This year’s Edinburgh fringe has adopted the slogan Fill Yer Boots!, as if to announce a return to the salad days of cheap tickets, independent venues and £1 Deuchars. But the festival still feels bruised, not so much by the memory of Covid as by its own financial crisis. Seeing most fringe shows is expensive enough; mounting one costs a small fortune, forcing amateurs and professionals alike to shrink their companies to skeleton crews.
This may explain an unusually high proportion of single-performer offerings this year, even among the big-ticket shows. Sold out on its opening weekend, The Ballad of Truman Capote (theSpace @ Niddry Street, ★★) is perhaps the most anticipated one-man show, performed by Patrick Moy and fuelled by the considerable clout of its writer, the Scottish novelist and journalist Andrew O’Hagan.
