Edinburgh Fringe 2026

I recently spent a few days at the Edinburgh Fringe, the largest performing arts festival in the world. A founding principle is inclusivity, meaning there’s no selection process for shows, which contributes to its size and range in quality and variety. At the music and film festivals I’ve been to, it was feasible to either browse the whole catalog or pick a random act/film and trust it would be good if not your cup of tea. Not so in Edinburgh.

After multiple days, I never developed an approach I was happy with. Mostly, I spent too long browsing reviews before giving up and picking more or less at random. When I could get service, I would look for nearby shows or wait for someone to “flyer” me. A blessing and curse was that I wanted to try a little of everything: standup, improv, musicals, juggling, theatre, big shows, weird shows, etc. In the end, I went to a lot of shows and tried to accept that I would see some stinkers. Most of the bad shows are still interesting, and you forget the boring ones as soon as you’re back on the beautiful Edinburgh streets looking for the next one.

Overall the festival itself was a great experience. It’s always exhilarating to be surrounded by passionate people. If circumstances allow, I would definitely go again (or to a closer Fringe), preferably with some friends to patronize the beer gardens between shows. I can promise an enthusiastic companion if not a competent guide.

The Shows

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Stop Playing Jacob’s Ladder With My Spine by HotCat Collective, a dance theater show featuring 4 roommates and microwave dinners is fresh and rotten at the same time. The writing, captioning, choreo, and dance were all original and sharp. It truly is gross but also sad, funny, and uplifting. I’ve never teared up at someone mixing sauce before. The microwave dance was awesome. For me, the difference between good and great is a gut feeling, and in this case that feeling is queasiness.

For a full meal of timeless human interdependence, pair the wine of Jacob’s Ladder with the entree of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame produced by Flabbergast Theatre, also about 4 roommates forced to put up with each other this time at the end of the world (and somewhat less uplifting). The actors all delivered captivating physical performances and kept the brilliant if repetitive dialogue lively.

The final show I saw was Soft Spot, a wine glass juggling show by Swedish circus pair OLO Company. It made me really excited to juggle again after having, at some point, internalized Misha Glouberman’s opinion that juggling is, at best, a gratuitous display of virtuosity with no artistic merit¹. Soft Spot reveals new ways to look at an object, new affordances. Wine glasses can be slid, flipped, or walked on. They can be bridges or islands. Aside from all that, there were a few truly mesmerizing sequences.

Maya Shoham’s In Other Words, a one woman show about making up new words to describe ineffable emotions which swerves hard into self reference, would be insufferable if I didn’t eat that stuff up. Think The Phantom Tollbooth having a quarter life crisis. It doesn’t hurt that she commits so hard to her performance either.

Big Stuff by Canadian duo Baram and Snieckus is about grief and objects that remind us of people. The pair tells stories of their own parents in a script that is tight but leaves room for improv and gentle audience participation. The effect they have on the room is magical.

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I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed all the standup I saw. I’ve long thought that I hated any standup I didn’t love. I went to quite a few, including some work-in-progress shows which were less funny but interesting in their way. Shane Daniel Byrne and Cheryl Hurst were the standout standups.

I’ve followed Depths of Wikipedia for years, and I’ve wanted to go to the show for a while, so this was one of the first tickets I got. Annie Rauwerda’s curation is impeccable. In thinly veiled Wikipedia recruitment, she goes beyond the viral Instagram content into talk pages, contentious debates, vandalism, the origins, right down to the beating heart of Wikipedia, its editors. However, the presentation left a little to be desired. There were a lot of setups that were concluded with “so this is interesting…” or “don’t know what to say about that…”

The biggest audience I was a part of was for The Distance, a one man show by Ben Norris based on his experience as a star youth cross country runner. The gimmick was that he spent much of the show running on a treadmill or climbing around a big metal cube. It was well written and performed, but the story itself was a very familiar sports story about obsession and grappling with identity after injury. Also, it could have been a radio program or short story without losing much.

Other good shows were A Public Display of Affection by Jonathan Wilson, Shakespeare x 5 by Hand Theatre, and A Star and a Pearl.

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I hate to be mean on the internet. I usually reserve that for real life. Unfortunately, some of the shows were bad in interesting ways².

Introductions is a musical about a man who lies to a woman he’s dating about his political beliefs because they have great chemistry. The problem is, hilarity never ensues. He keeps this up when he meets her friends and parents, they move to London together, she gets laid off, and they start resenting each other. He comes clean, they break up, and they get back together in the epilogue when they realize they’re actually both moderate.

In a medium that is normally earnest to a fault, Introductions’s tone alternates between confused and sarcastic. Half of the numbers (all competently sung) are the lead pretending to be progressive with a wink to the audience. The other half are young people complaining about modern dating. Even the dancing is all jazz hands and kick lines.

I admire a bold stance on such a hot topic, especially in a time of political polarization largely split by gender when many people wouldn’t date someone with different politics³ (especially in musical form). However, Introductions doesn’t seem to have much to say about that. It is neither funny nor insightful, and it joins Obsession as a story about the most heinous dating behavior that is played as relatable.

I went to Jane Eyre Convention because I had just read and enjoyed the book and someone flyered me. The show was 4 people who all want to be Jane acting out the cliffnotes. Somehow in this one case, being around passionate people made me like the book less.

Here Comes Almost is an exercise in American mediocrity. It’s a show about curing the loneliness epidemic by means of high fives, jumping kinda far, playing “Theme from New York, New York”, applauding when the clown puts their arms up, and lying to them about how much less lonely you are now. I can’t say if that’s always how it goes because it seemed a little off-the-cuff and like not much effort or thought had gone into it. A third of the audience was the clown’s parents. Possibly the most uncomfortable hour I’ve spent in a theatre. I hope they’re less lonely.

What a bummer to end on. Since I spent most of my time in Edinburgh in or between theatres, I’ll end with a few other Scottish highlights rather than write about them separately. I’m pleased to report that you can walk to both Edinburgh and Glasgow airports. The Royal Botanic Garden may be one of the best arboreta I’ve been to. For a relatively small garden, it has a great variety. There are some wild and some manicured places, some open and some tucked away. It was a sunny and thus busy though it never felt crowded. It’s also next door to Inverleith Park which has a hill overlooking a pond and the Edinburgh skyline.

Another day I ran up and around Holyrood which is at least as epic as it looks from Old Town Edinburgh. For some reason I went to the National Museum within the last hour of my trip that it was open which was not nearly enough time. It was still a very cool building and fun to run around and see how much ground I could cover in the time.