News, reviews, features and podcast on theatre across the UK
The British Theatre Guide Newsletter
No 1251: 15 February 2026
Editorial
It’s Edinburgh Fringe time!
Well, clearly it isn’t, as the Fringe is in the middle of summer and it’s literally freezing outside at the moment, but the first batch of 351 shows was announced on Wednesday—as Philip Fisher writes in his feature this week—six months ahead of its opening. There will be further such announcements on 1 April and 6 May before the launch of the full programme on 4 June.
Older Fringe-goers will remember the excitement there used to be for the June launch, waiting for the weighty Fringe brochure to drop through the letterbox then poring over the thousands of listings to see if our favourites would be performing this year. Now, by the time the brochure is launched, which is now more often read as a PDF than on paper, most of the programme will already be known, and anything left will presumably be the shows that the venues or the Fringe Society have deemed the least exciting or headline-worthy.
Perhaps announcing them in stages will give each show more of a chance to be noticed, or people will not notice how much they are spending on tickets if they are not buying them all at once—although this may work out more expensive due to the dreaded booking fees (what other industry charges you a fee for buying their product on top of the price of the product itself?).
This is probably another of those inevitable changes that old theatregoers like me will bemoan while younger people will wonder what the fuss is about, like programmes and paper tickets.
I’ve complained quite a few times about the theatre awards from the Critics’ Circle, of which several of our reviewers and I are members, because they rarely recognise anything outside London. There are practical reasons for this, in that most voting members of the Drama Section are based in London and rarely travel far outside the capital.
This year, the criteria for nominations include a requirement for shows to have been performed in London during the period covered by the awards. This at least is more honest than it has been in the past, even if that criterion wasn’t mentioned in any of the press releases I saw, but it does mean that I won’t be voting, as none of the shortlisted productions has been within 200 miles of me.
Listeners to our podcast will have heard me speak to Dan Rebellato in December, and during that conversation I mentioned the demise of Southport Theatre, which was forced to close during lockdown. Last week, my partner, who grew up in Southport and did her work experience at the theatre, sent me photos of the empty space where it used to be.
Sefton Council said of the original building, “the design report and outline business case developed both demonstrate that ‘make do and mend’ will require continued investment over a prolonged period, and will not enable transformation of the offer to meet market demand.“ In English, they were not prepared to pay to fix it.
Instead, it is replacing the theatre that hosted many great performers over the years—Les Dennis’s comedy partner Dustin Gee collapsed and died during a panto there just 40 years ago—with the Marine Lake Events Centre. The images on the boards surrounding the site of what it will look like are as inspiring as the name. In the list of ten features of the new building listed on the Council’s web site, only one refers to a “flexible theatre /auditorium space”.
Hopefully, the theatre space will be treated more seriously than this makes it seem, and that it will create as many great memories as the old theatre did to give this town a cultural ‘offer’ it needs and deserves.
Our Town (Welsh National Theatre) - Theatr Clwyd, Mold, –
Tina – The Tina Turner Musical (Stage Entertainment, Joop van den Ende and Tali Pelman, in association with Tina Turner) - Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, –
