What We Stay Alive For

A Love Letter to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

The 2024 Olympics sold over twelve million tickets. The 2022 World Cup scored over three million. These are the top two best-selling ticketed events in recent years. But the third-place finisher isn’t what you’d expect. No, it’s not the Super Bowl. It’s not Coachella. It’s not even Comic-Con, Wimbledon, or the Masters. It’s a not-so-little theatre festival in Scotland: The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which sold nearly two and a half million tickets in 2023. And, having been honored to perform in productions for the past two years of the festival, I want to explain exactly why this pocket world of the arts is not only one of the greatest bastions of theatre on the planet, but one of the most vital for the longevity of theatre as an art form, a career, and a cornerstone of the human experience.

Courtesy of Dan Smith Photography (Shutterstock.com).

Let me tell you a story. It’s 2023. It’s the third night of the show I was performing in, The Night Children. The air is warm, and the energy is high. Something feels electric. I peek through a gap in the curtains, expecting to see countless audience members looking back at me. I saw only four.

While that was the absolute lowest night of the show, in terms of both that turnout and our emotions, it also embodied part of what I love about the Fringe. A tiny, amateur show stood in the same festival as giants like Ivo Graham, Monet X Change, and an infamously well-advertised Twilight parody. I have personally gone from sold-out stadiums to sparsely attended basements in an afternoon. In 2024, I joined hundreds of other people in watching a Shrek burlesque, and the next day I was one of ten in an audience watching a recitation of Hamlet interspersed with bouts of clowning. 

That’s the Fringe: it allows for pre-professional and underfunded theatre to have a stage alongside big blockbuster shows. This is vital for theatre in the long run, as the Fringe is one of, if not the largest source of new theatrical work. Without festivals and local theatre like it, without a consistent, steady supply of new work, theatre is stuck in a rut of performing the same shows. And that would be a tragedy.

This celebration of the small leads to another reason why theatre at the Fringe is so vital. Most shows are not profitable at all, and so they must have passion as the driving factor instead of profit. means that the commercialization of theatre, as seen in Broadway and West End, is not nearly as prevalent in the Fringe. It allows for total directorial freedom, complete collaboration across all branches of theatre, and unfiltered artistic visions to be put on display. Consequently, the Fringe is one of the last strongholds of unadulterated theatre. 

Perhaps this lack of profit seems harmful, even destructive to the artists who sink so much time and money into their shows. Indeed, it’s true that shows are lucky to sell 30% of their venue in their run, and almost none show profits - but that isn't necessarily the point of the Fringe. You don't need an elaborate production to create spectacular art. For example, Galahad Takes a Bath was one of my favorite shows this past Fringe. It was almost certainly unprofitable. But the magic of the Fringe is that the artists don’t come for money. This specific artist came to portray Galahad, the forever-chaste hunter of the Holy Grail in Arthurian myth as if he were delivering a rambling, hour-long press conference on his mental state. This show would not be profitable… anywhere. But this is the Fringe, so it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to exist. Similarly, Covenant was a three-woman show exploring a dystopian England where abortion is completely illegal, delving into the ramifications of what it means to be in your early twenties with a fetus you cannot take care of. It was heart-wrenching, guttural, and, once again, completely unprofitable. But that isn’t the point. The Fringe does not exist for each individual show to make boatloads of cash. It exists to contribute to theatre. It exists to say something, to provoke thoughts, and to make the audience feel. It exists to expand the theatrical canon. It exists to let the audience witness things that they never would have in any other circumstance, and that makes its contribution to theatre far greater than just money.

And even beyond money, shows can become famous within the Fringe itself. This past year, the show I was performing in, Hometown, started slow, but word of mouth and exceptional marketing led to a string of sold-out shows at the end of our run. Lots of people go to huge shows, but an enormous number go to small shows as well. That’s the point of the Fringe, after all - to see the weird, unique, and never-before-seen. A standard performance of Death of a Salesman won’t sell well. Meanwhile, High Stakes, a one-woman show in which she hangs and cooks steaks while completely naked as a commentary on labiaplasty might not sell well at first, but it will get people talking. Once that ball is rolling, it’s hard to stop (High Stakes completely sold out when I saw it).

There is total freedom of expression and unlimited potential at the Fringe, and this can expose the world to minority-led theatre that often goes unnoticed in mainstream stage performances. From shows like The C Word, a feminist play written and directed solely by female artists, to The Burnt Butterfly, a Taoist Chinese dance opera, to Afrique en Cirque, an acrobatic show inspired by daily life in Guinea, the Fringe gives a platform to theatre that is often ignored in the West. It gives a megaphone to those whose voices have historically been muted, which is brilliant to watch and participate in. This diversity is absolutely necessary for theatre as a concept in order for it to expand to new audiences and greater heights.

There’s a quote from Dead Poet’s Society: “Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”  Theatre has all of those things and, in a way, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is helping it stay alive. Shows like Looking For Fun, a one-man performance about gay dating culture, inspire me to stay in theatre. Shows like Six go on to revitalize theatre for younger audiences at a massive scale. The Fringe changes theatre, generating new poetry, beauty, romance, and love each year for audiences to enjoy and theatre as a whole to absorb.

I saw twenty-three shows this past Fringe. I will remember each of them for the rest of my life. Some of them have changed me profoundly, not only as an artist, but as a person. It is my greatest hope for theatre that it adopts more of what makes the Fringe special, and it is my greatest hope that the Fringe continues to be the third largest event in the world. It deserves it. My genuine belief is that it is one of the most important things to ever come from humanity. So, stay alive, Edinburgh Fringe. Stay alive, and keep the rest of us thriving.