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Fringebiscuit began with a question: how do you make quality arts criticism radically accessible?
Our answer was to meet audiences where they are. In 2011 that meant Twitter (RIP), and bite-sized reviews that ran the length of a tweet — aka #Twittiques. Not because the thinking was small, but because the reader we cared about wasn't at home with a broadsheet. They were halfway up the Royal Mile, mobile in hand, with fifteen minutes and hundreds of shows to choose from.
Fifteen years and 1,000-odd Twittiques later, we're still obsessed with short form. Boiling a show down to 280 characters that are fair, precise and entertaining takes longer than most people assume — and we often do it in teams rather than alone, so several sets of eyes go into every line.
We've kept our charitable roots, too. Over the years we've covered the travel, accommodation and training that get young people and emerging critics to a notoriously expensive festival and let them learn to review the only way anyone really does: by seeing far too much and writing about all of it.
More recently we've moved on to other platforms, experimented with (slightly) longer forms, multimedia, data analytics, newsletters, and we're always looking for the next thing worth trying. We remain, however, shamelessly curated.
If you're interested in what we do, or you're looking for a review, reach out to our editor, Aisha, at editorial@fringebiscuit.com
Fringebiscuit Studio is walled off from our reviews. We never sell coverage, and a Studio booking never buys a positive review. Our criticism is — and always will be — independent.