Love Letters to the Fringe
Debut playwright Michael Reid chats to legendary producer and Shedinburgh co-founder Francesca Moody.
By Michael Reid
This August I’m bringing my first full-length play to the Edinburgh Fringe. Safety is a solo show I’ve written and perform, receiving its world premiere in a 45-seat room at Underbelly Daisy. It also launches Light Mends Carefully, the theatre company I’ve started to make new plays of my own and, in time, work by other writers.
Despite the Fringe’s challenges, I chose to launch Light Mends Carefully here rather than anywhere else. The costs are high and the competition is fierce but there is nowhere on earth quite like Edinburgh in August: the breadth of work, the experimentation, the passion of performers and audiences alike. For lovers of theatre and performance of all kinds, the Fringe has an undisputed magic.
This year marks Shedinburgh’s second season as a physical Fringe venue, after a first with 36 shows at the Wee Red Bar. Co-founded by Francesca Moody, the producer behind the original Fringe productions of Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, it offers one vision of how the Fringe might respond to some of its more challenging aspects. For 2026 it has moved to Assembly Checkpoint, substantially expanded its Edinburgh programme and added its first London season at the Young Vic.
I spoke with Moody about what last year taught her. Her answer is simple: there was demand for it.
By that she means “shorter runs, intimate experiences, stripped-back performances with storytelling at its heart”. The room holds just over 100 people, and many shows play once, twice or three times. Some of the programme revives acclaimed Fringe shows from previous years, giving audiences another chance at something they missed, or a return to something they loved. Other slots allow artists to try new work without committing to a month-long run.
Shedinburgh offers artists financial guarantees and support with travel and accommodation where needed. It also takes an active role in producing and marketing individual shows, investing in design, outdoor advertising and digital campaigns.
“The ethos of the project,” Moody says, is to give artists “a less risky environment” in which to experiment. The model allows them to spend more time thinking about the work and less time chasing enough ticket sales to make the exercise viable.
The Fringe gives artists extraordinary freedom. But as well as making the work, artists often finance it, find yourself somewhere to live, promote it and then compete for an audience once you arrive. Shedinburgh’s model shifts some of those responsibilities back towards the producer.
A small, curated programme is another part of the idea — small enough to have a recognisable personality. Moody wants audiences to trust Shedinburgh’s taste enough to buy a ticket for somebody they’ve never heard of.
Perhaps the artist they came for has sold out. If so, she hopes they will think: “I really trust in the curation, so I’m going to take a punt on someone I haven’t heard of.”
And that personality isn’t confined to one genre. Lucy McCormick brings back Lucy & Friends, her stripped-back queer cabaret about loneliness, labour and connection, recruiting the audience to play the friends she doesn’t have. Inua Ellams performs a pared-back An Evening with an Immigrant, moving between poetry and storytelling to trace his own history of migration and belonging. On another night, musical-comedy duo Flo & Joan hand songs from unfinished projects over to a group of “proper” singers. Theatre, cabaret, poetry and music sit alongside work in progress and pieces that are harder to categorise at all.
Moody calls Shedinburgh “a love letter to the Fringe”.
She is interested in the things the Fringe does unusually well: giving work permission to be strange, unfinished or difficult to categorise; putting an established artist next to a debut.
“The Fringe is still a place where audiences are more open to that kind of work,” she says. Here, the fact that people aren’t quite sure what something is can be part of the attraction.
This year Shedinburgh also expanded its Shedload-of-Future Fund from three to five £5,000 awards for artists and companies making their Fringe debuts. More than 200 applied. Five awards, £25,000 in total.
Moody talks enthusiastically about the “breadth and depth and variety” of the proposed work, all these “weird and wonderful and brilliant and exciting” ideas making their way towards Edinburgh. The applications were evidence of how much appetite there still is to bring work here.
They also exposed the economics behind that appetite.
Again and again, applicants explained that without support they would finance their shows through credit cards or their own savings. For some, £5,000 was the amount that would stop them going into debt.
Moody is experimenting with another part of the Fringe infrastructure too: information.
ShedX, its programme of free talks with producers, critics and other industry figures, treats knowledge about how Edinburgh works as something worth sharing. Moody describes the Fringe as a trade show as much as a development space for artists. Networks matter here, and not everybody arrives with one.
Putting on my own show has reminded me of the many questions first time producers have to grapple with. How do you get media to review your show? If you want it to have an onward touring life, who should you invite, and when? How do you make the most of being here beyond simply selling tickets?
ShedX is partly an attempt to help navigate those questions.
My own love letter to the Fringe is much smaller in scale than Shedinburgh: an hour long play in a 45 seat venue at 11:45 in the morning. I booked the venue, printed the flyers, asked (many) friends for favours, sent the invitation emails and press release.
Among thousands of shows, it’s a tall order to hope that audiences and industry will find my little theatre company. And still, I wanted nothing more than for it to begin here.
Shedinburgh runs at Assembly Checkpoint until 30 August. Tickets and the full programme are available at shedinburgh.com.
Light Mends Carefully presents Safety at Underbelly Daisy, Bristo Square, at 11:45am until 30 August. Tickets at https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/safety