It is festival season and that means that in the next month there is so many great comedy festivals to look forward to! This month we are looking at some of the great shows that you can see at the Edinburgh Fringe. So take note because we are going to give you all the information you need for just a handful of some of the great shows happening this year!
Mythos: Ragnarök
Location: Music Hall at Assembly Rooms (Venue 20)
Dates: Aug 6th-11th, 13th-17th, 19th-23rd, 25th-29th
Time: 12:25
Price: £18 Concessions £17
Ticket Link: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/mythos-ragnar-k
Hello! Tell us all about your show!
Our show is Mythos: Ragnarök, which combines Norse mythology and pro wrestling into a theatrical extravaganza unlike anything else. Ed writes and directs it; Mel designs and makes it; together we produce it and tour it around the world.
What other acts are you looking forward to seeing at the fringe?
We rarely have time to see anything at the Fringe, but we’d love to see Ten Thousand Hours. They’re normally on at the same time as us, but this year there might be an opportunity!
Have you done the fringe before? What are the key pieces of advice you have been given or would give to new groups or people performing at the fringe.
Yes this will be our fifth time at the Fringe. The best advice we can give would depend on why someone is going: If you’re there for the experience, get up in the morning and see as many shows as you can outside of your own. Use your artist pass as much as possible (it’s the only perk you get for being part of the city’s biggest economic boost) and make sure to see small shows as well as big ones, and always throw some wild cards into the mix because you never know what you’ll come across.
It feels like the month will last forever, but it’s over before you know it so push it as hard as you can and recover later. If you’re there to develop, make connections or – heaven forbid – earn some money, the best advice I can give is to work even harder than you thought possible. There is always something more you can be doing and, trust me, somebody else is. Something I love about the Fringe is that it gives you nothing: you have to work for and earn everything.
Talk us through your daily routine for a day at the Fringe
Our average working day at the Fringe is about sixteen hours long. Mel gets up before anyone else in our company, to make sure she can get our costumes washed and dried in time for the show. When Ed wakes up the first thing he does is check our ticket sales for the coming evening.
This helps us track our momentum and the effect of our daily promotional activities, but it’s also something he can do from bed – which is handy because it can take a while for his body to start working. Mel spends her morning washing, drying, fixing and tweaking costumes, while Ed does production work: interviews and press from the days before, meetings with promoters and venues for future bookings, and producing the events we have coming up after the festival. When we’re performing in one place, we have shows in half a dozen other countries coming up that all need accommodation, transport, permits, tech and marketing.
While Mel is making and developing costume, Ed spends three or four hours each afternoon street flyering and promoting the show to people in the various hubs of the Fringe. Promotion is, by a long way, the main workload at the Fringe: if you want people to come and see your show instead of one of the thousands of other shows, you have to let them know it’s happening and give them a reason to come.
We’re very lucky that our wonderful cast do a couple of hours of f lyering every day on top of their performances, which is a big workload for them but our show is so much more fun with a big crowd in. It’s also extremely expensive to put it on, so we need hundreds of people there every night to pay for everything! 7pm onwards is dedicated to putting the show on: setting up, performing and taking everything back down again.
After the show Ed spends around an hour meeting and chatting with the audience and Mel gathers, sorts and packs away the costume ready for washing and mending. Then we try to find somewhere nearby that is still serving food and/or drink. We are normally back at the accommodation around 1am to shower and eat and take care of the fundamental aspects of staying alive that we have overlooked during the day. A show like ours takes a while to wind down from, but we are normally in bed around 3am or 4am.
Ok, where is your favourite place to eat at the Fringe?
Every year we find a new favourite place to eat and by the time we come back the next year, it has closed! We’re always on the lookout for late-night eateries, but we tend to just grab street food from the vendors outside our venues because it’s easy. There are a couple of little restaurants that we sneak off to on our own, but we keep those a secret otherwise we’d never get any peace.
Best thing about performing at the fringe?
We love performing our show, so the chance to do it every day for a whole month remains a dream come true even five years down the line. Theatre people take that sort of thing for granted, but there isn’t a wrestling show on Earth that performs in the same venue every night – it’s really special for us. You would be amazed how many people come back to our show over and over again throughout the festival – it’s practically a fringe institution by now.
Do you bring anything special from home to make it feel more special whilst you are away?
We have each other and that’s as much as we can ask for. For most artists, being away on tour means being away from the person you love – but we get to share these experiences, good and bad, and relive them over and over again as time goes on.
What are your best hacks to save money whilst at the Fringe?
We can’t think of any hacks, but we recommend you find accommodation outside of Edinburgh, cook for yourself and bring food in with you, and remember to use your artist discount at bars and street food vendors. People complain about the cost and workload of the Fringe, but there’s always a way to make it work: the first year we just slept in a van in a carpark outside of the city.
If people want to find out more about you, where can they follow you on social media?
I’m @thustheguild on Instagram and the show is @mythos.theatre
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