Edinburgh & Fringe
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Become a memberDo you keep the bits that only started working in the last week of a Fringe run?
I’m wary of giving the final few shows too much authority just because they’re the freshest. If a section struggled for most of a run and then suddenly clicked near the end, do you treat that as proof you finally found the version — or assume the audience/context may have helped and test it again before rebuilding the show around it? I’m trying to separate “this got better” from “this had three good nights at exactly the moment I desperately wanted it to get better.”
When do you stop calling it a preview and start treating it like the show?
I’m interested in the point where a longer work-in-progress stops getting rebuilt after every outing. Early previews feel like permission to move whole sections around, try an ending that may not survive, cut ten minutes and put five back. But at some point I assume you need a stable version long enough to learn what the actual show does rather than what tonight’s rewrite did. If you’re developing towards a Fringe run, when do you start freezing the running order and making smaller changes instead?
How soon after Fringe do you watch your recordings back?
I’ve got a pile of recordings and I’m deliberately not opening them yet because I can still remember every tiny thing I wanted to change. But leave it too long and I’ll forget what the room actually felt like. If you’ve been developing a longer show, when do you start reviewing footage properly — straight away while the notes are fresh, or after enough distance that you can watch the show instead of reliving the set? And do you watch whole runs first, or go hunting for the sections you already know were unstable?
After Fringe, what notes do you keep before the whole month becomes one blur?
I’m thinking less about reviews and more about useful evidence for the next version of a show. By the end of a run you can have loads of tiny changes, bits that only worked in certain places, and ideas you swore you’d remember. What do you actually write down after a run — cuts, strongest sections, where attention dipped, new lines, running order changes? And what do you deliberately leave alone for a week before deciding anything?
When do you stop adding new bits to a longer show?
I’m finding the dangerous thing about building a longer set is that every decent new idea feels like it deserves a place. At some point that has to stop or the show never gets a shape. If you’re developing towards a Fringe-length hour, do you set a point where new material goes into a separate pile and you only work on what’s already in the show? Or do you keep letting stronger bits replace weaker ones right up until the run?
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How early do you start cutting a Fringe show down to time?
I’m building towards a longer show and the thing I’m already worried about is ending up with 65 minutes I love and pretending that’s somehow a 55. For people developing a Fringe-length set, when do you start treating the running time as a hard constraint rather than just collecting the strongest material? I can see myself leaving the painful cuts until far too late.