ASK any arts lover “who makes the Fringe?” and most will agree it is the artists.

WHERE would the Traverse Theatre’s Edinburgh festivals programme be without Irish writers, actors and companies? The most cursory consideration of recent years – in which the theatre’s stages have been graced by such shows as Enda Walsh’s Medicine (2021), Michael John O’Neill’s This Is Paradise (2021 and 2022), Meghan Tyler’s Crocodile Fever (2019) and David Ireland’s Ulster American (2018) – show that the festival offerings of Scotland’s new writing theatre rely very heavily

THE strange, tentative Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021 was drawing to a close. The social distancing at the eerily quiet Traverse Theatre was so rigorous that it felt like one’s fellow audience members were sitting in a different postcode.

AS the 75th anniversaries of the independence of Pakistan and India approach, an extraordinary event is being planned on the south side of Glasgow.

THE UK is in the grip of a summer of industrial discontent. From a series of strikes across the railways to industrial action by members of the Communication Workers’ Union at BT and Openreach, an estimated 85,000 workers took strike action throughout the UK in the week just past.

HOW better to start the Edinburgh Fringe 2022 than with a drama about a struggling female actor who – in the midst of the audition process for a theatre production based upon Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie Psycho – kills one of the pre-eminent stage directors of the day?

CANDIDE, the satirical novella by Voltaire, is one of the great works of philosophical literature. First published in 1759, the book takes a darkly comic sideswipe at the inordinate optimism of those who believed that “all is for the best in this best of possible worlds”.

IMAGINE the scene: a theatre at Eton College, an expectant audience awaits a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III, and, playing the titular, hunchbacked villain, one Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aged 18. However, Johnson arrives on stage woefully under-rehearsed and incapable of remembering his lines.

THE world has looked on in horror as – despite the chaos of his presidency and the appalling attack by his supporters on the US Capitol building on January 6 of last year – Donald Trump has continued to wield his malign influence over the Republican Party.

DECIDING what to see at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Edinburgh International Festival and their various sibling festivals can be a daunting task. That is particularly true this year, as the biggest arts showcase in the world returns to full, pre-pandemic strength.