First Time Fringer? Don't Be Nervous - Some Sound Advice

 

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.