Saturday, 13th August, 12:55 PM. Edinburgh, Scotland. A burrito place on South Bridge. 

I stand at the counter waiting for my coffee, tapping my foot on the floor and looking around. The venue is alive with energy as audience members descend into the basement. The show is about to start. A staff member hands me my coffee, wishing me good luck as I make my way down the stairs. I join my fellow performers in laying out extra chairs, setting up the speaker, and collecting lines written by audience members on slips of paper. Today is our biggest show yet, and the atmosphere is electric. We, as is custom by this late stage of the week, are physically and spiritually exhausted. As the last attendants take their seats, we head into our green room (which doubles as the restaurant’s bathroom) to muster our resolve. 

At 1 PM we emerge from the bathroom, dancing to the chorus of Elton John’s ‘Are You Ready For Love?’. It’s showtime.

I’m not sure whether I expected my first Fringe show to be this chaotic, but with “Improv She Wrote” (ISW), Trinity’s best and only improv group, chaos is part and parcel. After having performed as part of the group for a year, I was excited to take part in this year’s Edinburgh festival, which served as ISW’s Fringe comeback after several years of pandemic-induced hiatus.

Part of the magic of Edinburgh Fringe is how the festival transforms the entire city into an open-ended playground of theatrical space. Performances are taking place constantly in theatres, clubs, bars, parks, and on virtually every street corner. For ISW, our playground was the basement of Burrito N’ Shake (BNS), which also served as the host for various other acts ranging from musical comedy to magic shows. Given that our show started around the same time as their afternoon meal service, the BNS team were extremely hospitable – although the crowded space meant they sometimes had to make their way across the stage mid-performance to retrieve something from storage. Towards the end of the week, however, we learned how to make these rare interruptions a part of the show, with the unwitting staff becoming momentary side characters in our bizarre little scenes. I can only hope they found this novelty as amusing as we and (sometimes) the audience did. 

In many respects, we were extremely lucky to find ourselves in this kind of situation. Many other acts at Fringe regularly find themselves performing in venues where there’s plenty of room for the staff to move around and do pretty much anything – because there’s no audience there to get in the way. Promoting your show to make it stand out amongst the countless other contenders can seem like a borderline Sisyphean task at times, yet flyering is one of the most essential and occasionally draining parts of the Ed-Fringe experience. 

As someone sensitive to rejection, however, I can say that standing on a street corner with a bundle of flyers, occasionally crying out “Free Improv!” as people deliberately avoided eye contact with me, was far from a highlight. I was lucky to have my fellow improvisers there to lighten the load, both practically and emotionally speaking. We even came up with some fun flyering strategies as a way of relieving the monotony. My personal favourite involved one of my fellow improvisers playing dumb and loudly gushing as I gave him more information about the show: “For free you say? And I can bring my burrito and my shake down with me too? Maybe I will check it out…” It even worked a couple of times.

What I can say was a highlight of my Fringe experience was the bond that I built with my fellow performers, both by performing alongside them every day and by hitting the town with them every night. This sense of community extended to the other artists participating in the festival as well. Trading flyers with another performer I encountered on the street. Chatting with the actors from a play I just saw afterwards in the atrium. Seeing someone I recognise from their own show in the crowd during one of ours, ready with a smile and a wave.

These are the memories that I will cherish from Edinburgh Fringe, and I hope to find the same community of fun and chaos waiting for me when I return next year.