Some will have breathed a sigh of relief, others will be counting the days until it all begins again. But if there’s one thing that we can all agree on then it’s surely that the greatest inconvenience to the city this August had nothing to do with the Fringe.
No, that was down to a building on Princes Street, owned by a billionaire and home to rotating cast of shops with a loose grasp on their tax-paying duties, which caught fire and cut the city in half.
Leith suffered from the resulting blockade. Buses were rerouted onto George Street, but at the expense of the Assembly Festival’s annual expansion into the street, and all the businesses, such as local gems Alandas, who were expecting to feed hungry Fringe-goers all month at their pop-up gelataria and fish and chip stall.
The council swiftly said yes to Assembly Festival decamping with a bar and some street food vendors to St Andrew Square, much to the chagrin no doubt of those who had celebrated the blocking of The Famous Spiegeltent’s popular (going by ticket sales and their success in 2025) return there this summer.
This happened because the council refused to simply bulldoze a burned-out husk - on a street already vandalised by decades of horrifying planning decisions - to make the area safe. The city’s transport convener Stephen Jenkinson has been lambasted as “Trumpian” in the last few days for suggesting precisely that.
I don’t think Trump would give two hoots for either the smooth running of the world’s biggest performing arts festival arts or the small businesses who were caught up in the mayhem. At least he made plain where his priorities are. Personally, I expect a Labour-controlled council to value people over buildings.
Shrinking Fringe show audiences
The Fringe Society has officially released its figures, boasting more than 2.8 million tickets issued - an 8% bump on 2025 (for almost 9% more shows, and 14% more performances) that culminated in a record-breaking single-day attendance mid-month. That certainly chimes with my own experience of an August that started briskly and peaked in week two, before falling off a cliff as September loomed.
Being a former statistician, I couldn’t resist a brief dive into publicly available Fringe sales data to try to puzzle this out - and I think I have. While the Fringe Society’s touted 2.8 million sounds healthy, it’s still roughly 200,000 tickets shy of 2019’s high-water mark.
When you spread an overall smaller audience across an expanded programme of 4,232 shows and more than 61,000 performances - both records - average sales per performance (not show) are around 9% less. I’ll spare you the (rough) calculations, but we can attribute around a quarter of that drop to more supply diluting the audience.
Ticket prices have (allowing for inflation) changed little in the past decade. While sales for the entire runs of shows were similar to last year, those for each individual performance were down by more than 5%. The take-home message seems clear: More isn’t better.
Still, assuming mid-month really was breaking records, the remaining 7% deficit had to come from somewhere, and it seems likely the final stretch took the brunt.
That could explain why, barring only one, every show I was booked to review on the 31st cancelled their final performance; the bums on seats simply evaporated. The big commercial beasts and runaway hits were still packing them in, of course, meaning they didn’t absorb that pain. No, it would have been pushed down the food chain to hammer the smaller fry and unknown quantities - explaining the tumbleweed I watched roll past many doors.
Not so the Edinburgh International Festival, which seemed packed from start to finish - though their audience and the Fringe’s aren’t quite cut from the same cloth, are they?
We could spend a few thousand words teasing out why the Fringe seems to have suffered, but the truth is very simple. The Festival was built on the assumption of low-cost, cheap, and not-so-cheerful accommodation for high-risk art.
Two decades of wage stagnation and an escalating cost-of-living crisis take their toll. Fringe-wise, it’s a simple equation: people with less money buy fewer tickets - particularly if they are tourists subject to exorbitant hotel prices.
The newly implemented 5% Visitor Levy hardly helps matters on this front. While it is certainly laudable that the revenue is being ringfenced to secure long-term cultural infrastructure like Leith Theatre, slapping an extra premium on exorbitant room rates further squeezes audience budgets and prices out performers. All this, while the council seems entirely blind to the strain this has incurred, particularly to the Book and International Festivals, which have responsibility for housing their invitees.
That, I believe, is the entirety of the problem; not a ‘late’ Fringe, which still terminated on the English Bank Holiday, which has traditionally helped fill the basements and converted lecture theatres. Tweaking the dates to maximise overlap with Scottish school holidays would likely help some. However, if you want a healthier Fringe, believe me, the only answer is to vote in more competent governments who can put more money in the audiences’ pockets.
When Professor Murray Pittock delivers the findings of his current study of the economic and social impact of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, we will have a clearer idea just how valuable it really is to our city, and why fostering a robust Fringe is in everyone’s interests.
In other news, it was also the first year that I attended Fringe shows at the EICC, thanks to a Pleasance takeover, and even if the glorious visuals and almost absent narrative behind Dracula-inspired Lucy’s Dream underwhelmed, I made a glorious discovery. Greens on the Go, a few metres up the road, contains a Fisher and Donaldson bakery. In a month that demands more than 300,000 steps and over 400 flights of stairs, you’d be amazed at how delicious one of their fudge doughnuts can be.
Edinburgh Festival Reviews: Theatre, Comedy, and Standout Shows
My bold band of Quinntessential Reviewers and I witnessed some extraordinary highs throughout the month. From the magical thrills of GLOB in the McEwan Hall, to the genre-defying brilliance of Elf Lyons. The Fringe remained rich with exceptional work. Outstanding theatre such as Paul Howard’s darkly hilarious The Shit Table, and Maxwell Caulfield’s bravura outing in Pilate: The Lost Gospel continued to bring West End-quality work to student unions. You could even catch a simply exquisite cabaret show from Liberace and Liza (A Tribute) in a repurposed lecture theatre.
The city’s theatres came alive with internationally elite work plucked from around the globe and down the street, thanks to the International Festival currently helmed by Nicola Benedetti. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s deeply personal and highly ceremonial exploration of identity, memory, and violence deserved nothing but standing ovations at the Festival Theatre, whilst local piano hero Steven Osborne’s deeply felt piano tribute to the late Alfred Brendel stunned a packed Queen’s Hall.
Not to be outdone, the Edinburgh International Book Festival delivered its own luminous moments, peaking with a divine collaboration between poet Len Pennie and composer Paul Leonard-Morgan that filled Greyfriars Kirk with heart-stoppingly gorgeous spoken word and strings. Add in the deeply charming insights of literary treasures like Colm Tóibín and Ali Smith, and it was a month when the city’s pages refused to be upstaged. Oh, and of course, the Edinburgh Art Festival, newly headquartered in Leith, opened gallery doors citywide (most often for free) to anyone needing respite from the crowds.
Artistically, 2026 threw up a few bizarre thematic trends and venue innovations. For reasons entirely unknown to science or logic, female comedians and theatre makers repeatedly confessed childhood crushes on Disney’s animated Robin Hood. Meanwhile, the trauma dump survived another year. Despite widespread critical fatigue, performers continued to look to personal tragedy for a USP.
On a uniquely immersive front, the UK’s first sauna theatre, co-founded by James Grieve and Lucy Osborne, welcomed swimming-clothed patrons into a variety of theatrical experiences at Summerhall (I did not attend!). Over on the musical side of the street, 2026 found producers continuing to launch ‘the next big musical’ during August, but aside from the exceptional The Real Kyle McCarren (think Tick, Tick... Boom! but more personal and wryly amusing), there was nothing to set the heather on fire.
This summer also fomented a genuinely global media circus, with Gilded Balloon hosting Amanda Knox’s comedy show, Cartwheel. Bravo to both the Fringe Society and Karen & Katy Coren of Gilded Balloon for resisting the 9,000-strong cancellation petition. My glowing review of Knox’s measured, fascinating, and compassionate show has been read by folks from across the globe, posted to forums across Reddit and elsewhere, and met with everything from erudite praise to impassioned castigation.
The state of Fringe journalism and ‘Travgate’
In the midst of August, the Traverse Theatre, not content with a superbly critically-received Fringe programme, decided to foment ‘Travgate’. For the unaware, the Traverse withheld standard press tickets for Tilda Swinton’s return in Man to Man. Aside from three legacy print titles, they expect every other critic to pay their own way. Cue outrage from certain parties, but for me, it showed that venues could rediscover their power to say ‘NO’. My Christmas wish (in September) is for venues, performers and PRs to seize this power next year, and to say no to poor-quality journalism. The Fringe Society may proudly announce a record-breaking 1,090 accredited media professionals this year, but I believe taking stars for a poster from just anyone devalues the work done by a diminishing pool of genuine professionals and aspiring professionals.
Which brings me to The Edinburgh Inquirer - it’s in large part thanks to The Inquirer’s rigorously ethical approach and commitment to financially compensating writers that I have been able to expand my coverage, and that of the team that helps me with The Quinntessential Review, without any loss of quality. That’s only possible because of subscribers who appreciate the critical importance of truly professional journalism. So, thank you!
Until Next Year
For all its problems and economic headwinds, Edinburgh’s summer Festivals continue to bring some of the most remarkable performance art in the world to town. The sheer variety on offer remains staggering; as does the preposterous idea that all I have to do is walk 10,000 steps a day to experience some of the best, weirdest, and mind-boggling shows made around the world. It does not come without its inconveniences, but the fact that it exists at all should continue to amaze us all.