A history of the Fringe

The Fringe was born not from planning, but from defiance. In 1947, as Europe recovered from the Second World War, the Glyndebourne impresario Rudolf Bing spearheaded the Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama as an act of post-war reconciliation. It opened on Sunday 24 August 1947 with invited companies including the Halle Orchestra, Glyndebourne Opera and Sadler's Wells Ballet.

Eight theatre groups who had not been invited decided to perform anyway, staging shows on the margins of the official programme - including at Dunfermline Abbey, across the River Forth - and calling themselves the "Festival Adjuncts." They were, in a sense, gatecrashers. Audiences found them anyway.

The groups called themselves "Festival Adjuncts" in 1947. The word "fringe" arrived the following year. The Scottish playwright and journalist Robert Kemp coined it in a preview article for the Edinburgh Evening News on 14 August 1948, writing of the unofficial companies performing "round the fringe of official Festival drama." The phrase stuck.

Through the 1950s the Fringe grew organically. Student companies from Oxford, Cambridge and London made the journey north, staging shows in church halls, YMCAs and university buildings. By 1954 a printer suggested the groups advertise together in a shared programme - the first Fringe programme - and participating groups met to discuss forming a committee.

By 1958-1959 the Festival Fringe Society was formally established to help visiting companies with venues, accommodation, publicity and ticket sales, and to compile a comprehensive programme. Crucially, its founding constitution enshrined that it would take no part in vetting or selecting the programme. Anyone with a story to tell and a venue willing to host them could perform. That open-access principle remains the philosophical bedrock of the Fringe.

A pivotal moment came in 1960, when Robert Ponsonby, director of the International Festival, commissioned a late-night revue to rival the growing unofficial fringe. The result was Beyond the Fringe, written and performed by Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore. It transferred to the West End and then Broadway, is widely seen as the spark for the 1960s British satire boom, and drew mainstream attention to the fringe scene around it.

In 1981 the Perrier Comedy Award - now the Edinburgh Comedy Awards - was inaugurated to recognise the best comedy show at the Fringe. It became the most prestigious comedy prize in the UK. The very first award went to the Cambridge Footlights, whose members that year included Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. The prize added a competitive dimension to a previously non-hierarchical festival and helped turn the Fringe into the primary launch pad for British comedy careers.

The Fringe First awards, recognising outstanding new writing, date back to 1973 and are judged by critics from The Scotsman.

The Fringe has launched work that went on to define careers and culture. In 1966 Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was performed by a student company; on opening night only one of the seven people in the audience was a paying customer. Within months it was at the National Theatre and soon became the National's first transfer to Broadway.

In 2013 Phoebe Waller-Bridge performed Fleabag in a 60-seat late-night slot at Underbelly Cowgate, crowdfunded on Kickstarter with eight people sleeping in a two-bed flat. It won a Fringe First, earned an Olivier nomination and became a globally acclaimed television series.

The Fringe has been a springboard for a remarkable list of performers. Robin Williams came in 1971 with a student company's Wild West take on The Taming of the Shrew. Billy Connolly co-wrote and starred in The Great Northern Welly Boot Show in 1972. Judi Dench and Maggie Smith performed together in the late 1950s. Suzy Eddie Izzard began as a Fringe street performer in 1981, the same year the Footlights won the inaugural Perrier.

Steve Coogan introduced Alan Partridge at the Fringe in 1992; Alan Rickman debuted fresh out of drama school in 1976; Rachel Weisz was talent-spotted in 1991; Cillian Murphy starred in Disco Pigs at the Traverse in 1997; Lin-Manuel Miranda visited in 2005 with a freestyle hip-hop troupe; and Hannah Gadsby performed Nanette at the 2017 Fringe before its Netflix adaptation brought global recognition.

In 2020 the Fringe was cancelled for the first time in its 73-year history, due to the COVID-19 pandemic - the first time it had not taken place since 1947. A limited digital programme of streamed content stood in its place. The Fringe returned in reduced form in 2021 and fully resumed in 2022, the festival's 75th anniversary year.

The Fringe's constitution has remained essentially unchanged since 1959: the Society takes no part in vetting or selecting the programme. It is, by design, the largest uncurated arts festival in the world. By the 2020s it typically features more than 3,000 shows across more than 300 venues each August, and in 2022 it was estimated to generate around 1 billion pounds for the Scottish economy. That founding purpose - democratic, open-access and post-war in spirit - is what still makes the Fringe unlike any other festival on earth.