Naked magicians, blood, sex, clowns and a cute baby — welcome to the freakiest fringe festival yet

It wouldn’t really be a proper fringe, if there wasn’t a bit of onstage nudity – among the festival’s most hardy perennials, after all, is the show, Puppetry Of The Penis, in which two naked blokes perform genital “origami”. But recent years have seen a trend towards versions of acts that would normally be clothed, but are now delivered naked. There is, for instance, naked magic, in the form of The Naked Magicians: two buffed-up Aussie blokes who perform their tricks without the help of clothes. Or naked stand-up, in the form of Miss Glory Pearl, a performer who couldn’t decide what to wear so opted for telling jokes in the nude. This year, you can even go to a night of Naked Cabaret, whose blurb reads “Performers – clothes + Audience – clothes = NAKED CABARET”. The event promises, “A mystery line-up of some of the best performers at the Fringe, as you've (probably) never seen them before… Bring a towel, or something to sit on…”

Mike Tyler, one half of The Naked Magicians, describes their show as “basically like an orgy of comedy, magic and nudity all rolled into one”. No clothes, of course, means fewer hiding places. “We’ve actually got a saying in our show that good magicians don’t need sleeves, but great magicians don’t need pants.” Has being naked helped them stand out from the crowd? “We probably," he says, "get more attention with the title of the show, with having naked in the title.”

Glory Pearl, who is performing only a few dates in her third year at the festival, believes delivering stand-up naked profoundly alters the relationship with the audience. “It creates a really interesting dynamic. It engenders an intimacy very quickly. And also people perceive you as being vulnerable, so they tend to be quite protective.” She believes her nakedness has helped her be noticed. “For somebody who has got no established reputation bringing a show to Edinburgh I actually think I’ve done pretty well. I think I probably got a higher degree of cut-through than I would have done if I hadn’t been naked."

Blood

Fake blood on the fringe stage is nothing new, but menstrual blood is a whole other matter, and this year sees a whole cabaret show dedicated to the subject. Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman, celebrates a natural process normally considered a taboo, hidden from sight, treated as a source of shame, rarely mentioned publicly. Creator and performer, Marisa Carnesky has described it, as “a bit like a Ted talk, but also like a fabulous cabaret show.”

“There is a lot of blood,” she says. “We’re using a couple of pints per show. Not real bloody obviously — we’re working with a very lovely stage blood. Though there’s probably a bit of real blood will appear somewhere.”

Carnesky’s show is part of a wave of feminist activism and art currently intent on celebrating and breaking the shame around menstruation. Expect plenty of startling imagery. Theatre critic Lyn Gardner described a scene from the show: “A woman, naked but for a pair of blood-red shoes, walks to the front of the stage. She removes a lipstick from her vagina and applies it to her lips, transforming them into a crimson gash.”

The show, however, is more designed to move people than shock them, by drawing attention not to what Carnesky describes as the “abject nature of periods", but to “the wonderful cultural and historical rituals and incredible mythology and symbolism that has been hidden and is connected to menstruation.” What she wants to do is change perceptions of women as victims. "I believe there is an enormous power in menstruation that is untapped, that we’ve forgotten about.”

Clowns v Babies

Nothing draws attention like a cute baby does. That theory is at the heart of clown-artist Trygve Wakenshaw’s show, Trygve vs a Baby, in which he takes his own one year old baby on stage, and essentially asks the question, which is more entertaining a clown or a baby? A lot of the show, he has said, revolves around him enjoying playing with 13-month-old son Phineas. “It's me,” he has said, “asking, 'Can we have as much fun on the stage as we do crawling around in the living room at home?'"

But, how does he feel about the fact he's exploiting his baby? "Someone,” Wakenshaw has observed, “wrote something on Facebook, thinking it was using a child for cheap laughs, adding a sad or angry faced emoji. This is someone who hasn't seen the show and doesn't know my work. But, I am nervous about that because it is not my style to mess with the audience in an aggressive or bad way – I want the audience to be having as nice a time as I am."

Toilets

Several years ago, comedian Felicity Ward managed to make a comedy show, What If There Is No Toilet? out of her anxiety and stress around needing the bathroom when there's no opportunity available. This year, Gutted, at the Pleasance, takes the discussion of toilet issues to a whole new level, with a one-woman show that revolves around her experience of ulcerative colitis or inflammatory bowel disease. For performer Liz Richardson it has been a catharsis. “I talk about my operation,” she has said, “and terrible moments like when I heard the operation had damaged my bladder and I might have to catheterise myself for the rest of my life. But I also talk about about lying awake all night because I’ve got this terrible boyfriend who’s really not supporting me and I’m scared of farting in front of him or talking about poo because I just want to be so terribly sexy to him.”

Taboos

You name the taboo, and no doubt the fringe is busting it. Therese Ramstedt, for instance, tells the story of her own abortion in her “humorous, honest” monologue show, Mission Abort. Then, there’s Wank Bank Masterclass, a workshop teaching an array of techniques with the aid of carrots and cucumbers as stand-in props. The tortures of online shaming and revenge porn are explored in Shame, a play which also hopes to launch a social media campaign against online shaming, in which people share their own stories of shame. Red Bastard is back and will no doubt cause a few walk-outs with his show which revolves around free love. And, who knew that vibrators could make an award-winning and hilarious musical? Buzz: The Musical has been described, by Musical Theatre Review as 'The musical – and much funnier – sister of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues'.

Stunts

The biggest festival on earth is a tough gig for newby performers. Often the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stage some outrageous or provocative stunt. Each year, one of these is celebrated with The Malcolm Hardee Award for Cunning Stunts, a prize in honour of the late comedian Malcolm Hardee who was known for such stunts as managing to get his own review of his show published in The Scotsman, and driving naked on a tractor across the stage of another performer’s show.

As John Fleming, creator of the award puts it: “Everyone’s desperate to make people know they exist and one of the best ways to make sure people know they exist is to pull a stunt that will attract some editorial and it doesn’t matter if it’s two lines, that’s more than most shows get in Edinburgh.”

Among his favourite stunts from previous years, was one in which Gareth Ellis deliberately got himself beaten up by his comedy partner, Rich Rose. “They did a video which is online somewhere and his partner just punched him in the face, until he was blue, and had a black eye. He went round telling people, I got beaten up in the street by an irate punter because I was doing a show about Jimmy Savile. And everyone believed him of course, it was printed everywhere.”

Be boring

Given all this, possibly one of the most shocking things you can do on the fringe, is dedicate a show to something inherently boring. The Thermos Museum, a show in the form of a guided tour of an exhibition of a collection of thermoses, came into being when Edinburgh performer Neil Davidson was issued a bet that he couldn’t make anything that boring, interesting. Back for the third time at the fringe, inside a police box near the Pleasance, and with a giant 14ft Thermos model stuck on its front, the surreal affair now has a cult following. Davidson also has a few stunts planned around his new show, Edinburgh Safari. “Later this month,” he says, “I intend to scale the south face of the castle escarpment. Luckily I have all the relevant certificates and training”.