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    Is This the Edinburgh Fringe, or a Wellness Convention?

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    Grief narratives were in vogue, and psychological maladies, too, at the annual Scottish arts showcase.As I made my way to Scotland for this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the three-week arts showcase that finished on Monday, I felt a little apprehensive. A conspicuous number of shows were themed around psychological maladies. These included plays about grief, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and gambling addiction. I had thought I was going to a festival, but this sounded more like a wellness convention.Theater geared toward raising awareness can often be underwhelming, because the message gets in the way of a good time. But “300 Paintings,” by the Australian performer Sam Kissajukian, was a pleasing exception. Kissajukian, who has bipolar disorder, quit comedy a couple of years ago, when he was in his mid-30s, to become an artist — a frying-pan-to-fire trajectory if ever there was one. In this one-man show, he recounts, with the help of a slide show, a six-month manic streak during which he fast-tracked his way onto the art circuit through prolific productivity and business chutzpah: the delusional confidence of the unwell. Then he crashed, sought psychiatric help and got diagnosed. Kissajukian’s monologue is a whimsical delight, and the paintings aren’t bad either.Sam Kissajukian in “300 Paintings.”Tal GoldhamerGrief narratives have been much in vogue onstage since the success of “Fleabag,” which was performed at the Fringe in 2013. “So Young,” a sentimental comedy written by the Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell, was one of several shows about bereavement at this year’s festival. Set in Glasgow, it centers on the conflict between two grieving people: a middle-aged widower who has just found a new, much younger girlfriend; and his dead wife’s best friend, who is affronted at how quickly he has moved on. The play foregrounds an often overlooked truth: that grief, though primarily personal, has an inherently social dimension.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How to Survive (and Maybe Conquer) the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

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      Nadia Quinn had been warned about bringing her show of wacky comic songs to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. Facebook groups, Reddit posts and friends suggested that taking on the 77-year-old festival as an unestablished performer was too daunting.One episode of “Baby Reindeer,” the hit Netflix series that took off at the 2019 Fringe, mines the humiliation that Richard Gadd, the show’s creator, faced performing there in a pub. With nearly 3,500 shows and with comics and clowns vying for attention throughout the month of August, how would Quinn find a venue, housing and people to fill her seats for even a week? She had never even been to the festival, which has the potential to turn unknowns into stars.“Everyone is telling me you can’t understand the Fringe until you go to the Fringe,” Quinn said earlier this month before flying to Scotland from New York. “I’m hoping to make the right decisions and I’m very excited, but I also feel like throwing up every day, which I guess is part of the process.”You may have seen Quinn, a vibrant, vocally gifted actress in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” or on Broadway in the 2010 production of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.” Maybe you’ve seen her on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” or in TV commercials, or at 54 Below, the Midtown cabaret venue. She has worked in New York for 22 years, performing original songs with Aaron Quinn, her husband. (A recent one, about making bongs out of just about anything, was a huge hit on TikTok before censors took it down.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Hannah Gadsby: Woof’ Review: A Comic’s Pet Themes

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      In a soul-baring new show at the Edinburgh Fringe, the Australian stand-up leans once again into fears, anxieties and mental health worries.The title of Hannah Gadsby’s new stand-up show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is “Woof,” but the Australian comic has a very specific type of dog bark in mind. It sounds like something between a burp and a cough. It’s impossible to spell, but if you had to, it might go something like “peuh.” Gadsby says it typically signals that the animal is about to go into a frenzy. As a metaphor for Gadsby’s state of mind, it’s inauspicious. Should we be concerned?Well, yes and no. For the most part, Gadsby’s new routine, at the Underbelly through Aug. 25, is a chill affair. Gadsby is on genial form, taking acerbic pot shots at Taylor Swift (“a can of Coke masquerading as a sorority cult”) and social media (“where neurotypical people go to experience the worst of autism”). There’s some pleasingly risqué material about the sex lives of lesbian soccer players that is too graphic to discuss here.But when the focus turns inward, the vibe shifts. Gadsby describes a sense of discombobulation and a kind of existential vertigo that comes with having achieved fame and fortune relatively late in life.“My bed is so comfortable,” Gadsby says, “and that keeps me up at night.”This is, of course, nothing new — there is always a lot of Hannah Gadsby in a Hannah Gadsby show. “Nanette,” the 2018 Netflix special that catapulted Gadsby from relative obscurity to stardom, drew heavily on harrowing personal experiences of gendered violence. “Douglas” (2020) explored Gadsby’s autism diagnosis. An online run-in with Netflix bosses, over a routine by Dave Chapelle that critics described as transphobic, cemented Gadsby’s status as a culture war lodestar, and inspired the 2024 comedy showcase, “Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda.”The story of that career trajectory is inextricable from the oeuvre itself, making Gadsby something like the Rachel Cusk of comedy. This inevitably brings a certain anxiety about shelf-life, and the specter of demise haunts this set. Gadsby, who uses they/them pronouns, notes that this is their first Fringe appearance in seven years, and playfully suggests that returning to the festival — known for showcasing up-and-comers — is a fall from grace. Later, Gadsby imagines angry Swifties ending their career. “There’s nothing more feminist,” they quip, “than getting canceled by other feminists.”Gadsby also fears they might be too low-key, or too idiosyncratic, to command sustained attention. “I’m not the right person for this success,” they say — but most famous people have felt this way at some point. Besides, that whimsical nature is precisely what people like, and in our increasingly fragmented mass culture it doesn’t really matter if your material doesn’t work for everyone. There are many publics.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Edinburgh Fringe, There Are 2 Plays About Gwyneth Paltrow

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      Multiple shows at the Edinburgh Fringe make camp fun out of the 2023 civil action that spurred a thousand memes — and one of them is a triumph.Terry Sanderson, a retired optometrist, was unsuccessful when he sued the actress turned wellness entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow over a collision on a Utah ski slope. Though he claimed that she had crashed into him, a jury determined it was actually his fault. The live-streamed 2023 civil case was an unseemly but strangely fascinating spectacle featuring two equally dislikable archetypes: the vexatious litigant and the preening, out-of-touch celebrity.But in another sense, Sanderson won: His name is now forever etched into pop culture folklore, as not one but two new stage productions about the ski trial at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe attest.In “Gwyneth Goes Skiing,” Sanderson’s vibe is that of a spurned lover.Jonny RuffThe more rough and ready of the two, “Gwyneth Goes Skiing,” at the Pleasance Courtyard, is a camp burlesque in which both parties are mercilessly skewered. Linus Karp, in drag, plays Paltrow with the drawling malice of a pantomime witch. She’s an entitled girlboss whose altruistic affectations mask a sociopathic character, while Joseph Martin as Sanderson is dull mediocrity personified. The characters’ partners are played by plucky audience volunteers, aided by a teleprompter, and Kristin VanOrman, Sanderson’s lawyer, is represented as star-struck and hopelessly incompetent by a disheveled ventriloquist’s dummy, voiced by Martin.In this telling, both Sanderson and his lawyer are driven not so much by monetary greed as by a pathetic desire to connect with Paltrow. They are moths to the flame of celebrity, and Sanderson’s vibe is that of a spurned lover. There are snowball fights, some jousting with skis and snatches of music. When Paltrow utters the immortal line that spurred a thousand memes, “I lost half a day of skiing,” the stage lighting switches to a deep red to emphasize the severity of her plight. At the end of the show, the audience gets to be the jury, voting via QR code to decide who wins.Linus Karp as Paltrow, with Kristin VanOrman, Sanderson’s lawyer, played by a puppet.Jonny RuffWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What’s the Next ‘Baby Reindeer’? Maybe Francesca Moody Has the Script.

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      Francesca Moody has put on some of the Edinburgh Fringe’s biggest breakout hits. This year, she has three shows that she’s hoping will go global.One day in fall 2018, the British theater producer Francesca Moody was rummaging around in her bag for something to read during a train ride when she found a script she’d been meaning to look at for weeks.Glancing at its first page, she read a scene in which a man logs onto his voice mail. “You have 50 new messages,” the cellphone’s robotic voice says. The messages are all from a woman named Martha.For the rest of the train journey, Moody couldn’t take her eyes off the script of “Baby Reindeer,” a one-man play about a comedian’s struggles with a female stalker who he occasionally, with self-destructive results, encourages.“It was just a thriller,” Moody recalled in a recent interview. “And what was amazing was it wasn’t a normal victim-perpetrator narrative. It was about all the gray areas in between.”When the train reached its destination about an hour later, Moody didn’t get up. She stayed in the empty carriage to devour the script’s final pages. By then, Moody recalled, she’d already decided two things: That she had to produce this play, and it had to be at Edinburgh Festival Fringe — the best place in Britain to generate buzz for new plays and musicals by lesser-known writers.Success there, she knew, could propel the show to success in London. Maybe in New York, too. Although at that moment, she couldn’t predict that “Baby Reindeer” would also secure a Netflix deal and 11 Emmy nominations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Play About J.K. Rowling Stirred Outrage. Until It Opened.

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      The muted reaction to the Edinburgh Fringe show “TERF” suggests that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, offense can quickly vanish.There are more than 3,600 shows in this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe and most will struggle to get even a single newspaper review. Yet for months before the festival opened on Friday, one play was the subject of intense global media attention: “TERF,” an 80-minute drama about J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author, and her views on transgender women.Before anybody had even read the script, a Scottish newspaper called the play, which imagines Rowling debating her views with the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies, a “foul-mouthed” attack on the author. An article in The Daily Telegraph said that “scores of actresses” had turned down the opportunity to play Rowling. And The Daily Mail, a tabloid, reported that the production had encountered trouble securing a venue.On social media and women’s web forums, too, “TERF” stirred outraged discussion.The uproar raised the specter of pro-Rowling protesters outside the show and prompted debate in Edinburgh, the city that Rowling has called home for more than 30 years. But when “TERF” opened last week, it barely provoked a whimper. The only disturbance to a performance on Monday in the ballroom of Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms came from a group of latecomers using a cellphone flashlight to find their seats. About 55 theatergoers watched the play in silence from the front few rows of the 350-seat capacity venue.The play imagines a showdown in a restaurant between Rowling and the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies.Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGiven the regular disagreements between some feminists and transgender rights supporters, the uproar around “TERF” was not unexpected.But the muted response to the show itself suggests that fewer British people are riled by the debate than the media coverage implies — or at least that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, outrage can quickly vanish.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Edinburgh Fringe: Out and About at the Festival

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      It’s summer in Edinburgh and visitors from around the world have arrived for the 77th edition of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the chaotic, scrappy, sprawling arts event that opened Friday and runs through Aug. 26. This year, there are more than 3,600 shows on the program, by artists from 58 countries: theater, stand-up, circus and cabaret performances, as usual — but also film screenings, whiskey tastings and a life drawing class with dogs.Robert Ormerod, a photographer for The New York Times, was on the ground in Edinburgh to capture the atmosphere on the festival’s first weekend.Festival-goers crowd the pubs and restaurants in the Old Town district of the city.Poster and flyers — as well as performers hustling in the streets — help the public choose from the more than 3,600 shows.Fringe performers line up for a media event over the weekend.Spectators for a street performance on the Royal Mile, Old Town’s main thoroughfare.Tartan Heather, a Scottish artist who weaves fabric in the traditional pattern for spectators, on the Royal Mile.Handbills for Fringe shows cover a phone booth in the city center.Checking times and venues at the Underbelly box office in George Square, central Edinburgh.Nina Conti, a British ventriloquist who has been appearing at the Fringe for over 20 years, presents her show “Whose Face Is It Anyway?” at the Pleasance Grand.A performer from “I Wish You Well: The Gwyneth Paltrow Ski-Trial Musical,” performs an impromptu song on Friday after a power cut canceled the show.Julia VanderVeen in “My Grandmother’s Eyepatch.”The Fringe sold nearly 2.5 million tickets in 2023.The performers on the official Fringe program were joined by nearly 500 street performers in 2023, according to Fringe.Relaxing in Princes Street Gardens, a stone’s throw from the hubbub of the festival. More

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      What to See at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

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      Previous editions of the performing arts event launched shows like “Baby Reindeer” and “Fleabag.” Maybe there’s another breakout hit among this year’s more than 3,300 shows.Each summer, artists and audience members from across the globe decamp to Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest performing arts event. This year, from Aug. 2 through 26, the city will be repurposed into a labyrinth of makeshift theaters, in dingy rooms above pubs, hotel conference rooms and university lecture theaters.Throughout the Fringe’s 77-year history, its eclectic approach to performance has been integral to its appeal. Unlike the more highbrow Edinburgh International Festival, which runs concurrently. the Fringe is open to all comers — and a buzzy Fringe show can give an artist a very big break.“Fleabag” and “Six,” the musical, were originally Fringe success stories. So too was Richard Gadd’s 2019 one-man show “Baby Reindeer,” which this year became a Netflix series and an unexpected global hit.Very few artists make money at the Fringe, but at this year’s festival, many will be trying to emulate Gadd’s trajectory. And festival goers will equally be looking for the next big thing.With more than 3,300 shows on offer, finding the next “Fleabag” requires some careful studying of the weighty Fringe program. Here is a guide to some of the key themes and the buzziest shows from this year’s lineup.Award-winning comics returnAt the end of each year’s Fringe, a panel of judges hands out the Edinburgh Comedy Awards for best show and best newcomer, two prestigious prizes that have launched many international careers. This year’s Fringe lineup includes two of the most successful recent winners.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Meet Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s Breakout Clown

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      Around 2 a.m. one recent Saturday, Julia Masli laughed as she glided up to an audience member in a sweaty basement room at Edinburgh’s Monkey Barrel comedy club.Wearing a ghostly outfit with dolls’ legs sticking from a black hat, she pointed a microphone at the panicked-looking man and asked a simple question: “Problem?”After a confused “Er,” he blurted out a genuine issue for most people in the basement. “I’m quite warm,” he said.Masli, looking concerned, led the man onstage and made him sit on a stool. Then she pulled a huge electric fan from a nearby cupboard and duct-taped him to it.As the audience laughed, the clown was already moving on. “Problem?” she said, pointing the microphone at another audience member.Masli, right, had planned for “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” to run only two weeks.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesMasli’s show “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” (running through Aug. 27) has become the surprise hit of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Britain’s largest arts and comedy festival. She considered it a work in progress and had planned for only two weeks of performances, but word-of-mouth enthusiasm and rave newspaper reviews quickly sold out the run, forcing Masli to extend it in the only available time slot: 1:30 a.m.On Wednesday, the show was nominated for the fringe’s main comedy award, and Masli announced a three-week London run next year.Viggo Venn, another clown and Masli’s partner, said the show had gripped audiences because “it feels so risky and exciting,” with little possibility of planning. “She just has to trust the comedy gods that something magical will happen,” Venn said. “And it does. Every day.”In one recent show, Venn recalled, a man said he had a strained relationship with his mother, so Masli called her at 2 a.m., leading to an emotional chat onstage. That wasn’t something you get from many comedy acts, Venn said.During a recent interview in an Edinburgh pub, Masli, 27, said she developed shows by coming up with games to play, “and then from those I find where the meat is.” Last year, she started a routine where she’d walk up to audience members and say “Ha” in increasingly silly ways, seeing how they responded. If they echoed her, she tinkled a bell. If they misplaced the phrasing, she screamed.Saying “Problem?”, Masli found, quickly made audience members share startling tales.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesOne night, she decided instead to say “Problem?” and see what happened. She found that audience members quickly shared startling tales. Working with Kim Noble, a performance artist, she said they realized: “This is it. The ‘Problem?’ is the show.”Performing “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” has changed Masli’s own perspective on the world, she said. At an early show, a man said he was overweight, so she began running around the venue with him to help him burn calories. “It was wild,” she recalled.But when another man said he too felt fat, she said, she concluded the problem lay not with the men, but with how society saw them. She asked other audience members if they felt the man looked overweight, then kicked out anyone who agreed.“Clown is really about connection,” Masli said in the interview when asked why she thought the show was a success. “Maybe right now everyone just wants to be connected.”The daughter of two lawyers, Masli grew up in Tallinn, Estonia, until age 12 when her parents sent her to a girls’ boarding school in England. Masli has said she spoke so little English at the time that she would mime to be understood.As a teenager, her heart was set on becoming an actor and performing the great tragedies on London stages. She auditioned for British drama schools, she said, “but got nowhere because I had this really strong accent.” So she moved to Étampes, France, to study under Philippe Gaulier, a clowning instructor whose past students include Sacha Baron Cohen.Masli uses a microphone taped to a golden mannequin leg as a reminder of her first Fringe show.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesFor nine weeks of a 10-week module, Masli said, she failed to make anyone laugh. In the final week, Gaulier told her to perform as a plumber. She came onstage, looked at the pipes and said, “Oh, God.” When everyone fell about, she couldn’t stop thinking about how to make it happen again.Venn, Masli’s partner, said there was something in Masli’s eyes — “this innocent but cheeky look” — that could make anyone laugh with a glance.After returning to London, Masli struggled to make it as a clown. At one point, she stopped performing for 18 months and became so depressed she couldn’t get out of bed. Things only changed in 2019, she said, when she took her first show, “Legs,” to the Fringe. Made with the Duncan Brothers, two other clowns, it featured skits such as Masli shaking hands with audience members using her feet.Only two people saw the first performance, Masli recalled, but the show won a prize for comic innovation. Masli now tries to highlight the appendage in all her shows. “‘Legs’ saved me,” she said. “It was the biggest ‘Keep going.’” Last year, she returned to Edinburgh with “Choosh!” a solo show about a migrant struggling to make it in the United States, for which The Daily Telegraph named her the Fringe’s “best sad clown.”Masli onstage. On Wednesday, her show was named as one of eight nominees for the Fringe’s main comedy award.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesBoth those shows featured some audience interaction, but nothing compared to what happens in “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.” During the recent Saturday performance, the problems ranged from the trivial (someone’s glasses were broken) to the seemingly insurmountable (a man said he was a hypochondriac). Masli tried to solve them all.She only seemed stumped once, when an audience member said that she was devastated after splitting up with her girlfriend. Masli empathized, but that didn’t seem to help. She solicited relationship advice from other audience members. That didn’t work, either. So Masli suggested something a little more left field: that the person crowd surf.Approaching 2:30 in the morning, the audience member leaped into the crowd, who then carried her from the front of the room to the back. Her heartbreak was far from solved, but for a minute, at least, she seemed to forget all about it. More