Nude clowns, trad wives and thespians: My trip to Edinburgh for an art-comedy blowout

August in Edinburgh is a month in which the boundaries between life, laughs and art are blurred. To the unfamiliar (where have you been hiding?), the Fringe (est. 1947) is the famous performing arts festival that runs in parallel with the EAF (Edinburgh Arts Festival). The former is the largest of its type in the UK, founded when eight radical theatre troops performed around the city despite being excluded from the more traditional Edinburgh International Festival. I visited the hub of the EAF, where highlights included mixed-media pieces by the likes of Ellis Jackson Kroese, Hamish Halley, Jj Fadaka and Ria Andrews. I tracked down my friends, the brains behind the play Meg & Marge, a sexy satire in which an American trad wife influencer gets possessed by the 15th century mystic Margery Kempe. Under-slept and a little manic, I thought their dramatisation of performance vs reality might be of help as I navigated the dizzying overlap that seems to define both festivals…

The result? A sore throat and a tiny insight into what happens when a city is taken over by clowns, thespians and celeb impersonators. Here’s what went down, in pictures: