The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world's largest performance arts festival, which in 2019 spanned 25 days and featured more than 59,600 performances of 3,841 different shows in 322 venues. Established in 1947 as an alternative to the Edinburgh International Festival, it takes place in Edinburgh every August. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has become a world-leading celebration of arts and culture, surpassed only by the Olympics and the World Cup in terms of global ticketed events. As an event it "has done more to place Edinburgh in the forefront of world cities than anything else" according to historian and former chairman of the board, Michael Dale.
Jerry Sadowitz is an American-born Scottish stand-up comedian and magician.
C. J. Hopkins is an American playwright, novelist, and political satirist. Among his works are the plays Horse Country, screwmachine/eyecandy and The Extremists.
Henry James Naylor is a British comedy writer, director and performer. He is also a playwright.
Andy Gray was a Scottish actor and writer from Perth, Scotland. He appeared on stage and TV, including starring roles in the BBC series Naked Video, City Lights, and River City.
Nichola McAuliffe is an English television and stage actress and writer, best known for her role as Sheila Sabatini in the ITV hospital sitcom Surgical Spirit (1989–1995). She has also starred in several stage musicals and won the 1988 Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her role in Kiss Me, Kate.
Mark Borkowski is a British PR agent and author with an interest in the history of public relations and the art of the publicity stunt. He attended King's Stanley Junior School and St Peters High School in Gloucester and began working in public relations at nineteen years old. As founder and head of Borkowski PR, he is a well-known tv pundit, lecturer and speaker on the art of publicity. Borkowski has a column in The Guardian and has written two books on publicity stunts as related to public relations and has won several awards for his work.
Jessica Alice Cave Lloyd is an English actress, comedian and cartoonist, known for her role as Lavender Brown in the Harry Potter film series and for her shows in London and at the Edinburgh Fringe. She has also published a book of cartoon doodles called Love Sick, some of the designs in which have appeared on greeting cards. A comedic play based on her life and relationships, Sunrise, was first performed in 2019. Cave's first novel, Sunset, was published in 2021.
Daniel Sloss is a Scottish comedian, actor, and writer.
Jules Horne is a Scottish playwright, radio dramatist and fiction writer.
Real Circumstance Theatre Company is a not-for-profit theatre company based in Essex that delivers work nationally and internationally. Real Circumstance develops and produces new plays by emergent writers, and plays generated by the Company through improvisation. Real Circumstance is run by Artistic Director Dan Sherer and Creative Producer Anna Bewick.
Adam Riches is an English comedian, and 2011 winner of the Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Award. After his success at the Edinburgh Fringe, he became familiar to UK television audiences through his exaggerated comic parody of actor Sean Bean on the panel show 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown between 2016 and 2020.
Tim Crouch is a British experimental theatre maker, actor, writer and director. His plays include My Arm, An Oak Tree, ENGLAND, and The Author. These take various forms, but all reject theatrical conventions, especially realism, and invite the audience to help create the work. Interviewed in 2007, Crouch said, "Theatre in its purest form is a conceptual artform. It doesn't need sets, costumes and props, but exists inside an audience's head."
Bob Slayer is an Edinburgh Comedy Award winning comedian, musician and promoter. He has been part of a new economic model for venues at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe which has made the event fairer and more affordable for performers and audiences. Acts that have performed at his venues have won and been nominated for a number of prestigious awards.
Pressure is a 2014 play written by David Haig, based on true events that took place during World War II. It centres on the true story of James Stagg and the weather forecasts that determined the date of the D-Day landings as part of Operation Overlord. The personal and military stresses of Stagg, the tensions between the teams with different weather forecasts for the date of the proposed D-Day, and the events of the 72 hours leading up to D-Day are explored throughout the play. It premiered at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh in May 2014, and made its West End premiere at the Ambassadors Theatre in June 2018. The play made its North American premiere at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto in January 2023.
Offstage Theatre (UK) is "an enterprising young theatre company", based in Waltham Forest, London, run by Artistic Director and Producer Cressida Brown. The company's first piece was Home, written by Gbolahan Obisesan, Cressida Brown and Emily Randall in response to the demolition of the housing estate Beaumont Road. The site-responsive piece functioned as "a valuable document of a people and a place just moments before an irrevocable change". "The project, which overwhelmed the creative team with its success" established Offstage as a Site-specific theatre company.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society is the organisation that supports the running of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world. The Society was established in 1958 to provide a centralised information and box office service for the Fringe, which had grown in numbers since eight theatre companies had effectively "created" the Fringe by performing uninvited alongside the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947.
Jennifer Brewin is a Canadian writer, director, and artistic director. She is known for co-creating The Attic, the Pearls and Three Fine Girls and her other work with Common Boots Theatre, formerly known as Theatre Columbus and the Caravan Farm Theatre. In 2020, she was appointed the artistic director of the Globe Theatre in Regina.
RashDash is a British feminist theatre company. The company was founded by Abbi Greenland and Helen Goalen. Becky Wilkie later joined. They have produced and created many works, including We Want You to Watch.
Mitchell Cushman is the founding and current artistic director of Toronto's site-specific theatre company Outside the March. He has received the Siminovitch Prize protégé award, four Dora Mavor Moore awards, and fourteen Toronto Theatre Critics Awards.
