Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Buying Fringe tickets and planning shows each day

Tickets are sold through the official Fringe website, its app and its own box office in town. The big comedy names sell out early, so buy those first and leave the rest of the diary loose. Booking more than three shows a day rarely works. Fill the gaps with free or pay-what-you-want acts, which are the cheapest way to take a chance on someone you have never heard of.

Quality swings wildly, because nobody vets the line-up. Treat a few shows as wild cards. Follow a flyer pushed into your hand on the street, or ask the people in the queue what they saw yesterday. Some of the best hours of a Fringe trip come from shows you had not planned to see.

When to arrive during the August run

Aim for the middle of the run if you can. By then shows have found their feet, reviews and word of mouth have had time to spread, and the opening rush has calmed.

August is festival month across the whole city, not only on the Fringe's stages. Several other festivals share the calendar, so the pressure on rooms and restaurants is felt across the whole city. Book dinner on busy evenings, especially at weekends. Allow for the crowds on the Royal Mile too, which can slow a quick walk to a crawl in the evening, and give yourself a quiet morning now and then. Fringe days are long, and tiredness creeps up by the second week.

How eight uninvited companies started the Fringe

The Fringe began as gatecrashing. In 1947 eight theatre companies arrived without an invitation to the first Edinburgh International Festival and, with the big halls already taken, found smaller rooms of their own. By 1951 students at the University of Edinburgh were running a drop-in centre offering performers cheap meals and a bed for the night.

Formal organisation came in 1959 with the Festival Fringe Society, pushed along by Michael Imison of an Oxford theatre group, and the following year it printed the first guide to the shows. The founding rule still holds. There is no jury and no selection panel, and the society, a charity, coordinates without choosing. That is why a famous stand-up trying out a new hour can play next door to a student company doing its first play.

The unofficial venues are part of the story. Shows have turned up in taxis, swimming pools and underground tunnels, and pub back rooms and church halls are as much a part of the Fringe as any theatre. Seeing something in a room that is usually a bar or a lecture hall is half the fun.

The High Street, the big four venues and walking between shows

The pedestrianised part of the High Street is the Fringe's free stage, packed with buskers, street acts and actors pressing flyers on everyone who passes. Most comedy lives with the big four operators, Underbelly, the Pleasance, Assembly and Gilded Balloon, whose hubs of several rooms each sit in the Old Town and around the university quarter. Hundreds of smaller venues, more than 300 in all, are scattered across the city.

Walking is the best way around, but leave slack in the schedule. The Old Town is steep, and short distances on the map stretch in the crush. Allow longer than you think between shows in different hubs. Beyond the Scottish capital, our United Kingdom page is a starting point for the rest of the trip.