man, one guitar. Claude Bourbon's mix of blues, classical and Spanish guitar has been doing the rounds of the world's small venues for years, and the Speakeasy suits him. You're close enough to watch his hands and you still won't work out how he does it. No gimmicks, not much patter, just startling playing. The connoisseur's hour on this list.

10. Wagner's Ring for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Sit Through It at The Royal Scots Club

Exactly what it says on the tin: Wagner's 16-hour Ring cycle retold in a single funny, interactive sitting, for those of us who want the tunes and the doomed gods without the endurance test. Daft in the best Fringe tradition, and weirdly educational with it. Only in Edinburgh would this share a listings page with stand-up, and long may that continue.

A note on booking

Music spreads itself across the whole festival day, lunchtime jazz through to the late parties, so it slots easily around whatever comedy and theatre you've already booked. The big Assembly shows and anything at The Queen's Hall will go first at weekends. As ever, confirm venues, dates and times on edfringe.com or with the venue itself, since schedules can shift right up to and during August. One extra pick if you find yourself with a spare afternoon: Cabaret with Pitchcraft at Dynamic Earth, an a cappella choir who let the audience steer the setlist as they go.

Taskmaster does Fringe 

It's easy to forget Taskmaster started here. Alex Horne cooked the whole thing up as a Fringe show back in 2010, years before Greg Davies was throwing eggs at anyone on the telly. So there's something fitting about the sheer number of former contestants trooping back up to Edinburgh this year. We counted 23. Twenty-three! You could build an entire festival diary out of nothing but people who have thrown a teabag into a mug from across a caravan.

Here's who's up, what they're doing, and when.

The big new hours

Ania Magliano is the one everyone will be talking about. Fresh off series 20 (she lost that tiebreak to Maisie Adam, and no, we're not over it either), she brings Peach Fuzz to Monkey Barrel, 7-22 Aug. Her castmate Phil Ellis is a few doors down with Bath Mat (Monkey Barrel, 3-30 Aug), which then heads out on his first proper national tour. If you saw him on the show you already know the level of chaos on offer.

Sophie Duker, series 13 champ, has Hot Beef Injection at Pleasance Courtyard (5-30 Aug), promising an hour that's equal parts sexy and political, taking in the whole man-or-bear thing. Rosie Jones is at the Pleasance too with I Can't Tell What She's Saying (5-30 Aug), covering being single, boobs and gravy. Not necessarily in that order.

Phil Wang has grown a moustache and a worldview to match, Uh Oh is at Monkey Barrel, 5-17 Aug. John Kearns (teeth, wig, the works) brings Tilting at Windmills, also Monkey Barrel, 18-30 Aug. And Fatiha El-Ghorri from series 19 makes her Fringe debut with Cockney Stacking Doll (Monkey Barrel, 17-30 Aug), which on paper might be the most exciting booking of the lot.

The old guard are well represented as well. Julian Clary promises to drop the persona entirely in Fully Dilated (Assembly Rooms, 14-23 Aug) good luck telling the difference, he says. Jack Dee marks 40 years in the game with Jack's Joke Show (Assembly Rooms, 17-23 Aug), an hour of his favourite old stories with, and this is a direct promise, no new material whatsoever. Tim Vine rounds things off with a late-August pun avalanche called Sillypun Valley (Pleasance, 24-30 Aug).

Special mention to Mike Wozniak, whose show The Bench (Assembly Hall, 6-16 Aug) is apparently about a bench. That's all we know. That's probably all we need to know. Trivia for the pub: Wozniak actually won the original live Taskmaster at the Fringe in 2010, so this is technically a champion's homecoming.

Works in progress (aka bargain Taskmaster)

The WIP listings this year are absurd. Ed Gamble (Pleasance, 19-24 Aug). Rose Matafeo, doing a deliberately chilled-out 11am hour at Monkey Barrel, 17-30 Aug. Her blurb wants it to feel like the Animal Crossing museum cafe, which frankly sold us on its own. Nish Kumar is at Monkey Barrel nightly (5-30 Aug) with the perfectly titled Angry Humour from a Really Nice Guy. Russell Howard does eight intimate shows at the Pleasance, 5-12 Aug. Bridget Christie has just two nights, 5-6 Aug at Monkey Barrel, so move fast on that one.

Frank Skinner (series one, the beginning of it all) is doing double duty: a WIP at Assembly George Square (5-16 Aug), then an interactive Crowd Work show with rotating guest comics (17-26 Aug).

And then there's Mark Watson, who has three shows, because of course he does. A kids' show (his first ever), a WIP he's cheerfully warned is genuinely unfinished, and three last-ever performances of Before It Overtakes Us in late August.

Blink and you'll miss them

A few one-offs worth planning your whole trip around. James Acaster plays a single day: 4 August, four shows at Monkey Barrel, all being filmed. If tickets are still available by the time you read this we'd be amazed. Sara Pascoe takes over McEwan Hall for one night on 5 August, with a bonus work-in-progress about slagging off jazz at Shedinburgh on the 17th. Joe Lycett hosts a talent showcase, Joe Lycett and Friends, at the Pleasance from 7-11 Aug. Kiell Smith-Bynoe brings his improv hit Kool Story Bro, with a different celebrity guest each night, for three late shows on 20-22 Aug. And Richard Herring, the only man to win both his series and Champion of Champions, as he would definitely want us to mention, records his RHLSTP podcast daily at The Stand, 5-16 Aug.

So there it is. No prize task, no tiebreak, just a very good excuse to see what these people are like when nobody's making them paint a horse while riding a horse. Book early for the one-offs. 

Show Announcement 

Fringe favourite, Finlay Christie, is returning to the Fringe, and it's for the full run.

The new hour is called Champagne Casanova, it's at Monkey Barrel all August, and it's his third Edinburgh show. Going on how the last one went, book early.

That last one was I Deserve This, which sold out its whole 2024 Edinburgh Fringe season before it toured, got him a Malcolm Hardee nomination, and somehow turned into two Radio 4 programmes. Not a bad couple of years, all told. In the meantime he's been quietly becoming one of those comics your younger cousin already follows and your dad has just started noticing on telly - Live at the Apollo, Have I Got News For You, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, plus a couple of YouTube specials and over a million followers online. Chortle called him "the voice of a generation", which is the sort of quote you'd want on your poster, and sure enough, there it is.

So what's the new one about? Delusion, basically. The stories people tell themselves so they never have to admit they're average, or unwanted, or wrong. Incels who think the world owes them a girlfriend. Billionaires who think they're geniuses. And Christie himself, who apparently got mugged and came away wondering if the muggers fancied him. There's an air fryer bit too. Of course there is. Every comic under 35 has an air fryer bit now, but word from the previews is that his is a good one.

It's promising territory for him. The gap between who we think we are and who we actually are has always been where his best stuff lives, and a title like Champagne Casanova is doing a lot of self-aware winking on its own.

Edinburgh gets it before anyone else. A 35-date UK and Ireland tour follows from October through January, and some of those dates have already sold out, which for a show nobody has reviewed yet tells you something.

Finlay Christie: Champagne Casanova, Monkey Barrel 4, throughout August.

Tickets: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/finlay-christie-champagne-casanova

 Our 10 Unmissable Children's Shows at the Edinburgh Fringe 2026

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe runs this year from 7 to 31 August 2026, and while the festival's reputation is built on late-night comedy and boundary-pushing theatre, the mornings and early afternoons belong to families. The children's programme is genuinely one of the strongest strands this year — the ten shows below are the ones worth building your day around. Always double-check dates, times and prices on edfringe.com before booking, as festival schedules can shift.

1. The Listies: 110% Ready — Assembly George Square Studios

The Australian duo have been a fixture of family programming for a decade, and their superpower is genuinely rare: they entertain the adults just as hard as the children, without ever winking over the kids' heads to do it. The giggling genuinely does not stop — regulars talk about leaving with their cheeks aching. If your family has never seen The Listies, fix that this year; if you have, you've already stopped reading and gone to book.

2. Mario the Maker Magician — Underbelly, Bristo Square, 11.00am

If you only book one children's show this August, make it this one. Mario builds his own robots, does slapstick like a silent-film clown, and somehow makes card tricks and homemade contraptions feel like the same act of wonder. He's been on The Tonight Show and Sesame Street, toured with David Blaine — who's called him "the best kids magician in the world" — but the reviews that matter are the ones from parents who say they laughed as hard as their kids did. This isn't a magic show you politely watch; it's one you get swept into, and in years of Fringe-going I've never once heard anyone come out of it unhappy.

3. Splash Test Dummies — Underbelly's Circus Hub on the Meadows

The crossover pick from our circus list, and it earns its place on both. A trio of Australian acrobats doing a PG send-up of Baywatch, full of slapstick, audience participation and genuinely impressive hoop, silk and rope work hidden under the chaos. It's been a Circus Hub regular for years because it works: kids leave buzzing, adults leave more impressed than they expected to be. A brilliant first circus show for younger ones.

4. Comedy Club 4 Kids — check listings for venue and times

Swear-free stand-up, silly sketches and a fresh line-up every single day — which means you can go twice and see two completely different shows. In August 2025 they won the Edinburgh Comedy Awards' panel prize for embodying the true "spirit of the Fringe," and that's exactly what this is: proper comedians doing proper sets, just without the material you'd have to explain in the car home. The rotating format also makes it the perfect rainy-day wildcard when nothing else fits your schedule.

5. Mama G: The Magic Bookmark — Gilded Balloon Teviot

"Everyone's favourite pantomime dame" (Metro) and Britain's Got Talent semi-finalist Mama G returns with an award-winning panto adventure in which the villainous Book Worm steals all the books from Mama G's library, and only the audience — plus a mysterious Magic Bookmark — can help save the day. It's warm-hearted, big-spirited storytelling about why books (and everyone in the room) deserve to be part of the story. Panto in August shouldn't work, but in Mama G's hands it absolutely does.

6. Olaf Falafel’s Stupidest Super Stupid Show: This Time It’s Stupider! — Free Fringe

The comedy show comedians take their own kids to, back after a sell-out run last year. Award-winning comedian and children's author Olaf Falafel (if that is his real name) promises jokes, poos on pogo sticks, truth-telling cheese, a time-travelling portal to the future and a live drawalong. It's free-Fringe, which makes it the easiest possible yes on a packed festival day — and the fact that it sells out anyway tells you everything about how funny it actually is.

7. Hugo's Rainbow Show — Underbelly, Bristo Square

A drag show for kids about the science of rainbows, and one of the most joyful concepts in this year's programme. New Zealand's Hugo Grrrl leads a musical hunt for Ray The Sun, Misty The Cloud and the fabulous Archie The Rainbow, making meteorology genuinely fun through original songs, dress-ups and outrageous costumes. It's pitched at 2–10 year olds and made with neurodiverse audiences in mind — wholesome, goofy and glamorous in exactly the right proportions.

8. BATSU! Presents GANBA!! — Underbelly, Bristo Square

The most physically involving show on this list — your whole family enters the Dojo to train like ninjas, taking on ridiculous challenges while the mischievous Spirit of Batsu tries to derail your training. It comes from the team behind the international hit BATSU!, and the interactivity is the point: this is for the kids (and parents) who can't sit still through a conventional show and don't want to. You have to go for it. You have to GANBA!!

9. Frogs in Bogs — Pleasance Courtyard

In 2026, a crack amphibian plumbing unit was locked up for a contamination crime they didn't commit — and if that A-Team setup has already made you smile, this is your show. Superhero frog plumbers Turner and Constable must smash the Megaclog and defeat the evil Cwac-Ty-Bach in a blockbusting amphibian comedy that comes with the Fringe programme's finest content warning: "Contains poo! May entertain teenagers!" Gloriously daft in the best Fringe tradition.

10. FoRT — Assembly George Square Gardens

The gentlest and most beautiful pick on the list — a multi award-winning show inspired by the timeless craft of turning living rooms upside down. Everyday objects transform into fantastical places to play through ridiculous clowning, spectacular acrobatics and genuinely lovely visual imagery. It's the one to book for the child who builds sofa-cushion fortresses at home, and the one you'll be quietly moved by yourself. A perfect palate-cleanser between the louder shows above.

A note on booking

Children's shows at the Fringe tend to cluster in the mornings and early afternoons, and the popular ones sell out at weekends especially — book ahead rather than chancing the box office. Always confirm venues, dates, times and age guidance on edfringe.com or the venue's own site before you book, as festival schedules can shift right up to and during August. And if you're after an extra pick, Max Fulham's family-friendly Monkey Business (Gilded Balloon Teviot, 11:50am, 5–16 August) — the companion show to his main evening hour from our cabaret list — is well worth a look for the first half of the festival.