In this podcast, Paul Levy looks at the unique potential and role of empathy in maintaining an enhancing our well-being amongst all attentions of crowded, busy, and high stakes arts festivals such as the Edinburgh Fringe

Fringe festivals and other arts events can be places of tension and stress. This is a deeper look at the concept and practise of unconditional positive regard, drawn from the practise of person-centered therapy.

Developing and maintaining unconditional positive regard is a very specific and yet practical way of ensuring that we can be calm, positive and feel authentic in the way we engage with the stresses and strains of being creative as well as performing at some of the most stressful fringe festivals.

So what is unconditional positive regard? Building upon a video that began to look at this, Paul Levy, founder of FtingeReview, takes this a bit further.

Unconditional positive regard video

Ok, I admit it. I am about to be a hypocrite because I do not like acronyms and I am about to offer you one.

This one is fairly clunky and unmemorable.

But it might just be worth remembering it to maximise the chances of getting press coverage for your fringe show.

At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, most approaches to journalists fail before they are finished reading the first sentence. The problem is rarely the work itself. It is the assumption that coverage is owed, or that a generic press release will cut through a crowded inbox. Journalists are looking for relevance, clarity, and a reason to pay attention. If you cannot provide those quickly, they will move on.

This framework is a blunt tool to help you avoid being ignored.

I introduce you to …

PAIPE: A Practical Approach to successfully Engaging Reviewers and Journalists

I am not kidding but that is what I’ve come up with. But go with me on this because I think each section is pretty useful and the acronym kind of works…

It goes in sequential steps…

Personalise

Use the reviewer’s name and, if relevant, their job title at the start of the message. This shows that the approach is intended for them and not part of a mass email. A direct opening is enough. It establishes a professional tone and signals respect for their role.

Acknowledge

Show that you understand what they cover. A brief reference to the type of work they review or the section they are responsible for is sufficient. This demonstrates relevance and helps them see why you have contacted them rather than another outlet.

Informate

Provide clear factual details about the show. Include title, venue, dates, times, duration, ticket price, and access information. Add a short description that explains what the work is. Avoid inflated claims. Reviewers need accurate information to decide whether they can attend and whether the show fits their remit.

Persuade

State, in a few lines, why the show may be of interest to their readers. This could relate to the subject, the form, a new piece of writing, or a distinctive collaboration. Keep the tone measured. The purpose is to indicate relevance, not to oversell.

Ease

Make the practical steps simple. Explain how to request a review ticket and provide links to images and press material. Include a clear contact name and email address. When access to tickets and information is straightforward, it is easier for journalists to commit to coverage.

So …

Coverage at the Fringe is not a right and it is not a favour. Journalists are balancing limited space, competing priorities, and the needs of their readers. If you respect that reality and make your approach useful to them, you may start a conversation. If you treat them as a marketing channel, you will be deleted. Yikes.

See you on the fringe circuit somewhere soon, but in the meantime, drop us an email.

Paul Levy, Editor, FringeReview.

Brighton, UK, 2026

Watch it here:

For me, a reviews publication editor and theatre maker, this raises a bunch of frown-worthy questions:

What does it mean for liveness at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe when ideas, scripts, images or even performers may be partially shaped by systems that do not experience risk, embarrassment or failure in the human sense?

When audiences laugh, are they responding to craft, to novelty, or to a subtle anxiety about not knowing whether a human or a machine was responsible for what they are seeing and hearing?

How might the Fringe tradition of rough edges, unfinished thinking and productive mistakes be altered if artists increasingly lean on tools designed to optimise clarity, coherence and appeal?

In a festival built on voice and plurality, who gets amplified when AI enters the room, and whose labour, style or cultural inheritance quietly disappears into the background?

If the Fringe has always been a testing ground for the future of performance, what responsibilities do artists, programmers and audiences now carry in deciding which futures they are rehearsing?

It is very easy to ensure your experience as a Fringe performer is dire and spirit crushing.

Just follow these top five tips and you’re sure to hit the bottom quickly and effectively…

1. Financial Self Sabotage
Make it all about money. Become fixated on making a profit and ensure every empty seat is a sign of your personal and professional failure. If you can, borrow money from friends and, ideally, colleagues and always have “when are you going to pay them back” hanging in the air like a festering wasp, close to death but still managing to stay annoyingly aloft. Try to lend money to someone else, or even more than one person, while you are up there, using money you do not really have.

Put a lot of unplanned spending on credit cards, buy a new smartphone if you can just for the Fringe, and exceed an agreed overdraft, to act as another financial ball and chain holding your happiness back.

If you can, get into an early and big row with your producer, and ideally colleagues, casting aspersions on their morality and suggesting the profit share is corrupt to the core.

2. Physical Neglect
Eat a really unhealthy diet, especially fried food, and eat crap sandwiches as you walk along flyering. Drink almost no water or fruit juice, and overdose on caffeine if you can. Try to destroy your liver and the livers of those you care about. Try to eat only Pot Noodles.

3. Emotional Insecurity
Be insecure. Worry obsessively about reviews and develop conspiracy theories about your colleagues, friends and even loved ones. They are all judging you harshly. Finally, judge yourself harshly too and have a fling with someone who has recently been to the Landmark Forum.

4. Toxic Social Circles
Hang around the venue you are performing in every day, for hours afterwards, and also spend a lot of time with the most negative people in your social and professional circle. Try to only interact with cynics and those who are bitter about the theatre industry. Try to bump into a haunted ex.

5. Creative Stagnation
Ensure the show you are in is mediocre. Then you can repeat something that is not particularly good for a whole month, driving sadness into your soul like a tent peg into semi hard treacle. Fix the show in stone and resist all attempts to improve or develop it during the run. Take all criticism and feedback deeply personally and always retreat into the comfort of solitude and dodgy substances. Talk everything down, rename pessimism as realism and doubt the motives of everyone you meet, even yourself.

6. Digital Burnout
Spend most of your day online, on your phone, reading bad reviews and engaging in angry exchanges on social media. Use your phone like a mirror, constantly seeking affirmation and praise. Burn out staring at the screen and engaging in distracted conversations with real people, with at least one eye on your social media stream.

7. Irritation as a Lifestyle Choice
Try to be irritated with as many people as possible and become fixated on the people who are not doing the washing up in your shared flat, or who leave the seat up or down, depending.

8. Existential Doom
Be a perfectionist and, if you can, a fatalist as well. It is going to go wrong and we will never achieve satisfaction.

Follow this recipe for emotional disaster and your Fringe will be as dire as the journey by cheap coach or outrageously expensive train or orange flight.

Thoughts, reflections, tips, wisdom, diaries, videos and podcasts - here’s our home.

Subscribe now