Performer Tom Bailey on camping at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: 'the perfect, nature-based antidote to a bad review'

Yes, there are downsides: Needing a wee at 3am is the king of them. Or midsummer downpours drenching the canvas. Or upstart crows pillaging your sandwich if you accidentally leave it outside the tent. But after a few years of camping at the Edinburgh Fringe, it is (for me) infinitely better than any shared floorspace or appropriated student digs or cut-throat rental property on offer. Which is ironic considering where it all started. In 2018 I came to the Fringe as a marsh warbler, a tiny bird that migrates between the UK and Africa. The show was called Zugunruhe - a quaint ornithology term for ‘migratory restlessness in birds’, when they compulsively twitch and shiver in preparation for migration flight. I enjoyed bouncing and flitting around on stage like a clown-animal, and the show gratefully picked up a Herald Angel award. Underneath, the performance explored temporariness, nomadic migration, travelling light. It was made partly in response to the so-called European ‘migration crisis’, which still continues. Fed up with the sour and dead-end political discourses surrounding human migration, I wanted to explore migration as something that has creatively evolved through nature - in this case, the mind-blowing journeys of birds. Prior to making the show I had been volunteering at the Calais ‘Jungle’ migrants camp, sleeping and working in a second-hand tent city. When I got to the Fringe two years later, something in me couldn’t stomach the savage exclusivity of the Edinburgh accommodation market, which similarly divides the world into Haves and Have Nots; Insiders and Outsiders. It felt in the spirit of the show’s process to re-pitch camp here.

There are a few Fringe camping joints on offer, some considerably better than others. My first encounter (somewhere near Edinburgh airport) was a disaster. After six sleepless hours of planes thundering overhead, I packed down at 5am and left a pissed-off note at the campsite reception. Wild camping somewhere in the Pentland Hills wasn’t practical either - the at-sea madness of the Fringe necessitates some daily anchor to return to - access to a warm shower, a couple of home comforts. I then discovered somewhere up near Mortonhall, and haven’t looked back. It’s in the city’s hinterlands, but close enough for a 20 minute cycle in. You lay camp in the grounds of a former stately home, where Highland cattle nonchalantly browse and chew in the surrounding fields, and a local garden centre does a banging cream tea. A nearby nature reserve-cum-golf course offers fantastic morning runs, albeit chastened by golfers effing and blinding at you to get off the fairway (I swear the OS Map peppers a few public footpaths across there). Over the 4 Fringes that I’ve stayed there, I’ve come to love what camping here offers - the perfect, nature-based antidote to a shit review; or a great vista to celebrate a good one, gazing out across the city toward Arthur’s Seat. And above all, a wild place beyond the noise where you can retreat, rest, and keep mental health afloat.

My genial attempts to invite company members to camp too have been met with mixed success. Some hate it, some love it, the ratio being about 70/30. We had a company camping blast in 2019, but I was met with a firm no in 2022. I’m back here soloing again in 2024, sensing how camping and staying close to nature have become a core part of my process and DNA of theatre making. I’m a nature artist, creating work through my company, Mechanimal. I’m passionate about finding fresh new narratives and experiences in these strange Anthropocene times (in counterpoint to data-heavy, info-led, apocalyptic, or other usual climate discourses). I’ve just returned from touring a show to Denmark, for which which I spent 2 months walking over 800 km across Scotland, Norway and Denmark (sailing across the North Sea), often wild camping on the way (here’s a journey blog). It is part of an EU/ Danish-supported project exploring radical new modes of touring theatre in a changing world. For me, wild camping up through the turquoise-and-white lacquered beaches of the Outer Hebrides, or high up on a glacial plateau in Norway, were more inspiring and soul-opening than any good show or film. Living and working in nature now feeds the performances that I make - whether that’s Fringe camping, or tenting it in a Brazilian rainforest for 6 months during the pandemic (I got stuck there while on vacation in early 2020).

Ever an Outsider, I’m back at the same site for the Fringe this year - again as a clown-animal on stage, but this time trying to embody 26,000 of them in the space of an hour. Vigil is an award-winning show about a guy tragicomically trying and failing to ‘do’ the animals - as both a gentle and urgent metaphor for the current mass extinction happening. Across the next year (with this show and other nature-focused performance projects) I’ll be making, camping and touring in Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Portugal, Croatia, Czech Rep., Lithuania and South America - most of that involving green travel. Camping at the Fringe, for me, has become part of something much bigger - a nomadic, light, and earthen practice of living and making on a changing planet.

Vigil, Zoo Southside, 20-25 August, 12.30pm