How the Edinburgh Fringe Was Born From Postwar Theater Rebellion

Virtually every August since 1947, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival has transformed Scotland’s capital into a stage for the unexpected: Shakespeare's tragic character Ophelia drowns nightly in a hotel swimming pool. A theater company stages an updated take on “Waiting for Godot” in a public restroom. Dancers perform aboard a moving double-decker bus. An immersive dystopian thriller plays out in a pitch-black shipping container.

Today, the Fringe ranks as the world’s largest arts festival, a juggernaut of creativity that in 2024 alone featured at least 3,746 shows from 60 countries and drew a ticketed audience of 2.6 million to more than 250 venues. But its roots lie in a postwar cultural rift, when a rebellious act by eight British theater troupes defied the elite vision of Europe's artistic future. And over the decades since, the scrappy showcase has launched global stars and hit productions alike.

The Fringe was born in the rubble of post-World War II Europe. In 1947, Vienna-born opera impresario Rudolph Bing launched the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) to help revive the continent’s cultural life after years of war and deprivation. His vision was high-minded and elite: a carefully curated lineup of classical music, opera, ballet and serious drama meant to restore artistic standards and promote European unity.

But Bing’s top-down model clashed with a postwar undercurrent of grassroots cultural energy. That same year, eight uninvited British theater troupes arrived in Edinburgh and staged their own performances outside the EIF’s official venues and schedule. They were both amateur and professional—including six Scottish companies responding to the Scot-free EIF lineup—and presented works ranging from "Macbeth" to two plays by T.S. Eliot to a puppet show in a restaurant. “Round the fringe of official Festival drama, there seems to be more private enterprise than before,” Scottish journalist Robert Kemp wrote the following year, as the renegade tradition continued. “I am afraid some of us are not going to be at home during the evenings!”

While Bing’s authorized events unfolded during the day, the upstarts performed at night, creating a populist counter-festival in spaces located on the fringes of the city center. “Because the main theaters and concert halls had been commandeered by the EIF, these other companies had to make do with whatever spaces they could find—a YMCA, for example,” says Mark Fisher, a veteran Scottish arts writer and author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide.

That act of theatrical insurgency soon became an annual tradition. Running concurrently with the more buttoned-up, well-heeled International Festival, the chaotic, creative Festival Fringe, as it was ultimately named, set itself apart by eliminating gatekeepers and embracing open-access performance. Essentially, anyone with a story and a venue could tell it.

By 1959, the Festival Fringe Society emerged to provide loose organization—retaining both the DIY ethos as well as the no-invitation-required approach. Accessibility took center stage, as one-person shows, experimental theater and late-night revues proliferated. As offerings grew, venues began squeezing a half-dozen shows or more into each day, sometimes starting in the early morning and going until the wee hours.

In the 1960s and ’70s—amid the rise of student protest movements, avant-garde experimentation and youth counterculture—the Fringe became a proving ground for emerging talent. College troupes like the Cambridge Footlights and the Oxford Revue regularly staged shows, with future stars like John Cleese, Michael Palin, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie cutting their teeth before rising to global fame.

In 1971, audiences might have caught Robin Williams playing the servant Traino in a Wild West reimagining of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.” In the early 1980s, they might have seen a young Rowan Atkinson trying out his most famous character, the bumbling Mr. Bean, in a series of one-man shows.

Alan Taylor, a journalist and author of Edinburgh: The Autobiography, recalls the excitement of his first Fringe experiences in the 1960s. “You found yourself in parts of Edinburgh that you didn’t know existed: small halls, subterranean basements. I remember a 'Hamlet' taking place in a small car.”

The anything-goes ethos encouraged bold reinterpretations of the classics and surreal site-specific performances aimed at delighting and disorienting audiences. Comedian Paul Foot once performed stand-up while doing the breaststroke in a swimming pool, with the audience in their swimwear lining the edge. In 2003, a group called Pigeon Theatre staged its interactive feminist-themed piece “The Housekeeper” in a working kitchen, and in 2006, one troupe put on a distilled version of "Hamlet" in an inflatable bouncy castle. Performances have been held on a squash court, in taxis, a chicken coop and more.

One particularly memorable—and ambitious—Fringe event: a production of “Macbeth” that unfolded across a performance hall, three buses (with a witch haranguing the audience in each), a boat and, finally, an island just north of the city. “At times you had to say, ‘Is this really happening?’” Taylor recalls.

Over time, the Fringe became a platform for breakout theatrical works with far-reaching impact. Tom Stoppard’s breakout play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” an absurdist take on two minor messenger characters in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” debuted at the Fringe in 1966 before conquering London and Broadway. The percussion-heavy spectacle “Stomp” emerged from the 1991 festival, eventually enjoying a 29-year Off-Broadway run. And the Tony-winning musical “SIX” (2017), which reimagines the ill-fated wives of England’s Henry VIII as an all-girl pop group, used the Fringe as its launchpad to the West End.

Increasingly, the festival has also incubated television and comedy. Comedian Alex Horne’s beloved British comedy competition series “Taskmaster” began as a 2010 Fringe stunt, while Richard Gadd developed his darkly comedic Netflix series “Baby Reindeer” in a 2019 performance piece. Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Emmy-winning TV series “Fleabag” started as a solo show in 2013 about a free-spirited London woman whose contradictory inner monologue drives much of the dark humor.

Waller-Bridge, now honorary president of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, remains an outspoken advocate. In a 2025 interview, she described the festival as “a symbol of artistic freedom and anarchic creative energy…a kind of fizzing, dangerous, exciting, unpredictable energy that can’t really be found anywhere else.”

From the start, the Fringe has dazzled with its sheer volume. In a single day, audiences might catch a Shakespeare revival, a slapstick improv, a magic act and a one-woman show—all before a midnight cabaret. Meanwhile, buskers and boundary-pushing street performers fill Edinburgh's sidewalks, turning the city itself into a stage.

“People sometimes assume it must be all dangerous, provocative and politically angry, but that’s not quite right,” Fisher says. “You can see student first-timers as well as household names. It’s hard to generalize.”