Festival Diary: Susie McCabe’s guide to surviving the Fringe

Festival Diary: Susie McCabe’s guide to surviving the Fringe

With the season having (surely) reached the half-way point, many have succumbed to some form of lurgy by now, including International Festival director Nicola Benedetti, whose voice had been getting increasingly croakier as the first week unfolded.

She seemed to have recovered at Our Dynamic Earth for a recording of the BBC’s Front Row programme, where stand-up Susie McCabe shared her own tips for surviving a month of Edinburgh’s festivals, starting with commuting from Glasgow every day.

She said: “For my my own mental and physical health I have to go home every night. You get trapped into the bubble of Edinburgh, don’t you, so have to go home at some point. I just go home and get told I forgot to put the washing on a spin. It feels like normal life.

Stand-up comic Susie McCabe. Picture: Aemen Suka

“When you go home, have cheese and toast, and a cup of tea. It is food for the soul. When you’re here, have lots of chicken noodle soup and vitamins. Always carry Beechams powder and hair product.”

Jordan Gray, one of the big successes to emerge from last year’s Fringe, has also been offering halfway-through-the-festival advice to acts on a bit of a downer about reviews and audiences.

Gray, who had appeared on the TV show The Voice TV before a largely-ignored Fringe debut in 2018, said: “The room was WAY too big for me, and no one came. In 2022 I took a new show to a leaky shipping container on George Square, expecting nothing, and my life changed forever. The difference was I’d tasted failure (it's 'orrible) and learned a bit of humility.”

After a number of fainting incidents at Darran Griffith’s show at the Pleasance Courtyard, the phenomena appears to have spread to The Stand Comedy Club.

Writer and performer Apphia Campbell. Picture: Peter Dibdin

It marked the half-way point on social media with a shout-out for Marjolein Robertson for selling her new show out almost every day of the festival.

The move may have put something of a hex on Robertson, whose stand-up show takes a distinctly dark turn when she recalls an abusive relationship.

Robertson had to finish the show with her audience gathered around her outside after what The Stand described as a “fainting situation."

Robertson said: “Was it because it was so overpowering? or because of global warming? Or demonic possession? We will never know.”

Apphia Campbell has been one of the many acts recalling the impact of their career of winning a Scotsman Fringe First in the 50th anniversary year of the awards.

Campbell, who is originally from Florida, is celebrating a landmark of her own as it is 10 years since she first pe Black Is The Color Of My Voice, the Fringe show she created inspired by the life of fellow American singer-songwriter Nina Simone.

Campbell – who won a Fringe First for a follow-up show, Woke, in 2017 – has brought Black Is The Color Of My Voice back to Edinburgh for a five-night run at the EICC to mark its big birthday. A big surprise was sprung when she was presented with a plaque to mark 10 years of Black Is The Color Of My Voice – by her mother, who had flown in specially from Florida without telling her daughter.