The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world's largest performance arts festival, which in 2024 spanned 25 days and featured more than 51,446 scheduled performances of 3,317 different shows across 262 venues from 58 different countries. Of those shows, the largest section was comedy, representing almost 40% of shows, followed by theatre, which was 26.6% of shows.
Richard Demarco CBE is a Scottish artist and promoter of the visual and performing arts.
Paines Plough is a touring theatre company founded in 1974, currently led by Artistic Directors Charlotte Bennett and Katie Posner.
The Traverse Theatre is a theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was founded as The Traverse Theatre Club in 1962 by John Calder, John Malcolm, Jim Haynes, Richard Demarco, Terry Lane, Andrew Muir, John Martin and Sheila Colvin.
David Greig is a Scottish playwright and theatre director. His work has been performed at many of the major theatres in Britain, including the Traverse Theatre, Royal Court Theatre, Royal National Theatre, Royal Lyceum Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and been produced around the world.
Douglas Maxwell is a Scottish playwright, whose work has been performed throughout Scotland, the UK and abroad.
Ann Marie Di Mambro is a Scottish playwright and television screenwriter of Italian extraction. Her theatre plays have been performed widely; they are also published individually and in collections and are studied in schools for the Scottish curriculum's Higher Drama and English.
Daniel Craig Jackson, also known as D.C. Jackson, is a Scottish playwright, born in 1980.
Phil Nichol is a Canadian comedian, singer-songwriter and actor.
Jules Horne is a Scottish playwright, radio dramatist and fiction writer.
Zinnie Harris FRSE is a British playwright, screenwriter and director currently living in Edinburgh. She has been commissioned and produced by the Royal Court Theatre, Royal National Theatre, the National Theatre of Scotland and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her plays have been translated and performed in many countries across Europe and the globe.
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."
Joe Douglas is a British theatre director, playwright and performer. He was the Artistic Director of Live Theatre in Newcastle from 2018 to 2020.
Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour is a play based on the 1998 novel The Sopranos by Alan Warner, adapted for the stage by Lee Hall. It received its world premiere at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in August 2015, before embarking on a short UK tour. The play is a co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland and Live Theatre. The production ran at London's National Theatre in August 2016 and was scheduled to transfer to the West End's Duke of York's Theatre in May 2017.
Summerhall is an arts complex and events venue in Edinburgh, Scotland. Formerly home to the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies of the University of Edinburgh, it is now a major Edinburgh Festival Fringe visual and performing arts venue. It also hosts events for the Edinburgh Science Festival and Edinburgh International Magic Festival and provides a home for arts practitioners year round; its many rooms are used for art exhibitions, drama and music performances, libraries, small museums, educational & research programmes, artist studios, arts organisation offices, and workshops.
Guy Alexander Masterson is a British actor, writer, theatre director, producer and playwright widely known for his solo theatre performances of Under Milk Wood, Animal Farm, and Shylock by Gareth Armstrong. He is a regular producer at the annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival and responsible for several of its most notable productions including Twelve Angry Men in 2003, The Odd Couple in 2005 and Morecambe in 2009 – which transferred to London's West End and won a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment, and The Shark Is Broken in 2019 – which transferred to London's West End and won a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best New Comedy. It opened on Broadway on August 10, 2023 for a 16 week run.
Yaël Farber is a South African director and playwright.
Graham Eatough is an English theatre director and playwright, based in Scotland. He was a founding member of theatre company Suspect Culture.
The Lavender Menace Bookshop was an independent gay bookshop in Edinburgh from 1982 to 1986. It was the first gay bookshop in Scotland and the second in the United Kingdom.
Robert W. Orr is a bookseller based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Orr is best known as the co-founder of the Lavender Menace Bookshop, alongside Sigrid Nielsen.
