But for us, there was one show that stood out as choosing to dare the most daringly, weird the most weirdly, and above all, provide an experience that specifically resonated with Binge Fringe’s values of platforming unheard marginalised voices. So, without further ado…

Winners – Le Fratelle della Perpetua Indecenza for SmaDragdus

Queer art collective Le Fratelle della Perpetua Indecenza arrived at Thessaloniki with a unique offering – the canonisation of an under-recognised 5th century saint as a certified LGBTQIA+ icon. Following in the footsteps of the legendary Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who canonised American filmmaker Saint Derek Jarman, this order of Drag King monks’ site-specific practice has taken them across Europe to create a piece specifically surrounding a local figure.

Smaragdus was given the name Euphrasyne from his parents as he was born in the city of Alexandria, expected to follow in the footsteps of 5th century Egyptian AFABs, be married to a wealthy man, live a life of servitude and mediocrity. Le Fratelle take our hero’s story and locate it to the fictional island of Mount Psicopathos, inhabited exclusively by monks and where women were barred entrance. 

Frivolity of the highest order ensues, with the audience getting involved with prayers and consuming communion wafers, whilst the brothers take the greatest pleasure in dashing up and down the aisle to perform legendary tracks that roughly trace the outline of Smaragdus’ life. The DIY aesthetic of the piece re-enforces the lunacy, but its scale is vast and impressive.

Queering Smaragdus’ story gives him voice beyond the walls of organised religion, taking it to the masses, chucking it around the stage and demanding it be heard. Synthesis is delivered in deploying pop culture, but it is by no means just a crutch for comedy, it vitalises the essence of queerness as something timeless, tangible, and essential.

We’re delighted to recognise Rome-based art collective Le Fratelle della Perpetua Indecenza with our Pick of Thessaloniki Fringe 2026 Award for their work on SmaDragdus.

Through earworm-worthy song, highly physical clowning, and well-realised character comedy, GUMBO ask us to turn the mirror on our perceptions of Japan. An overworked businessman has arrived on his first vacation, and he’s already spent the first ten minutes of it handing out his business cards to the audience while enthusiastically praising his boss. A young Japanese mother clad in ‘Krazy Kitty’ plush pink get-up feeds her baby only with WacDonalds’ horrifying fast food meals. It’s kitsch, full-fat, at times a little too on-the-nose, but vastly entertaining nonetheless.

Audience participation becomes a lynchpin to engage our preconceptions, prejudices and vices, as we are given Happy Meal toys that unlock the truths buried in our imperialistic souls. Cast off your inhibitions, and you’ll access a biting satire that is equal parts disturbing as it is joyful, engrossing and sadistic. A latter ‘Human Check’ section that invites audience members to the stage does become a little repetitive, but this is soon twisted back into the narrative to deliver a satisfying finish.

One of the pure joys of Are You Lovin’ It is sinking into the kaleidoscopic world of props, set pieces, costumes and toys that the trio have created to deliver their hysterical antics. They are never a crutch, but instead add more detail to the terrifying story-world that quite too often dangerously reflects our own. It’s a parallel universe that feels alarmingly near, put together seamlessly and delivered whole-heartedly.

There are moments in a theatre you never forget, and as I sat watching the WacDonalds waitress limbo under a ten-foot long set of rotten intestines, I realised I was deep in one. There’s gusto and buckets of odd charm to this show that are offered to us at break-neck pace, inspired by the most outlandish elements of stage clowning that can be achieved in the boundaries of a Fringe stage.

As we witness a near-global regression into fascist politics, we should be glad that companies like Theatre Group GUMBO are willing to flash the most outrageous satirical concepts at vast scale.

This preposterous, enthralling, laugh-a-minute jumble through the worst of humanity, and how we got here, delivers a powerful message, and even more powerful belly-laughs. Doo doo doo do-do.

Recommended Drink: Pair this with an XXL WacDonalds Shake – just be sure to mix in all the things you want to get rid of about yourself.

Performances of Are You Lovin’ It? have now concluded at Thessaloniki Fringe 2026.

We’re given 5 coins to spend over the night, as we drift between each character and are offered the opportunity to spend our currency to engage them in conversations. Each is a distinct, unique entity with a personality that appears to either have been programmed or captured by this world’s creator. One, a flirtatious content creator looking to craft the perfect digital date, another a crypto-influencer trying to sign us up to their get-rich-quick scheme, opposite, a virtual oracle who offers insights to our souls, and finally, a motivational girlboss there to hype us up and make us each a ‘winner’.

These interactions are interspersed by dramatic choreographed battle sequences, in which we are handed the reins to decide which of our NPCs will survive. Control is gifted to us, seemingly, in the democratic mode, but before long, the characters offer glimpses that not all is as clear-cut as it seems. Certain audience members are given their own personal quests, which allegedly offer alternate endings to the piece. All of this excitement and engagement forges an exhilarating atmosphere, that entertains as much as it intrigues.

Characterisation from all of the performers is utterly engrossing, as they robotically sway, swagger, flaunt and eventually, falter to the ground as the dust of the battle settles. Every detail is perfectly realised, with nostalgic references to Mortal Kombat, glitchy video game graphics, and the giddy childlike joy of entering an arcade delivered with synchronicity, style, and verve. Each character even has their own real Instagram account, giving this concept so much replay-ability. If it runs multiple nights in one place, you’ll no doubt find yourself running back to it, for another dose where much of the piece radically changes.

Each performer is given their moment in the sun, as they take centre stage and invite an audience member to partake in a cut-scene and sink deeper into this world. Director Kosta Karakashyan offers a vivid realisation of the addictive nature of technology, the gamification of our lives, the digitisation of our presence, and how we both influence and are influenced by our relationship to technology.

A mammoth team is involved in the creation, curation, and maintenance of this captivating world, including game design consultant Alexander Torofiev, costume and make-up designers The Trackers, and the fact that each of the performers themselves contributed to the choreography process. All of its elements work together in unflinching synchronicity, with lighting design from Sava Kisiov pulsating to the hypnotic techno beats of composer and sound designer Martina Stefanova. It is utterly immersive, utterly entrancing, vivid, and seamless.

It’s performances like these that get you excited about the future of theatre – a true melting pot of multimedia, dance, physical theatre and characterisation that delivers on every wild promise it sets out to make.

Recommended Drink: Pair this with your favourite pixelated pint. Performances of INSERT COIN / PLAYER ONE have now concluded at Thessaloniki Fringe 2026. Keep up with the show’s future touring dates on Instagram.

CRAVEyard is a demanding piece of theatre – part installation, part movement piece, part multimedia projection. There are long pauses, breaths, processions and partakings that see this pair weave the tapestry of their relationship into something equal parts figurative and literal. The child seeks permission to be from this mother figure, but she stands circuitously performing rituals that cannot be understood through a child’s eye.

Suffocation and release bulb together and apart as the dialectic of the narrative, alongside themes of longing, belonging, inheritance and entrapment. Neither character develops beyond their mould until the piece’s final moment of catharsis, and this will challenge the conventions of theatre that many audience members may have entered CRAVEyard expecting.

Greek contemporary company In contACT look to explore how identity is formed through what is remembered, forgotten, inherited, and silenced in this form-breaking work, that in truth may well only give back to you what you are willing to put into it. The characters are not as such in the traditional sense; they are constructs to explore what creator Smaro Platioti calls an ‘emotional architecture’. There are points where this dramaturgy is highly salient and engrossing, and others where it is foreboding, isolating, and discombobulating.

Nafsika Karakomninou-Tsigkopoulou’s performance of the Mother figure is chilling and intoxicating. A moment where a child’s toy accidentally lands on the foot of an audience member sees her snap her fingers at them to demand its return, placing the audience in the same posture as the child in that instant. As we witness the duo proceed up and down the performance area, with flashes of childhood holidays projected onto them with grainy dew, there’s a menacing distance created between us and the world that these figures inhabit despite the immediate physical proximity.

Self-revelation is only enacted in a deep and scurrilous interrogation of the processes, moments, and rituals that have made us the person we are today. CRAVEyard pushes many boundaries, at moments to the point of difficult extremity, and lands a little on-the-nose in its finale. It is, nonetheless, fascinating work that blurs the boundaries of performance, media, and installation with verve and depth.

Recommended Drink: Pair this show with a Dark ‘n’ Stormy cocktail.

Performances of CRAVEyard have now concluded at Thessaloniki Fringe 2026.

In the first instance, we are bound together as an audience by a seemingly endless tape measure that Barello weaves in between us, and later all involved in the audience participation find themselves navigating the maze of obstacles it presents. Barello is interested in intentionally causing as much mischief as possible, even in the title of this show, which has elicited many questions across the social scene of Thessaloniki Fringe – ie. “When are you seeing Tonight?!”, “I’m seeing Tonight! tomorrow”. This holistic approach gloriously sets up the interactivity of the piece, in which Barello takes various members of the audience up on stage for boxing matches, date nights, and pizza dances (not spoiling anything about that last one).

Our clown, however, is not interested in playing conductor to the room, but instead crafting a space that audiences can take to the stage and truly engage with his ethos of play. Our participants are not often guided, sometimes to Barello’s disadvantage, and this marks the show’s contribution to clowning pedagogy, in which the audience members themselves to must take part in the artform to progress the show succinctly along. Some do not comply, which makes for a few awkward moments where the balance of power tips away from Barello and his near non-verbal vow is temporarily broken to nudge the story in the right direction, to the next point of interaction.

Loneliness is at the core of the piece’s themes, and how even without exchanging words with one another we can build bridges of all kinds to make each other feel seen, heard, and soulfully nourished. It’s an absurd journey to get there – with sequences seeing our clown train for a boxing match, or measure the earlobes of audience members, not there to push the story along, but to play with the audience’s expectations, push their boundaries a little further, and in the end, make sure that our clown fulfils his aim of being left on stage with someone who can offer him that feeling of being loved.

Joyful, gentle, impish clowning that invites the whole audience to take part, be seen, and muck about.

Recommended Drink: Pair this with a fizzy, punchy Aperol Spritz, from our titular clown’s home country.

Performances of Tonight! a clown who wanted to be loved? have now concluded at Thessaloniki Fringe 2026.

Image Credit: Amy Brown Carter

Smaragdus was given the name Euphrasyne from his parents as he was born in the city of Alexandria, expected to follow in the footsteps of 5th century Egyptian AFABs, be married to a wealthy man, live a life of servitude and mediocrity. Le Fratelle take our hero’s story and locate it to the fictional island of Mount Psicopathos, inhabited exclusively by monks and where women were barred entrance. They then follow the true narrative that would see Smaragdus incarcerated for 38 years, after brothers in his order blamed him for their own unholy thoughts. Taking it in turns, the three brothers in this much more modern and ephemeral order play Smaragdus in three stages of his life, through a barrage of lip-sync numbers, costume changes, puppeteering and freewheeling.

Frivolity of the highest order ensues, with the audience getting involved with prayers and consuming communion wafers, whilst the brothers take the greatest pleasure in dashing up and down the aisle to perform legendary tracks that roughly trace the outline of Smaragdus’ life. The DIY aesthetic of the piece re-enforces the lunacy, but its scale is vast and impressive. A gigantic cardboard chapel is constructed at the back of the stage, which is soon used to flip in and out of costumes, all while maintaining our complete attention, and garnering masses of whoops and hollers from the audience. There’s many intricate set pieces, to which the team behind Le Fratelle spent a week in Thessaloniki before the debut performance to build from recyclable materials. Here I coin the term, ‘Cardboard Bling’, to describe their general aesthetic, which is equal parts charming as it is irreverent and radical.

Emerging from the anti-fascist grassroots movements in Rome, Le Fratelle were created in the year of the Catholic Jubilee in 2025, and have performed reclamations of queer stories using religious iconography, in-depth research, multimedia production and countercultural techniques inspired by legendary Australian artist Leigh Bowery, Cuban filmmaker Ana Mendieta, and Greek rebetiko singer Sotiria Bellou, to name but a few. In their previous piece, they led a procession of queer visibility along the River Tiber in their home city representing the biblical figure Lilith as a figure of exile, dissent, and desire. Their work is genuinely exciting, flying in the face of heteronormative patriarchy and rigid artistic form, and instead crafting a convincing mould of exuberant cultural activism that aims to ignite conversations about mythology and historiography with fervour.

Queering Smaragdus’ story gives him voice beyond the walls of organised religion, taking it to the masses, chucking it around the stage and demanding it be heard. Synthesis is delivered in deploying pop culture, but it is by no means just a crutch for comedy, it vitalises the essence of queerness as something timeless, tangible, and essential.

Whether you’re in it for the extraordinary, unhinged experience or to add your voice to a movement, the evolving work of Le Fratelle della Perpetua Indecenza will offer what you desire and so much more.

Recommended Drink: Communion wine, by the bucket.

You can catch SmaDragdus one last time as part of Thessaloniki Fringe, tonight Friday 9th October at Transcendance from 22:00 (30mins). The performance is in English, with large lip-sync sections. Tickets are available through the Thessaloniki Fringe Online Box Office.

Keep up with Le Fratelle della Perpetua Indecenza’s future works online.

Before long, we are asked if we as an audience want the performance to continue. It is the first test in what will become many as to whether we are willing to undertake the instructions given to us by a nameless, faceless organisation projecting words onto the screen, or whether we wish to engage with the humanity of Ozan, the show’s author, by resisting its attempts to enforce authority upon us. Depending on the audience who enters the space, any myriad number of outcomes are possible, as we are put to task in deciding the fate of the words written for us, whether freedom of expression is worth the price of resistance, and if a personal story can be trusted in the hands of someone else.

Ephemerality is at the heart of Bingöl’s performance philosophy, which develops in the latter half of the piece when a number of audience members are asked to take to the stage and read postcards from his home town of Istanbul. It is herein that we see what lies underneath the hood of TEMPORARY AUTHORIZATION, an attempt to force upon the audience the same bureaucracy that Bingöl has faced in his efforts to remain within the European Union and obtain Belgian residency. We are temporarily authorised to read his words, just as he is temporarily authorised to exist in Belgium as a Turkish immigrant. It is a concept that deserves a stage and a concept as fascinating as this, but also needs further development to become the main talking point as you leave the show.

In fact, after leaving the show, the largest discussion came about as to how much of what we had just witnessed, nay, taken part in, was decided before we entered the space. Conversations came around the table about whether some people had been planted, whether the show would truly have ‘ended’ if we had agreed to it doing so, and what would have happened if someone who wasn’t as proficient and profoundly good at reading Bingöl’s words as the one in our showing. These are valuable, valid conversations, but leave a fair distance form the core subject matter of the show and its goals to make us feel like we too are experiencing the vast precarity of someone in Bingöl’s position as a marginalised immigrant.

Game theory here hands the audience the reins, which opens up huge questions about collective responsibility, giving voice to the oppressed, and overturning turgid oppressive systems when they exhume the humanity from us. There’s a fuller form to be found to Bingöl’s deeply personal piece, and that will only come as it continues to tour, to experiment with its audiences, and let its audiences experiment with it.

Recommended Drink: Do as our selected reader did, and politely ask the show assistant if you can take your beer up on stage with you.

Performances of TEMPORARY AUTHORIZATION have now concluded at Thessaloniki Fringe 2026. If you want to experience this unique show, follow it to Voila! Theatre Festival in London at Theatro Technis on November 21st from 17:00 (45mins). Tickets are available through the Voila! Theatre Festival Online Box Office.

Taking the eponymous mode of transport as an opening gambit, the ensemble cast of co-devisors use the steady hand of concept creator Alexandra Lioliou and Director Maritina Koutsochioni to build an engrossing world of characters, subject to Kafkaesque logics and rhtyhms of absurdity but immediately recognisable as archetypes you’d find travelling around an urban landscape filled with fracture, conflict, difficulty, and eventually, recognition. A fare evader is pursued down a seemingly endless gangway, an older woman comes face-to-face with maskless sneezing youths in the midst of a pandemic, an immigrant is told to return home after the slightest of agitation. Chaotica seek to hold up a mirror to how in confined spaces, we are ultimately all confined to one another.

Dressed up in the way you might imagine a young David Bowie would have made up toys in a dollhouse, the surreal quickly blurs into grounded lived realities, all anchored in fluid, engrossing movement and physical characterisations that capture the often buzzing environment of each scene. In vignettes, we move through the themes with ease. At points, it feels as though Chaotica could have a little more to say about each of the interactions we witness – their portents and their consequences – but instead of a holistic approach, we are given a lens to reflect on how we treat one another, and where narratives, conflict, violence and, eventually, acknowledgement of the absurd human condition, emerge from.

The use of props and moveable set pieces to create different spaces is deft, clever and consistent. Two long clothing rails with wheels are whipped around the stage, sometimes at breakneck speed, with each of the performers taking centre stage across the different scenes, and becoming set dressing themselves in the form of multiple different background characters. One of the joys of this piece is its broader framing as a tapestry of life, a vivarium, in which you could spend just as much time watching the main encounter or looking across the background at the myriad different people making their way through the same absurd conditions.

It is in this sense that Chaotica achieve the fullest sense of their aims – to remind us of the Sisyphean nature of urban sprawl, the strain it places on us, and to question how much attention we should give our frustrations against the backdrop of the futility of human existence. By painting this picture in broad strokes, they reveal much, and ask us to take away as much or as little as we see reflected onto our own lives when the curtain falls.

The BUS is vivid, imaginative, playful theatre-making of the most physical variety, with plenty of big questions burst open in its unravelling.

Recommended Drink: Pair the BUS with a crisp, bubbly Gin and Tonic, the perfect thing to arrive home to after a long commute.

You can catch The BUS one last time at Thessaloniki Fringe, tonight from 7pm at Avlaia Theater (60mins). Tickets are available through the Thessaloniki Fringe Online Box Office. The performance is undertaken in Greek with English surtitles.

Internationality has been at the centre of the ethos since French-German Meridjen and local Thessalonian Manavapoulou met, with Meridjen’s background in international theatre management aboard cruise ships, and Manavapoulou having worked as Marketing Manager at Assembly during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe over a number of years. Performers from Japan, Germany, Mexico, Egypt, Italy, Russia and beyond will join Greek performers. Performances will be offered in English, Greek, alongside Non-verbal shows, and some with surtitles or translated scripts for audiences providing a wealth of accessibility for visitors and locals alike.

Key ingredients that have fuelled the festival since its origins remain in play for 2026 – including an open-access model with participating venues curating their own programmes, in tandem with the organisers managing their own venue with an array of award-winning international acts. Workshops, networking events, and nightly social meet-ups provide plenty of variety for attendees of all stripes. The festival is volunteer-powered, independent, and focused on visibility, experimentation, exchange and touring opportunities for participating performers.

Eclectic highlights of this year’s diverse theatre programme include an existential Kafkaesque reimagining of a city bus exploring the absurdity of everyday life and the suffocating pressures of urban existence in Greek company Chaotica’s The BUS (Oct 7 & 8, 19:00, Avlaia Theater), and Bulgarian company Karakashyan & Artists’ INSERT COIN / PLAYER ONE (Oct 10 & 11, 21:15, Amalia Theatre), an immersive performance exploring the blurred boundaries between real and virtual worlds. Set inside a surreal arcade, the audience will become active players in a live videogame, navigating themes of identity, desire, and control.

On the surreal and genre-defying front, Italian company Le Fratelle della Perpetua Indecenza bring a live performance ritual that sees three drag king priests honour the legacy of the great SmaDragdus of Alexandria through a staged canonisation ceremony in SmaDragdus (Oct 8 & 9, 22:00, Transcendance), while Japanese Theatre Group GUMBO offer up another serving of international Fringe hit Are You Lovin’ It? (Oct 10 & 11, 18:00, Artbox Fargani Theater).

Without any set, props, or words, German mime Silent Rocco transforms the stage into a dreamscape where emotions are tangible, objects hold secrets, and the impossible feels real in UNTOLD STORIES (Oct 10, 17:30 & Oct 11, 15:00, In Situ Stage). Also presenting a non-verbal, physical performance, Greek company In contACT org offer an attempt to stand before the internal graves of unmet needs and ask what was silenced, what was inherited, and what still insists on existing, with a post-show discussion each night, in CRAVEyard (Oct 8-10, 21:30, To Pikap Kato).

Exploring different intersections of politics, XQUENDA (Binge Fringe ★★★★, Oct 10 & 11, 19:30, To Pikap Kato) tells story of a young indigenous woman from rural Oaxaca, México, and her search for justice after the disappearance and murder of her best friend, as no one seems to care due to their social and economic conditions. Meanwhile, Did4luv (Oct 10 & 11, 21:30, Artbox Fargani Theater) stages labor as spectacle and spectacle as labor, asking what forms of visibility and desire the systems of work and entertainment extract from marginalised bodies.

Or take a chance on dance in Greek dancer & choreographer Iro Vasalou’s performance art piece The course of an argument (Oct 11, 20:00, Transcendance), a solo performance dancing the rhythms of dissagreement. Cinematic and everyday arguments are woven into a confrontational sound loop, that sees despair, complaint, and bitterness transformed into gestures, accusations into BPM.

Plenty more is on offer across the 5-day festival. Explore the full programme, travel information, places to eat & drink and more on the Thessaloniki Fringe Website.