“What have I learned from going to Edinburgh before? Just because people offer you free drugs, don’t take them,” says Berlin comedian Anna Beros, remembering how a housemate at last year’s festival got a little too generous with the weed. “I was doing two shows a day very late, from 11pm to midnight and then 12:30 to 1:30am, and yeah… won’t be doing that again.”
After two successful runs at the world’s biggest performance arts festival, Beros knows now to take her own advice. Though the New Zealand-born performer can’t say the same for her audiences: “There was a lot of ecstasy going around the last two years in the audiences and people were just off their tits. I really do attract a certain type of crowd, apparently.”
You can forgive them for needing the energy boost. Audiences going to Edinburgh Festival Fringe this August will have over 3,700 shows to choose from, ranging from improv in dingy pub basements to world-class theatre acts in major venues like Assembly Hall, as Scotland’s usually quaint capital is transformed for four weeks into a circus for hedonists, eccentrics and attention-seekers. The sheer volume and randomness of what’s on offer is its appeal; in a single day you could be ‘discovering’ the next Phoebe Waller-Bridge in a soon-to-be smash comedy show or praying for the end as an elderly Dutch lady pees into a cup on stage, chanting “I am a butterfly”; you could be getting lost in “the worst toilet in Scotland” in an award-winning immersive Trainspotting experience or watching through your fingers as a young Mr Darcy struggles in angered silence for five minutes to wrench open the wobbly prop door on stage.
In a single day you could be ‘discovering’ the next Phoebe Waller-Bridge… or praying for the end as an elderly Dutch lady pees into a cup… chanting “I am a butterfly”
For performers, it can be a crucible. They have to figure out how to fund, stage and promote their own shows in a highly competitive environment. While the festival does offer some grants, the cost of participation lands many performers in debt, as the scant amount they make in ticket sales fails to tally up with spiralling accommodation and venue prices. Most shows fail to break even. And yet, Edinburgh offers unparalleled promise for launching careers – among them those of Emma Thompson, Rowan Atkinson and Jude Law – and propelling hit shows, including Stomp, Baby Reindeer, Flight of the Conchords and The Mighty Boosh. That’s what keeps them coming back.
“It’s a comedy paradise,” says Beros, one of a handful of Berlin-based performers taking a show to this year’s Fringe. “You get there and you can be performing for 10 hours a day. You can be going from show to show to show to show, and it’s the one time of the year when all of the comedy community gathers in this one city.” High Hoe, the show she takes to Edinburgh in August, will play off Beros’ reputation as a former party girl drawn to Berlin’s generous sex and drugs culture (she experienced enough of it to make 156 episodes of her fabulously candid Adults ONLY Comedy Berlin podcast), now slowing down and sobering up in her 30s.
As an established comedian, Beros can be confident she’ll draw audiences. Her previous two shows have turned a profit, although she admits that this year will be tougher financially: “I didn’t have any buffer for Edinburgh this year because all my savings went [toward] freezing my eggs, so it’s an expensive gamble.” To prepare, she has been rigorously honing material at the four weekly open mic sessions she hosts in Berlin, making sure jokes land well with her international audiences. This year, she will be performing as part of the Free Fringe Festival, which helps promote artists and cut their costs in return for their offering donation-only performances. How generous do people tend to be? “I’ve had audiences where it’s just four people and each one of them tips £20-40 [around €23-47]. But, you know, a full room doesn’t necessarily equate to more money. You might have 25 people packed in your little Fringe room and half of them just throw you £2, and you’re like, ‘Oh, come on.”
It’s not unusual for artists at the Fringe to supplement their income by taking on extra improv gigs, as Beros is, or to bring their performances out to the streets. For Italian footballer-turned-actor Lucia Mallardi, the latter will mean introducing Edinburgh audiences to the impressive keepy-uppy skills that kicked off her artistic career in Berlin. Mallardi, who performs as La CalciAttrice (translation: the football actress) was dubbed “Mara-donna” (‘donna’ means ‘woman’ in Italian) by a Neapolitan newspaper, likening her talent to that of the Argentinian great. After playing in the First League in her home country, Mallardi moved to Berlin at 22 to continue her professional career, but soon grew dissatisfied with the strict regimes of the game. “That’s why after two years I just quit and I started to street perform with the ball,” she explains.
More than 10 years later, she is making her Edinburgh debut with an hour-long autobiographical show that combines physical comedy and football performance, with Mallardi playing multiple roles in different dialects to narrate her journey through the often contradictory worlds of football and the arts. “I see football as a bridge between people,” she says, “and I see a bridge between Naples and Edinburgh, because they are people that have both been colonised, or people have tried to. They also have an underdog mentality. So I’m thinking, ‘How can I connect to an audience in a place where they’ve never heard of me?’ It’s the resonance between our histories and football. The Scottish people I think also worship Maradona.” Having performed the show in German and Italian for audiences in both countries, she sees the Fringe as an opportunity to break into the English-speaking market, where she believes there to be better opportunities. “Berlin is not the right place to be for me anymore. I think the universe is bringing me to the UK.”
Mallardi is sanguine about the costs of taking such a risk – she has not yet worked out how much she will need to take her show to Edinburgh for four weeks. That includes finding somewhere to stay, which can cost hundreds of pounds per night due to increased demand during the festival season and the Scottish government’s short-term-let rules, which have made it more complicated for homeowners to rent out their space. Mallardi says that her self-belief has carried her through much trickier times. “I’ve learned that especially when you have less and you are in a big need is when you start to push, and then good things come.”
Other first-time performers are taking a more strategic approach. Berlin’s four-person Hysterie Theater started scoping out venues last summer and booked their accommodation in January, anticipating a gold rush on all the most affordable spots. Dorm rooms at the city’s university, plus the use of a 45-seater studio for the month, will cost them around £10,000 (around €11,900), plus promotional costs, flights and food and drink for the month. “We felt like this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and we want to make the most of it,” says actor and playwright Bianca Waechter.
Their comedy show, Wenches!. tells the tale of two hapless medieval peasants, who, trying to escape the witch trials and avenge their friend’s death, end up travelling through time via the medium of self-help podcasts. It’s an absurd concept that works in the vein of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, using physical theatre and farcical dialogue to make the audience question our propensity for performative activism. Who are the victims of today’s witch trials, and how does the self-improvement industry shape our sense of what’s right and wrong? “The witch hunts have stopped, but scapegoating is still a thing today, of trying to find who’s to blame for the issues that I have, or who’s to blame for whatever we face as a society,” says co-writer and actor Maya La Roux.
Wenches! is one of around a dozen original shows about witches being staged at this year’s festival. Why? La Roux says that while the figure of the witch is timeless, the ‘vibe’ of witchiness is very fashionable right now, which she hopes will play in their favour. “There’s a rise in New Age spiritualism on TikTok. When I scroll I see Lives of tarot readings, lots of talk about crystals, and you’re kind of thinking, what is this? But I also think the witch is such a versatile character that you can do anything with. You have the classic scary witch, the Grimm tales, but you also have witches like in Practical Magic, who have beautiful homes and independent lives, and who have fun. So the more we have, the better.”
How can I connect to an audience in a place where they’ve never heard of me?
As a new company of twentysomethings, Hysterie Theater knows it will be hard to get attention amid all the competition in Edinburgh. The promotional plan? To throw themselves into a relentless flyering schedule on the Royal Mile, the city’s central streets, where thousands of performers gather each day. “We’re also going to have arguments on the street in character,” says La Roux. “I mean, there’s all these ideas – witch burning on the street, someone suggested that to us…”
The group doesn’t expect to make back their money, which came from their savings. They just want to return to Berlin a more polished outfit, with new connections in the industry and, inevitably, lots of funny stories to tell about their first time in Edinburgh. “As artists, it can be really scary to promote yourself,” says director Antonia Reinisch, “so I’m excited to be at the Fringe where everybody’s doing that, and to have no reservations, like people do in Germany.” Waechter agrees: “You step into a world where it’s okay to scream on the street… that’s going to be a learning experience.”
