A laughter vacation to the Edinburgh Fringe
I started August on the wrong foot.
An overbooked flight meant I spent a day travelling to an Austrian mountain town, instead of two hours. There, it rained and rained. I couldn’t shake the ghosts I was running from. Two more flights and I had returned to a town similarly grey: Edinburgh. I was escaping heartache, endings, the stress of moving places, and more, and I needed a hearty laugh.
I set out in earnest for the biggest, brightest, and often cheapest comedies. I had only a handful of days and plenty of faces from my university years to meet. On my first day, I shuffled up and down Leith Walk.
Not two years before, Leith was heavy with boxed-up properties and takeaways that flickered eerily in half-light. In 2023, the tram line was opened to the public, which ushered in a new landlord: Gentrification. Leith went from being a separate part of the city to a haven of strawberry matchas and trendy vintage shops. I stalked past the shopfronts, willing Fringe to do what it does best and present me with the best-kept-free-show in history. Instead, our first show was a blinding failure.
The horror of the one-man show
We fell at the first hurdle: believing the words behind the hopeful actor handing out flyers like Covid-19 jabs. ‘Let’s Talk Again Next Year’, the man insisted, was a tender and funny one-man odyssey through grief, memory, and absurdity. We cosied up with three others in Leith Arches to watch Ido Raphael perform his heartbreaking tale over the whir of the ongoing coffee machine.
At first, it was funny because it was “Fringe”. The set-up of three gleaming mirrors staring back at the audience was promising, but the narrative was clunky and the writing was a little confused. A segment depicted the protagonist arguing with his older sister, who nicknamed him “fatty gay”, though Raphael assured us he was neither of the adjectives.
A little later, it became less funny. Through a quiet collage of contexts—the bus in Tel Aviv, his brothers at the army base—Raphael eventually admitted that he was an IDF soldier who regretted staying at base for so long because he missed quality time with his now-passed father. Throughout, the actor touched on themes such as physical and mental home-building, unity in times of crisis, and grief.
At all times, the horrific scenes from Gaza at the hands of the IDF loomed over the play like a bad smell. Not one word of recognition was uttered. Affording a stage for a soldier who offered no remorse for the current moment, and instead chose to self-indulgently question how to build a home while his affiliates destroy another, felt undignified. We left hurriedly as the unsure spatter of three pairs of hands played out around us.
We took a few hours to collect ourselves, and then dived into another one-man show. I brushed aside my resentment towards the next self-indulgent male figure—is all of Fringe just a licensed trauma dump?—and sat in the dingy back room of an empty pub. On the face of it, ‘Downward Spiral: The Benji’s Mind Show’ was doomed to be another egotistical failure. A talk show set in the mind of a teenager who welcomes various guests, including shame, marijuana, and cheesy bread.
Instead, the show was saved by a hilarious performance from Felix Jakob Mangold, a performer who had all the quirks of Robert Pattinson and the comedic energy of Jim Carrey. I laughed out loud and effortlessly at his quick-witted script and his memorable characterisation.
Monsters versus aliens? Try mermaids versus ogres
A day later, I sat in the front row for a show called ‘Tall Tales’; five mermaids, clad in dazzling outfits helmed by stylist Nikola Carouso, undertaking a people-pleasers retreat in order to hilariously navigate coming-of-quarter-age anxieties.
The writing was precise and intelligent, jam-packing every sea pun under the sun into 45 minutes. Each character was distinguished, nuanced, and had their own hilarious quirks, and a meta twist near the end shocked the audience while astutely playing into the bright conceit of the play. I left smiling. Big things are surely coming for such a talented group.
Onwards, “Think Cirque du Soleil meets Magic Mike”, an audience review on the Fringe website promised me of Sophie’s 29th Birthday, a birthday party circus cabaret comedy. The act suffered from the same syndrome as the lengthy description: too much was happening. The tight, flighty team boasted acrobatic skills like no other. Bodies stretched beyond their cutaneous limits to become unfamiliar and astonishingly beautiful. However, to get into these positions narratively, the play fell back on old, tired tropes.
Perhaps the problem was my friends, who had seen a similar crew the year before. “At one point, a woman completely naked rode a unicycle, with a popcorn machine on her head. She rubbed butter lasciviously across her chest and pulled salt out of her vagina to offer up the perfect snack,” I was told.
In the shadow of this spectre, a rich-tea-biscuit-wielding drug dealer with a garish neon hat doing football tricks with a custard cream was child’s play.
The interspersion of comedy throughout was both a high and a low. The “goth” character who pulled off a beautiful acrobatic sequence to Nirvana read out some Twilight fan-fiction that had the whole room cackling. Nonetheless, the brutish “fuck-boy” character had a stand-up segment all about incel culture, which fell flat on the otherwise rowdy audience, and was let down by a painful comment or two.
By the end, his face made me squirm.
I needed to save my dying mood, and fast. What better than a beloved Edinburgh classic, Swamplesque, a five-star, critically acclaimed Shrek-inspired burlesque and drag parody, and a foolproof solution to my mounting dreariness! Right? Wrong. I left the 70-minute extravaganza, uttering probably the harshest quip in drag history: I was bored.
Each song began with a character clad in a clumsy outfit, attempting to eventually strip down to whipping nipple tassels that spun in the neon light. That was it. As the entire audience, so enraptured as they appeared to be, broke out into the ‘YMCA’, a thought came to me: Queer art for straight people. This was what I was witnessing.
Thankfully, not a day later, I found what I was looking for: queer art for queer people. At Edinburgh’s often overlooked Paradise Palms, I ordered their acclaimed Buckfast daiquiri and settled in for Fruit Salad, a two-hour drag cabaret extravaganza. Hosted by the quirky, effervescent duo Kat Amongst the Pigeons and Pat Riarchy, the night was a raucous, riotous, and risqué rendezvous. Finally, what I had been searching for—layered comedy, sharp, proactive, and always intriguing.
When I told a new friend and old Edinburgh resident that I was tackling the Scottish city in search of some healing, she replied with great joy: “Edinburgh is a city of escapism. It holds you in its hands and gives you ample nooks and crannies to cast yourself into”. My laughter vacation was complete. Edinburgh, equal parts gentrified resplendence and ancient haven, came alive during the Fringe Festival. I had no choice but to follow suit.
