Fringe 2025 reflections #1: when does a show begin?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how audiences experience theatre and how the final performance is only one part of the journey. After this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, I keep wondering: when does an encounter with a show really begin, and how much does the ‘Fringe bubble’ shape what we see?

All that stuff that comes before

I think a show starts the first time you hear about it, and then continues as you the posters, or the Instagram Stories. Through the power of social media we often know an artist before we know their work.

Take Victoria Melody’s Trouble, Struggle, Bubble and Squeak. I first met her at a pigeon loft in Brighton in 2022, where she had an audio piece about racing pigeons. After that, I followed her on Instagram and watched as her new show took shape. By the time Bryan (who we meet in cardboard form in the show) flyered me, I already knew who he was, where he’d travelled from, and why the project mattered to him. So when did my experience of the show begin? Months earlier, maybe. With autobiographical work, the line between artist and performance blurs.

Images: Victoria Melody (Instagram) and Carla Keen (taken before the performer entered)

When the bubble bursts is the show the same…?

At the Fringe, word of mouth, a single glowing review, or even a WhatsApp recommendation can transform a show overnight. And suddenly you’re hovering over the Ed Fringe app, desperate for a ticket before it sells out: this is the 'Fringe bubble'.

But when the bubble bursts, the contrast is stark. As Hannah Maxwell points out in BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG, you can go from playing to sold out audiences during the Fringe, to performing for 15 people in Lowestoft. The show is the same, but the context changes everything. Is the show less of an experience without the buzz surrounding it?

Julia Masli’s Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha, a highly-interactive clown piece programmed at 1:40am, became the runaway hit of Ed Fringe 2023, fuelled by word of mouth and a room full of excited punters. When I saw it later on tour, there were maybe 30 of us in the room. The Fringe had turned it into a runaway phenomenon; whereas on tour it had a much more meditative quality. (Admittedly, it didn't help that the participatory nature meant I spent 80% of the show with headphones and an eye mask on pretending to sleep, but that's another story...)

And yet, so many artists build work that leads to the Fringe, hoping to secure reviews that, as Maxwell questions in her show, don’t have much value beyond the Fringe. If you’re not creating a show that will land like it will at the Fringe, is that sustainable as a living?

Just before the lights go down

Photo: Carla Keen (set of Primal Bog before the house lights went down)

I came across a range of intriguing waypoints to 'official' show starts this year. In Primal Bog, a poncho under the seat warned us things would get messy (and they did). In The Insider, an actor paced a perspex box as we wrangled with our headphones. In Different Party, the business cards given to us as we entered reappeared as props later in the show. And sometimes, as with in Julia Masli and Paulina Renoir’s semi-secret nuns-in-the-bathroom piece, there wasn’t really a formal beginning at all.

So where does a show start?

Is it In a queue, on Instagram, or with a nun washing her hands in a bathroom? What are your thoughts?