Wake up to the news that the 2026 Fringe Programme is out today.
It is very pink, bears the slogan “Shifting perspectives since 1947”, and it is jam-packed with shows of all kinds which will take place in Edinburgh in the summer.
There are 3,649 shows in the few weeks between 7 and 31 August.
The world comes to Edinburgh with nearly 54,000 performances.
This year’s Fringe brings together performers from 71 countries across 3,649 shows, totalling a massive 53,884 performances at 258 venues throughout the city – once again cementing Edinburgh’s place at the heart of the global cultural calendar.
And if the sheer scale doesn’t take your breath away, the themes might. This year’s programme holds a mirror up to the modern world, tackling artificial intelligence, cults, the manosphere, identity crisis and social class — alongside a generous dose of Y2K nostalgia for those feeling the pull of a simpler era. Running through it all is a thread of resilience and hope, a reminder of what live performance does better than almost anything else.
For Edinburgh locals, the city’s streets, churches, car parks and converted spaces of every description burst into life with comedy, theatre, dance, spoken word and everything in between. With artists travelling from every corner of the globe to perform here, the 2026 edition is a powerful statement that Edinburgh remains the world’s greatest platform for bold, boundary-pushing creative work.
Tickets are on sale now. The Fringe runs throughout August.
Full listings at edfringe.com
Tony Lankester
We spoke to Chief Executive Tony Lankester, to get his perspective on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society which he leads, their impending move to Infirmary Street (not all of them just some of them) and what he really likes at the Fringe.
Mr Lankester has been CEO of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society for one year and two months. He said he likes to think of the Fringe Society as “the glue that holds the Fringe together”.
He very quickly explained: “This is not my metaphor, it’s someone else’s – but I’ll just shamelessly steal from them. So to deliver the fringe every year, obviously there’s a gargantuan effort from venues, from artists, from visiting professionals, from the city, from so on, and we play a convening role in the centre of all of that – not above it – but in the centre of it.
“We try to grease the wheels and make sure that everyone’s lives are made a little bit easier, so that it’s easier and more viable for them to do the work that they need to do for the Fringe to be delivered.
“At our core, we do three main things: we sell tickets, so we run the central box office, and everything that goes along with that, the website and the app. We support artists, so we’ve got a massive artist support team who makes sure that every single artist who comes to perform has access to resources to support, to advice, both while they’re here, but also in the months leading up to their time coming here.
“And the third thing we do is we advocate for the Fringe as a charity, and for the Fringe society as a charity, and pull the sort of big structural levers that we can to try and get support for the Fringe. I guess the final piece of the puzzle is the marketing that we do, so we print the programme, we run campaigns online digital programmes to get people excited about coming to the Fringe.
This year is not the biggest in terms of the number of shows, but it’s close. Tony said that the highest number of shows was in 2019. But of course audiences cannot see everything.
Tony continued: “We say to people that in the course of their planning, try and use the rule of thirds, so a third of your time pre-planned, go through the programme, pick out the names that you recognise, the shows that you really want to see, things that have done well in previous years, or maybe a show you’ve seen previously that you want to see again.
“Fill up a third of your time up with that, and for the second third, take some some gambles, take some punts, just maybe there’s a picture that intrigues you, or you like the description of it, or it’s a recommendation from a friend of yours, or a reviewer that you trust to say nice things about it.
“So that’s your second third, and then the final third of shows leave empty until you get to Edinburgh.
“Once you get to Edinburgh, find out what the buzz on the street is, what people are talking about, what shows have won awards. Look for the posters that appeal to you. Find the artists walking up and down the Royal Mile, handing out flyers. Find the artists that you gravitate towards, and if you do those three things, I think you’ll have a pretty complete Fringe experience when you come to Edinburgh in August.”
Tony had just spent the weekend in Prague at the Prague Fringe, where he had many conversationsabout Edinburgh. He said: “There’s a lot of love for it. People love this thing, they love what it means, they love being here, they love the experience, and there are a lot of people out there who just want to help.”
There are now several Fringe ambassadors “carefully chosen from amongst our alumni”.
Tony explained that many shows began on the Fringe – “Fleabag, Baby Reindeer, people like Stephen Fry credit the Fringe as being a place that he was able to cut his teeth in his early years, so in looking at that landscape and picking out some ambassadors who we believe represent some of that success, we’ve got Phoebe Waller-bridge as our president, and she was our first ambassador, and Susie Eddie Izzard, who obviously is this globally acclaimed comedian who started life as a street performer and has since evolved into what she is today.
“Brian Cox is globally known as a great actor, and our most recent addition to the network of ambassadors is Graham Norton, who took a slightly different path. I guess he performed in his early days as a young stand-up comedian at the Pleasance, and has since obviously navigated a slightly different path in the entertainment industry.
As for the impending move to the new Fringe Central on Infirmary Street Tony is quite excited about it. He said: “I only joined a year ago, and one of the strangest things for me to get my head around is trying to manage a team who are spread physically over three different buildings, and to try and create a single cohesive team.
“The culture has been really difficult in that context, so just that on its own, having everyone in the same building at the same time year round, I think will really change things for us as a visible anchor, and as a flagship space during the Fringe itself. Having our own Fringe Central means we no longer have to hire buildings around the city to deliver our services predominantly to artists and to do media registration and various other things that we do, we can now do it from there. So it’s got very practical views as well, and it is beautiful.”
But the Fringe Shop will remain on the Royal Mile. It is too good a position to lose.
Tony said: “Our visible blue presence on the Royal Mile will continue. We’d be mad to give that up, as it’s our main footprint on the Royal Mile. It’s going to continue as the Fringe Shop. We’re vacating the offices behind the shop, and we will be able to extend the shop further back and have more retail space.
“And then the Fringe box office underneath us will continue, so that’ll still be the physical place people can come to to get their tickets or to meet the box office team in August. And while we will absolutely still have this presence in High Street, Infirmary Street is just a very short walk away.”
