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On the Road to Edinburgh: My Durham Fringe Picks for 2026

Nicholas Abrams Nicholas Abrams
25 Jul 2026

There are few better ways to ease yourself into a month at the Edinburgh Fringe than spending a few days in Durham.

Somewhere will be this year’s unexpected gem

This will be my second consecutive visit to the Durham Fringe Festival and, after being so well looked after by the team last year, returning was an easy decision. I’ll once again be staying in Durham Castle (yes, you really can stay there), spending time at the festival hub on Palace Green beneath the cathedral and soaking up the atmosphere before the annual sprint north to Edinburgh. I just need to remember one important lesson from last year: don’t assume the walk from Durham railway station to the castle is manageable when you’re hauling a month’s worth of luggage. Trust me on that one.

Now in its sixth year, Durham Fringe has grown from just four venues to 11, with more than 140 shows filling the city’s theatres, pubs, churches and performance spaces. Like any fringe festival, that’s both exciting and slightly daunting. One of the joys of these festivals is that you never quite know what you’re going to get. Last year I found some genuine gems, alongside a handful of productions that were, shall we say, unmistakably “fringe”. That’s all part of the experience, and exactly why I was so keen to come back.

Being one of Britain’s most famous university cities, it’s no surprise that student theatre features heavily throughout the programme. One production that immediately caught my eye is Flat 504 from TIN Theatre. Set in a chaotic first-year student flat, it promises an unfiltered look at university life through a Brechtian lens, following seven students as they navigate friendships, deadlines, heartbreaks and the occasional hangover. Every fringe festival seems to produce one student show that breaks out from the pack. It’ll be interesting to see whether Flat 504 can become this year’s word-of-mouth success.

I first came across Chris Cook’s Fake at Prague Fringe earlier this year but never managed to fit it into my schedule, so I’m delighted to catch it before it heads to Edinburgh. Mixing magic, comedy and storytelling around a true tale of forgery and deception, it sounds like the sort of show where the illusions exist to serve the narrative rather than simply impress an audience. At the opposite end of the theatrical spectrum sits BrainSoup Collective’s Thresholds, whose wonderfully baffling premise involves a post-apocalyptic wasteland, three survivors, a banana, a lightbulb and a fork. Quite how those ingredients fit together remains a mystery, but if nothing else it’s already won my award for the programme’s most intriguing blurb.

Trevor Bickles: Where to Guv? turns the spotlight onto life behind the wheel of a London black cab, drawing on the strange passengers and stranger conversations that come with the job. If anyone has accumulated enough stories for a stand-up show, it’s probably a London cabbie. Then there’s Will BF: MOON TEAM IIIV, a title that immediately appealed to my love of all things space-related, promising sketches, songs, multimedia chaos and science-fiction absurdity. And then there’s Yes, My Lord… Proceed with Caution, which may well have the easiest sell of the entire festival. Pitching itself as Yes, Prime Minister meets Blackadder, it imagines George Stephenson attempting to launch the Rocket while committees debate whether travelling at 15mph might cause “spontaneous eyeball ejection”.

Not everything on my list is aiming for laughs. One of the downsides of disappearing to the Edinburgh Fringe every August is spending a month away from my cats, so I’m always a soft touch for productions involving animals. A Tail for Our Future combines puppetry, movement and live music to tell the story of a grieving young girl whose life is changed by an encounter with a fox. It sounds touching, imaginative and hopefully more The Animals of Farthing Wood than Watership Down. Having only recently returned from Toronto Fringe, I’m also looking forward to Online Presence, the award-winning work by John Arthur Sweet, who spent more than two decades studying and working in Toronto.

Finally, there’s Oranges and Lemons, a ghost story that feels perfectly suited to Durham’s medieval surroundings. A group of former school friends gather to remember their old headmistress before conversations turn towards hauntings and the ghosts of the past. The only slight concern is that I’ll then have to make my way back through Durham Castle to my room. Perhaps I should leave a light on.

One of the great pleasures of any fringe festival is that the show you’re most excited about is rarely the one you end up talking about over breakfast the following morning. Somewhere among Durham’s 140-plus productions will be this year’s unexpected gem, the performance everyone starts recommending to strangers in the queue for coffee.

I can’t wait to find out which one it will be.

Nicholas Abrams

Nicholas Abrams

Nick runs Broadway Baby's Brighton operation.

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