The Edinburgh Fringe, explained by someone who has queued in the rain

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe began in 1947 as a sulk. Eight theatre companies were not invited to the first Edinburgh International Festival, turned up anyway, and performed on the fringe of it. Nobody organised this. Nobody has organised it since, and that is the single most important fact about it.

The Fringe is not curated. There is no panel, no selection, no quality control. Anyone who can find a venue and pay the registration fee is in. That is why it has grown to around three thousand shows, and it is why roughly a third of them are not good.

The whole skill of the Fringe is finding the other two thirds.

How it actually works

Twenty five days, from the first week of August to near the end of the month. Several hundred venues, from proper theatres to the back rooms of pubs to a shipping container someone has licensed. Shows run from ten in the morning until well past midnight.

Four large venue operators run most of the significant shows: Pleasance, Underbelly, Assembly and Gilded Balloon. If you know nothing else, know that a show at one of those four has cleared at least a minimal bar. The genuinely unfiltered end of the Fringe is the free venues, which is where both the worst hours of your life and the occasional extraordinary discovery live.

How to choose shows

• Ignore the star ratings on the posters. Every poster has five stars on it. They are frequently from publications with a readership of forty.
• Trust the word of mouth from about day five. The Fringe takes roughly a week to sort itself out. Anything people are still talking about in week two is worth seeing.
• Book the big names early and leave the rest loose. Two booked shows a day and the rest decided on the ground is the correct structure.
• Go to one thing you have no interest in. This is the only festival where that instruction reliably pays, because the ticket is twelve pounds and the room holds forty people.
• Half Price Hut on the Mound. Same-day tickets, heavily reduced. The listings are what has not sold, which is not the same as what is bad.

The practical part

• Allow half an hour between shows. Everyone underestimates this. Venues are further apart than the map suggests and the Old Town is vertical.
• Eat before six or after eleven. Every restaurant in the centre is full between those hours for the entire month. Book, or eat in the New Town.
• Avoid the Royal Mile for food entirely. It is the worst eating in Scotland for four weeks a year.
• The weather is not a joke. August in Edinburgh is fifteen degrees and often wet, in a city where you will spend a lot of the day outdoors queueing. Bring a coat.
• The Tattoo is a separate thing. So is the International Festival, and the Book Festival. Three separate festivals run alongside the Fringe with separate box offices, and a lot of people arrive not knowing this.

The Fringe rewards the loose plan over the full diary. The best show you see will be one somebody told you about that morning.

When to go

The first week is cheaper, quieter and rougher, because shows are still finding their shape and reviews have not landed. The middle weekend is the peak of everything, including the prices. The last week has the best shows, the most exhausted performers and the highest chance of a sold-out sign.

If it is your first Fringe, go for the second week. If it is your fourth, go for the first week and pay less to watch things go wrong, which is frequently better.

And if you would rather not

Perfectly reasonable. Edinburgh in the first two weeks of September is the same beautiful city with the scaffolding coming down, half the room rates, and restaurant tables available on the night. The Fringe is extraordinary and it is also twenty five days of standing in the rain holding a flyer you did not want. Both things are true.