The Edinburgh Fringe

Everything you should know about The Edinburgh Fringe

It’s August again, the sunshine is going away, and we’re hard at work getting the library ready for all the students coming back in September, so what better way to unwind than catching a show at the Edinburgh Fringe?

Taking over the city for its 78^th year, the Fringe is a fantastic way to take in a good dose of culture. As Edinburgh’s various streets, pubs, and clubs are playing host to a range of off-beat and out-there live acts featuring performers from around the world. You can catch an exhibition on Scotland’s relationship with rain being hosted at the National Library of Scotland, Then head on over to St Giles’ Cathedral to listen to some music. Then in the evening, you can go to Monkey Barrel Comedy Club and enjoy some stand-up comedy performed by some of your favourite comedians from the television along with local talent looking to breakthrough.
The beautiful thing about the Edinburgh Fringe is you really never know what you’re going to get.

The History of the Fringe

Starting back in 1947 and running every year since then (with the exception of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic) the Fringe is an off-shoot of the Edinburgh International Festival that is held in the city every year. The Fringe stands out when compared to other art festivals due to its status as an open-access festival, meaning anybody can apply to participate and perform anything they want!
This means that every August Edinburgh gets to play host to a wide variety of strange and unexpected shows, and over the years the Edinburgh Fringe has built up a reputation as the go-to-place for aspiring performers to build an audience and hone their craft, with many international celebrities performing at the Fringe early on in their careers. For example, did you know that award-winning Irish actor and Peaky Blinders star Cillian Murphy performed the Fringe back in 1997 as part of his first professional acting job, touring with the play Disco Pigs? Or that the critically acclaimed shows Baby Reindeer and Fleabag began life as a play performed at the Fringe? As did the comedy gameshow Taskmaster which ran at the Fringe for two years before being commissioned for television.
So who knows! Maybe at the Fringe you’ll catch a star in the making, or the next modern classic.

Some recommendations…Library themed, of course!

But why don’t we save you the trouble of trying to sort through the Fringe programme for yourself and recommend you a show that we’ve thoroughly enjoyed. And since this is the library blog after all, it’s of course going to be a library themed show.
Returning to the Fringe for the third year in a row, comedy theatre group Cabbage Productions are performing their show The Librarians: A Very Serious Comedy, a satirical look at libraries in the modern day. The show follows the staff at a local library struggling to deal with a lack of customers, the building falling apart around their ears, and a new head librarian who wants the building sold-off to make expensive flats! Needless to say, we here at the library find all this a lot more relatable than we’d like – especially the show’s emphasis on the importance of which biscuits are available in the library office. We’re not sure if anybody involved in the production has a history of library work, but they’ve certainly managed to nail the tone in our opinion. But it’s not all jokes with The Librarians. Although the show never fails to keep a light comedic tone, at its heart it is very much a story about the important role that these types of community spaces play in society, and how the abandonment of these public run institutions has left a hole in our local communities.

Running every day of the Fringe from 3:15 to 4:15 at the Pleasance Courtyard, The Librarians is a show that manages to balance sharp comedic writing with a heartfelt message and we here at Napier Library can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who’d like a behind the scenes look at what modern library work is like, with plenty of laughs along the way.

Library resources

We have lots of resources on the Edinburgh Fringe and wider festival.  From books likeThe Edinburgh Fringe by Alistair Moffat and The Fringe Survival Guide by Mark Fisher to this fantastic article called : A hefty dose of lemons: the importance of rituals for audiences and performers at the online Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2020 by Ingi Helgason et al. Check out Librarysearch for so much more.

Read more about different festivals here on our blog. Check out: The Cherry Festival 

By Matthew Ferrie