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Edinburgh city centre during the 2025 Fringe festival was as chaotic and sunburnt as a Malaga strip, with the presence of aircon being as much of a draw as a five-star review from the Guardian.
Although I was there for just two days, and purely as a punter, I’m happy to report that the immersive ethos was well represented across a variety of different shows.
One of my favourites was Let the Best Man Win, hosted by comedian and presenter Niall Gray. The audience were all guests at a fictional wedding, welcomed into the space by Niall’s character DJ Dave on the decks.
Once seated, two ticket-holders who had never met before (in fact one of them had never even been on a date before) were picked as the newlyweds. As they sat on stage and made their way speedily through a bottle of wine, randomly-selected audience members in the fictional roles of friends and relatives told tall tales about the couples’ history. This culminated in three comedians getting up in turn to give their own best man’s speech, incorporating all of the above information, and competing for an audience vote at the end of the show.
On the creation of the immersive improv show, Niall said: “As an audience member it’s always fun to feel like you’re part of a unique performance at a comedy show, and the fact that this show was just heavily reliant on the audience to make the show itself, each night you know it’s going to be completely different.”
The show also slightly changed shape during its run, with later versions bringing up real life couples from the audience with existing lore to mine from; “It gives the comedians a bit more fun to play around with those real life stories from their relationship,” said Niall, “and also I think it made them feel a bit more comfortable onstage knowing that they were in this together,” so maybe the wine went down a bit slower on subsequent nights.
From a sham wedding to a shambolic competition, Not Another Quiz Night is to the pub quiz what Shooting Stars was to University Challenge. Honed over regular residencies in London, it’s a variety show of stand-up, sketches, celebrity impersonations, and frantic challenges designed for minimum production cost and maximum hilarity, all wrapped up in the participatory pretence of a competitive evening.
Of course the point isn’t to win a quiz, the point is to see all of the above play out in the very loose context of one. Organiser and host Jake Bhardwaj said: “The quiz is really important so that the non-quiz bits can feel as sort of anarchic as they do. I don’t think they would if we didn’t have the actual quiz questions acting as a sort of teacher in the room.” And to that point, I had a great time, but I couldn’t tell you who won, what prize we were competing for, or whether there even was one.
For a bit of dark relief, eerie audio storytellers Darkfield brought their distinctive shipping containers to the Fringe as they have for every in-person festival since they brought their first show Seance in 2017. It’s become a pattern for new shows to be programmed in Summerhall, while existing shows are outside the Pleasance Dome. This year visitors could try Eulogy, Arcade, or Darkfield Radio.
Co-director Glen Neath said: “The festival has always been successful for us because the shows fit well within a festival context; their brevity also means people can easily fit them in between other shows,” also noting that it works among the comedy in a multi-faceted crowd because “for me there is plenty of room for both, and I think the work finds its audience.”
A look through the programme suggested some other innovative approaches to immersion, such as A Teen Odyssey – a physical theatre show with its own app for audience participation – and Agent November’s series of escape games as family-friendly activities mixing narrative, puzzles and comedy.
I was sad to miss Another Sight, a play performed in complete darkness by both blind and sighted actors, which takes us away from the idea that ‘immersive’ has to mean ‘surrounded by digital technology’, instead using darkness as a device.
The latter being a startlingly tech-light example of something tagged as ‘immersive’ brings me to a point of personal confusion.
This might be a bit Captain Obvious, but just because a show or artwork uses a lot of technology, especially AI, it doesn’t mean it’s immersive. Something can use AI and can be immersive – of course – but the inclusion of AI doesn’t come with any inherent immersiveness if there are no additional steps taken to make it so.
An example of a show that achieved both was The Waiting Room, which empowered audience members to influence their surroundings and the story via AI and their phones. But at the other end of the spectrum was an experience I won’t name (and which is probably just one of a number of examples) which had the word ‘immersive’ written throughout its marketing so generously that I felt compelled to see it, even though the overview was otherwise very vague. It turned out to be some prose delivered to the audience, in front of a flat screen which was showing a series of AI-generated images. Poetic – yes, visual – very, but not immersive.
To quote Josephine Machon in her article What is Immersive?: “So how can you tell what it is when you’re in it? Well, that’s exactly it – you will be in it, rather than looking on at it.”
In practice ‘immersive’ is meaningless unless it’s an adjective that can be applied to an actual product – like something being ‘3D’ or ‘virtual’ or ‘hypoallergenic’. For example, every immersive experience I’ve ever encountered has been an immersive version of something – theatre, film, art exhibition, audio story. Some of them don’t even use the word in their marketing, they just are.
If it were up to me (and it shouldn’t be), I’d interrogate everyone using that ‘immersive’ tag and ask them:
- What is this thing an immersive version of?
- What have you done to make it immersive?
- What is the resulting difference between your immersive version and a non-immersive version of that thing?
If no satisfactory answer to those questions – not immersive. And if any of the answers are just ‘AI’ – immersed in jail immediately.
Immersive Experience Network members also raved about another show called Undersigned, which describes itself as ‘a deeply personal and introspective psychological thriller for an audience of one… Your participation will involve an invocation, a blindfold, and a pointed discussion’. I would love to tell you more about it but I’m limited to the information the creators decide to give, which is that ‘management believes firmly that entering into your Appointment with an absolutely minimum of expectations or foreknowledge is of great value to participants’. Wild with curiousity, I will be keeping a keen eye on their website to look for future tours.
If you’re bringing an immersive show to Edinburgh Fringe 2026, let me know in advance so I can make it (especially if you’re going to be all mysterious about it otherwise).
