The Power and Absurdity of Fringe Review Culture

In 2025, I was invited deeper inside the Edinburgh Fringe. I was asked to write reviews for one of the staple review sites, and that revealed a whole other side to this festival, and to the theater industry at large.

This was important to me because my first year there, solely as a performer, something was abundantly clear:

If you want to make money, run a venue.
If you want power, write reviews.
If you want to be desperate, do a show.

I have no interest in all the operational mayhem that goes into running a venue at the largest arts festival in the world. But reviews? Those I can handle.

My hot take: reviewers have an immense amount of influence, and most of it is undeserved. These are single individuals with single perspectives whose words can shape ticket sales, morale, and reputations. And a lot of them have no idea what they’re looking at.

I read reviews of excellent shows that were middling or downright bad, not because the work wasn’t strong, but because the reviewer just didn’t get it. Which would be fine, if that misunderstanding didn’t ripple out into a public judgment that might haunt the performer online forever.

I want to be clear: reviewers are a crucial part of the ecosystem. In my opinion, artists can be too kind to one another. We’re so afraid of losing face or discouraging each other that we often avoid saying what’s actually useful. Reviewers can serve that function—to push, provoke, and hold standards. They deserve the freedom to be critical, even negative. That’s how the work gets better.

But honesty and competence aren’t the same thing.

At the Fringe, it’s almost as easy to become a reviewer as it is to become a performer. You just need a reviewing platform to vouch for you. Literally, all my editor had to do was upload a form letter into Google Docs, which I then personalized. It essentially said, She’ll be writing for us. That was it. No background check, no vetting, no questions about credentials or taste. In less than a day, I had a press pass.

For what it’s worth, if you’ve been reading and wondering, Who the fuck is Danielle? And why should I care what she thinks?—that’s exactly my point. You should be asking that question.

You can always spot the reviewer in the audience. They’re alone, with a notebook and pen, and a bright orange lanyard signaling: It’s me. I’m the one who’ll decide your fate.

Many of these outlets are volunteer-run, which means there’s no pay, no training, no mentorship. So while some reviewers are articulate, insightful, and discerning, others write like they’re reviewing a middle school play. I’ve read “reviews” that are just inaccurate plot synopses or baffling moral judgments about the performer. Many are brief, emotionally charged opinion pieces that fail to back up any claim they make.

When that’s the level of output, it’s insulting to the artists who’ve poured years into creating their work. Too often, a novice with no theater background takes a week off from their desk job, blasts through ten shows a day, and slaps together a half-baked review to feel important and score free tickets.

I know many artists are desperate for reviews, but come on. If you want people to truly bring art, review on that level. Without that depth, reviews at best feel like the shallow game of social-media comments and compliments.

Meanwhile, the good reviewers—the ones who can actually write, analyze, and articulate what a show is doing—are rare and increasingly overworked. Traditional press outlets keep cutting arts coverage, so the volunteer reviewers are often all that’s left. And when the system relies on volunteers, the output ends up being wildly inconsistent.

That’s why I’ve stopped following publications and started following people. You can tell, after a while, who actually understands performance and who’s just sending empty adjectives and well wishes (or damnations) into the void.

Because at the Fringe, like everything else, the review system is open access. That’s the beauty and the chaos of it. Anybody can perform. Anybody can review. And sometimes great art gets missed or misunderstood because the wrong reviewer’s in the audience, or not there at all.

The same openness that lets a genius from Manila or Milwaukee debut on equal footing with a West End veteran also lets amateurs with press passes dictate reputations.

And that’s the paradox of the Fringe: it’s the most democratic art festival in the world—and democracy, as we know, doesn’t always reward the wisest voices.