The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world's largest performance arts festival, which in 2018 spanned 25 days and featured more than 59,600 performances of 3,841 different shows across 322 venues. Established in 1947 as an unofficial offshoot 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.
Fringe theatre is theatre that is produced outside of the main theatre institutions, and that is often small-scale and non-traditional in style or subject matter. The term comes from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In London, the fringe are small-scale theatres, many of them located above pubs, and the equivalent to New York's Off-Off-Broadway theatres and Europe's "free theatre" groups.
James Anthony Patrick Carr is a British-Irish comedian, presenter, writer and actor. He is known for his rapid-fire deadpan delivery of one-liners which have been known to offend some people. He began his comedy career in 1997, and he has regularly appeared on television as the host of Channel 4 panel shows such as 8 Out of 10 Cats, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and The Big Fat Quiz of the Year.
The Finborough Theatre is a fifty-seat theatre in the West Brompton area of London under artistic director Neil McPherson. The theatre presents new British writing, as well as UK and world premieres of new plays primarily from the English speaking world including North America, Canada, Ireland, and Scotland including work in the Scots language, alongside rarely seen rediscovered 19th and 20th century plays. The venue also presents new and rediscovered music theatre.
Luke Wright is a British poet, performer, publisher, curator and broadcaster.
Frisky & Mannish is a British musical comedy double act, created and performed by singer Laura Corcoran and pianist-singer Matthew Floyd Jones. Known for their pop music parodies, the duo have toured the fringe festival and comedy festival circuits in the United Kingdom and Australia, and appeared on a number of British television and radio programmes.
Showstopper! The Improvised Musical is an improvised comedy, musical theatre show founded in London in 2008. It has toured the UK extensively, usually sells out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe every year, had its own BBC Radio 4 series in 2011 and performed a 10-week run in London's West End in 2015, for which it won an Olivier Award.
Ruth Bratt is an English actress and comedian. Bratt has appeared in the BAFTA award winning BBC2 series People Just Do Nothing. In 2022 she was at the Edinburgh Festival in "Starship Improvise" with the Mischief Theatre.
AllthePigs Theatre Company is an independent theatre company based in London. Their stated mission is to "showcase the hidden gems of the past, champion up-and-coming playwrights, and give both the platform to shine".
Paul Vickers is the vocalist and lyricist with cult rock band Dawn of the Replicants. After the group went on indefinite hiatus in 2007, he continued to release music with various collaborators as well as branching out into comedy and writing. Described by The Guardian as "a pioneer of the indie/fringe crossover", since 2010 he has performed an annual, award-winning cabaret show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as Mr. Twonkey. He has also released four albums with Edinburgh band The Leg. In 2013 he published his first book, Itchy Grumble, and in 2015 his first theatrical play Jennifer's Robot Arm debuted in London. Twonkey's Mumbo Jumbo Hotel won the Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In 2022 What Broke David Lynch? written about the Hollywood film director having difficulty making a costume for The Elephant Man was announced as Vickers 2nd theatre vehicle with Paul playing Lynch himself.
Gail Louw is a South African-born British playwright. She is known for the wide-ranging topics of her plays, though a central feature running through most of them is the focus on flawed characters in both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. She is particularly well known for Blonde Poison which has had eight productions worldwide, including at the Sydney Opera House. In 2023 three of her plays were performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Four of Louw's plays were presented as a Gail Louw Season at The Playground Theatre, London, from February 27, 2024 to April 6, 2024.
Mischief Theatre is a British theatre company that was founded in 2008 by a group of students from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in West London, and directed by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields. The group originally began by doing improvised comedy shows, but by 2012, they expanded into comedic theatrical performances that include choreographed routines, jokes, and stunts.
Josiah Norris is a British alternative comedian, comic actor and screenwriter.
Benjamin Hart is an English magician. In 2007, he was awarded the "Young Magician of the Year" award by The Magic Circle. Hart has worked on British television and is an inventor and designer of magic tricks and stage illusions. In 2014, he starred in Killer Magic on BBC Three. Hart was a finalist on Britain's Got Talent in 2019. He is a member of The Magic Circle (organisation)
John-Luke Roberts is a British stand-up comedian, writer, actor and performer.
Six is a British musical comedy in the style of a pop concert. Its music, book, and lyrics were written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. It is a modern retelling of the lives of the six wives of Henry VIII, presented in the form of a singing competition. In the show, the wives take turns telling their story to determine who suffered the most from their shared husband, but ultimately seek to reclaim their individual identities and rewrite their stories.
Haley McGee is a Canadian actress, writer and comedian based in London. McGee is best known for her role as Dorothy Skerritt, the personal assistant to Nikola Tesla in the Doctor Who episode Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror. She is also known for her solo performances, most recently Age Is A Feeling and The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale.
KlangHaus is a British artistic partnership formed in 2008 between Sal Pittman and the Neutrinos.
Austentatious (An Improvised Jane Austen Novel) is a long-form improvised comedy show, in the style of a Jane Austen novel, where each show is improvised by a six-strong cast, based on a title suggested by a member of the audience. Beginning in 2011 in London, the original cast members took the show to the Edinburgh Festival Free Fringe in the summer of 2012. Following their initial success, they began performing a monthly show in London, transferring to the West End in 2017, and have since performed on BBC Radio 4, on tour, and at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Amy Molloy is an Irish actress born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She resides in London UK.
