Five Stars and a Full House: Elaine C Smith Reminds Edinburgh Why the Fringe Still Matters

Elaine C Smith has picked up a rare five-star review at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe for her performance in Cathy, Eilidh Loan's dark new comedy about grief, grit, and the kind of Scottish grandmother you either had or wished you did. It is the sort of show that reminds you what live performance is actually for. And if you run a business in this city right now, the timing is worth paying attention to.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the largest arts festival in the world. That is not a boast; it is a fact that the Edinburgh Reporter, VisitScotland, and the Fringe Society itself have documented for decades. Around 3,000 shows across 300 venues. Roughly three million ticket sales in a single August. And somewhere in that extraordinary sprawl this year, Elaine C Smith is performing Cathy to a room that, according to the Edinburgh Reporter's reviewer, left without a dry eye or an unfilled lung.

The show is written by Eilidh Loan and centres on an eponymous grandmother navigating loss with fury and humour in roughly equal measure. Smith, best known to Scottish audiences as Mary Doll in Rab C Nesbitt, brings what the Edinburgh Reporter describes as a performance that moves from hilarity to heartache in the turn of a phrase. That is a rare skill. Most shows manage one or the other. Five stars suggests this one is doing both, and doing them well.

For anyone who has not seen Smith on stage before, this is the version of her that live theatre was built for. She has spent four decades doing the work in Scottish theatre, television, and comedy, and that depth shows in the kind of role that lesser performers would flatten into sentiment or reduce to gag. According to the Scottish Theatre community and critics who have followed her career, Smith has always been most formidable when the material asks her to hold contradictions; funny and bereft, warm and fierce, present and broken. Cathy, by all accounts, asks exactly that.

The Fringe's economic impact on Edinburgh is significant and direct. The Edinburgh Festival City partnership estimates the combined summer festivals inject hundreds of millions of pounds into the local economy annually, supporting accommodation, hospitality, transport, retail, and services across the city. For SME owners in Edinburgh, August is not just culturally interesting; it is one of the most commercially consequential months of the year. Every five-star word of mouth spreads fast in a city this size during festival season.

Cathy is the kind of show that earns its run the hard way: through performance rather than marketing spend, through a writer who trusted her material and a lead actor who trusted the writer. In a Fringe that produces thousands of shows every August, a genuine five-star review in a publication as closely read as the Edinburgh Reporter carries real weight. If you have not booked a seat yet, the window is short and the rooms are filling.

What this means for you: If your business depends on footfall during August, the Fringe is still your single best organic marketing environment. A presence near a five-star word-of-mouth show, whether that is a café, a printer, a transport service, or a pop-up, is worth more than most paid campaigns. Check the Fringe programme at edfringe.com for venue clusters near Cathy's run and think about whether your business is visible where the audiences already are.