Edinburgh Fringe alone is the move

I have done the Edinburgh Fringe nine times. Three of those I went with people. Six I went alone. The six were better.

This sounds like the kind of contrarian thing a writer says to make a piece, but I will defend it. There is no festival in the world more suited to going alone than the Fringe. The infrastructure of the city, the density of programming, the sheer act of trying to see as much as possible in as little time as possible — all of it works against the social structure of a group trip and works for the solo trip.

The maths of group Fringe

Here is what happens when you go to Edinburgh with three friends. You all want to see different things. You compromise. You see two shows you wanted to see and three you didn't. You spend a quarter of each day arguing about what's next. You drink alot more than you intended. You sleep less than you should and the sleep deprivation compounds the indecisiveness.

I do not say this with bitterness. I have had three excellent Fringes with friends. The brilliance of those trips was friendship-shaped, not Fringe-shaped. We could have been at Glastonbury or in a flat in Hove and the friendship would have been the same. The Fringe was a backdrop.

When you go alone, the Fringe is the thing.

The choice problem

There are about three thousand shows at Edinburgh in August. Even at five shows a day for the whole month you would see one in twenty. You are, mathematically, choosing.

When you choose alone, you choose well. You walk past a flyerer at noon, you look at the description, you commit. Your only filter is whether you, specifically, would enjoy the next ninety minutes. There is no negotiation. There is no waiting for someone to finish their text. There is no "are we sure" round of doubt.

When you choose in a group, the filter doubles. Then triples. By the time three people have agreed, you are seeing the third-best option for each of you, rather than the best option for any of you.

The social paradox

Here is the strange thing. Going alone to Edinburgh is the most social thing I have ever done at a festival. You will talk to more strangers in three days at the Fringe alone than in a month at home. The whole apparatus of the place — the queues, the venues, the cafés between shows, the late-night Pleasance Courtyard, the bus from George Square — is built around incidental conversation.

When you arrive at a queue with friends, you talk to your friends. When you arrive alone, you talk to whoever is in front of you. The person in front of you is, almost by definition, someone who has chosen to see the same show as you, which is already a stronger filter than most of the apps offer.

I have made friends at the Fringe who I see in London year-round. None of those friendships started in a group trip. All of them started in a queue at the Pleasance or a bar at Summerhall, alone.

The rhythm

A solo Fringe day looks like this. You wake up early, you read the day's reviews over coffee at Söderberg or Cult Espresso. You walk into town, see something at noon, get a sandwich, see something at two, walk to a free thing at four, eat properly at six (alone, with a book, in a small place that doesn't mind), see your booked thing at eight, see something risky at ten, end up at the Pleasance Dome bar until one.

You can adjust this rhythm by the hour. You can decide at twelve forty-five that you want to see a thing at one and walk there. You can skip the four o'clock thing and have a nap. You can leave a show at the interval (this is allowed and people do it) and go to a different one. The whole festival is built around the assumption that some of its audience are doing exactly this, which is why the timing is so densely staggered.

Loneliness, briefly

I am not going to pretend that doing the Fringe alone is never lonely. It is, occasionally. Around hour five of day four you will sit down for a coffee and realise you have not had a real conversation with anyone you knew before yesterday. This is briefly bleak and then it passes.

The bleakness usually passes because someone in the queue at your next show says something interesting. Or because you finally catch a show that wasn't on your list and it is the best thing you have seen all week, and the experience is yours alone, complete, owned. There is a particular pleasure in seeing something extraordinary that you cannot immediately turn to someone and explain to. You have to sit with it. You have to let it be the thing it was.

The practical case

If you have not done a solo Fringe and want to try, do this. Book your accommodation early — by April, ideally. Book three or four shows you want to see, no more. Leave the rest of your time blank. Buy the printed programme for ease of browsing, even though everyone says the app is fine, because the app is not fine. Don't plan more than a day in advance.

Stay in the Old Town if you want walkability. Stay in Marchmont if you want quiet. Don't stay in Leith — the bus is fine but it adds 30 minutes a day each way and that is two hours over four days that you could be watching a show in.

Don't try to see everything. Five a day is a lot. Three a day is enough. The mistake of every first-time Fringer is going for ten a day and burning out by Wednesday.

Why this is also a defence of London

A confession — the reason I think the solo Fringe is great is the same reason I think solo gigs and theatre nights in London are great. The compromise tax of going to live events with people is high. The reward for going alone is shows you actually wanted to see, in venues you actually wanted to be at, with a head clearer to receive what's on stage.

If you live in London and you've never done a solo Soho Theatre night or a solo Royal Court preview, do that first. It scales up. Solo Fringe is just solo theatre at festival density.

The wider point is that going to live events alone is a learnable skill, and the Edinburgh Fringe is the best place in the English-speaking world to practise. Eleven months out of the year you might feel weird sitting in a queue alone. In August in Edinburgh, half the queue is alone, and the other half wishes they were.

If you're working out what to see in the meantime, Edinburgh and London comedy listings are a decent jumping-off point — particularly the August work-in-progress shows that travel up to the Fringe.