Greater Manchester Fringe returns this July with all the gusto of a reinvented Britpop B-side, serving up 75 shows in 17 venues across the city’s pubs, old mills, railway arches, and – because this is Fringe, after all – Stockport Railway Station. The festival runs 1 July to 2 August and opens with the usual fanfare: a launch party on 14 June at the Kings Arms, that spiritual HQ of Northern experimental theatre and enthusiastic gin consumption.
Now in its umpteenth year of championing the brilliant, the baffling and the very much still in development, the 2025 programme leans heavily into new writing. Three freshly-minted plays – I Don’t Want to Play Anymore by Libby Hall, Adult Orphans by Becca Ashton, and Boys We Knew by Emilia Chinnery – are products of the Shelagh Delaney New Writing Award at Salford Arts Theatre, directed by Roni Ellis. Chinnery, 18, is making her professional debut with a play about three young Salford lads clinging to dreams of Oasis-level fame with none of the follow-through. “They come across as quite angry at the world and angry at women,” she says. One imagines a great deal of yelling in bucket hats.
Elsewhere, the festival is positively spilling over with theatre that blurs boundaries and occasionally common sense. Dr Black is Dead at The Fitzgerald is part murder mystery, part magic show, with audiences invited to solve the case or become suspects themselves – Fringe meets Cluedo with a touch of Derren Brown. Fallen Bodies at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation rewrites humanity’s origin story through the lens of disability, with writer-performer Oliver Turner and director Shannon Black promising incisive comedy and, presumably, a few raised eyebrows. Missed Calls, a headphone play with mime and contemporary dance (of course), closes out the festival at Hallé St Peters, inviting audiences to eavesdrop on a crumbling relationship one voicemail at a time.
Other highlights include Karma, a new musical from first-timer Archie Jackson, and One Hundred Percent, Precarious Theatre’s offering described as a “dark comedy” – always an encouraging phrase. Award-winning ETAL Theatre returns with Wink, tackling toxic masculinity in the digital age, presumably somewhere between Tinder and an incel Reddit thread. Songs in the Key of Love brings choral tenderness and poetry to men’s mental health at Hallé St Michaels, while Railway 200, a free promenade show at Stockport Station, sold out faster than you can say “platform theatre”.
For younger audiences (or their more patient parents), Neysa Killeen offers Irish storytelling at the new 422 Community Hub in Longsight, with sessions split by age – because apparently even seven-year-olds are picky now. Meanwhile, Happy As Pye includes BSL and neurodiverse leads, ticking the much-needed representation boxes with actual substance.
Stand-up comedy is, as ever, well stocked with names that range from circuit staples to nervy newcomers with jokes about flatshares and therapy. Mitch Benn, Amy Webber, Jonathan Mayor and Becky Fury are all on the bill, joined by a scattering of award-winners, improv troupes and probably at least one person doing an entire set from the point of view of a sentient vape pen.
In an era of ticket pricing that seems to demand a mortgage broker, Fringe co-founder Lisa Connor offers welcome clarity: “There is no dynamic pricing.” It’s a rare thing – a festival that remains defiantly affordable, staunchly inclusive, and wholly unbothered about where you trained, if at all.
Use your favourite search engine to find tickets for Greater Manchester Fringe – get them while you can, before the Salford lads form another band instead.
