Brighton Fringe returns this May with a programme that spans apocalyptic clown comedy, award-winning drag storytelling, intimate dance-theatre and everything gloriously in between. Now in its 21st year, the festival cements its position as the third-largest Fringe festival in the world — and one of the most reliably surprising weekends on Brighton’s cultural calendar.
As an open-access festival, Brighton Fringe operates on a simple and radical principle: any artist can put on an event and perform. The result is a programme that mixes polished touring productions with raw new work, local voices with international acts, and mainstream accessibility with genuinely boundary-pushing performance. This year’s line-up delivers on all of it.
Theatre and Dance
The theatre programme is anchored by Jonny Woo’s Suburbia — an award-winning piece of drag storytelling that has built a devoted following on the festival circuit and arrives in Brighton with its reputation firmly intact. Are You Even Indian? offers something more intimate: a dance-theatre work exploring identity and migration that has drawn strong critical attention for its emotional precision.
MAN!FEST brings drag boyband comedy to the stage in what promises to be one of the more raucous evenings of the festival, while Custard Club takes a camper, queerer route through performance and spectacle. Rounding out the theatre highlights, NIUSIA is a powerful examination of legacy and identity that provides one of the programme’s more meditative counterpoints to the mayhem elsewhere.
For those tracking Brighton’s growing reputation as a hub for queer performance and experimental theatre, this year’s programme represents another significant step forward — both in the ambition of individual productions and the breadth of voices being platformed.
Comedy
The comedy line-up is characteristically diverse. RATMAGEDDON leads with apocalyptic sketch-clown mayhem — the kind of show that is almost impossible to describe and entirely necessary to see. Police Cops: The Original brings high-energy 80s physical comedy that has been packing out venues on the national circuit, while CHILD STAR delivers queer musical comedy with a theatrical edge.
Guess Boo promises a raunchy spiritual journey (the programme notes do not elaborate further, which feels correct), and The Cycling Man rounds things out with the kind of offbeat character comedy that Brighton audiences have historically been among the most receptive to in the country.
The full programme spans venues across Brighton, Hove and beyond throughout May. Tickets and the complete schedule are available at brightonfringe.org — and given the festival’s open-access nature, the full breadth of what’s on offer extends considerably beyond the highlights listed here. Brighton in May tends to reward spontaneity as much as forward planning.
Brighton Fringe 2026 runs throughout May. Full listings at brightonfringe.org.
