‘It’s a brigade of outdated gits!’ Miriam Margolyes, Andy Linden and the older performers storming Edinburgh | Edinburgh pageant 2025

Miriam Margolyes is ensconced within the backyard room of a flowery Edinburgh resort, framed by tasteful greenery and smiling for a fan who desires a selfie. Apple-cheeked and foul-mouthed, she is gracious with the passing stranger, although she warns me later: “If somebody pisses me off, I’ll say: ‘Now listen to me, I’m 84!’” She pauses. “But I don’t see why they should!” she provides with amusing.

Margolyes is returning to Edinburgh for the second yr operating with an upgraded model of her acclaimed showcase based mostly on the characters of Charles Dickens, her favorite writer. “Same old cunt, even older,” reads the flyer. “It could be the last time, but don’t bank on it!”

The Edinburgh pageant fringe is world-famous for the range of its acts, however trade and media consideration is definitely distracted and the urge for food for daring new expertise and contemporary voices typically equates – intentionally or in any other case – with youth. Yet this yr presents a “brigade of old gits”, because the actor Andy Linden says, a few of them veterans similar to Margolyes who first carried out there with Cambridge University Footlights in 1963, and others remarkably making their debuts of their 70s and 80s.

“I’m very lucky,” says Margolyes, whose legion of followers straddle generations and have delighted in her performances in Blackadder, Harry Potter and her appearances on The Graham Norton Show. “There’s relatively few people of my age still working.” And there’s “nothing like a live audience”, she provides: “It’s like a kiss, it’s a caress.”

“I just enjoy doing it so much,” she continues, operating via among the characters she brings to the stage with “shape-shifting flair”, as one reviewer put it. “My favourites like Mrs Gamp, Miss Havisham, I think I’m a perfect person to give voice to these amazing creations of which there were very many. So it’s a bit of a wank, really,” she concludes cheerily.

Margolyes describes an “immediate feeling of joy and competence” when she steps out in entrance of an viewers as of late. Has she at all times felt as if she is aware of what she’s doing on stage? “No, it has come with time. What I am conscious of now is that people know who I am and that is really relatively recent.”

Just as confidence comes with age, so does a duty to make use of her profile to talk out on behalf of those that don’t have such a platform. Most just lately Margolyes, who’s Jewish, has confronted a backlash for her strident criticism of the actions of the Israeli authorities in Gaza.

“People say: ‘You’re just an actor, for fuck’s sake, shut up.’ Well, that is a point of view. I don’t happen to share that. I think that if you have a chance to make an impact for good, to change things, then you should. I think it’s an absolute requirement, and people don’t, out of fear sometimes. They are afraid of being cancelled. You can’t cancel me!” she says.

Just off a flight from Australia, the place she lives part-time along with her associate, and affected by “punishing” jet lag together with a latest again harm, Margolyes admits that life on the highway may be tiring. “I’m gathering my powers and I will deliver, but it is a struggle.”

Also showing at Edinburgh this yr is Linden, a veteran character actor and considered one of Margolyes’s Harry Potter co-stars, who performed the horcrux thief Mundungus Fletcher. This yr marks the fortieth anniversary of his Edinburgh debut in 1985. Now 71, when Linden final carried out on the pageant in 2022, he suffered a giant respiratory assault and ended up in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

Having been informed by his physician in no unsure phrases that “next time it happens I’d need a hearse not an ambulance”, Linden is embarking on his first booze- and cigarette-free pageant as he returns with Baxter vs the Bookies, a present he wrote and performs himself, charting the fortunes of an ageing horse-racing tipster bamboozled by trendy know-how.

“In the past we gloriously defiled ourselves one way or another, but as the years unfold experience takes a hand,” he says with some forbearance. “Edinburgh is the Grand National, not a five-furlong sprint and whether you’re young or old you’ve got to pace yourself.”

Linden’s recommendation for performers of any age is to take just a few days off through the run: “Edinburgh can be very insular so try to do something a little different, go up the coast. I go to the football and watch Hearts or Hibs. Don’t do 30 days nonstop.”

The pageant has modified mightily in scale since he first carried out right here, and has grow to be “fiercely competitive”. But ageism is just not a priority for Linden: the “brigade of old gits” he’s referring to contains Ivor Dembina, Stephen Frost, Mark Arden and Mark Thomas.

“You don’t retire from the profession,” he says, “the profession retires you.” And till that occurs, he plans to begin work in October on a brand new character challenge a few boxing cornerman.

Others are making their debut right here. I come to the Assembly Rooms bar to satisfy two girls who’re sitting poised on excessive stools. Vivienne Powell, 76, has simply emerged from the primary efficiency of her solo present Diva, about an opera singer with dementia battling to reclaim her reminiscences via music. Christine Thynne, 82, a retired physiotherapist who took her first dance class at 68, is embarking on the primary full run of her choreographed efficiency These Mechanisms.

It’s a bodily difficult dance piece involving scaffolding planks and stepladders. Does Thynne rub up in opposition to expectations of how a girl of her age must behave or what she is even able to? She laughs. “At 82, people say: ‘You shouldn’t be going up a stepladder, somebody else should be changing the lightbulbs!’”

Powell provides: “Our society is pretty ageist, in a lot of ways. Older people can be quite dismissed for what they can contribute, particularly women. So, to be doing our own shows at the fringe at a more mature age is pretty amazing.”

Thynne concurs: “When you look back over the programmes of past years, I don’t know that there have been many elderly women who have done a full show.”

Yet the pair stay largely unfazed by their very own trajectories. “It can be quite common with women”, Powell argues, “who don’t come into themselves until their 40s or 50s. And they discover talents, interests that they didn’t know they had. They start a whole new chapter of their lives.” Having labored as a trainer whereas elevating her three youngsters in Sydney, Australia, latterly as a single mum or dad, Powell gave her first skilled opera recital in her early 40s and later acted on stage, in TV and movie in Los Angeles.

Do Powell and Thynne imagine they’re braver as performers due to their age and expertise? “Definitely,” insists Powell. “You take more creative risks.”

“My piece is completely about creative risks,” agrees Thynne. “From the beginning where I’m lying on a scaffolding plank and turning over its width. That’s the essence of the creativity, because the audience wonder what is going to happen next, then they realise: this isn’t an elderly person, this is an exciting piece of work.”

There ought to be no age restrict to creativity, says Powell. Her recommendation to these nonetheless considering their subsequent chapter is easy: “Follow your heart, do what you love.” She raises one finger for emphasis: “And don’t settle.”

Thynne says: “Even if you’re bringing up children and juggling all these different things and the ups and downs of life, still follow your dream. And be very, very positive about that!”

Both girls’s grandchildren will see their reveals. Powell reads hers a George Eliot quote: “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”

Margolyes and Dickens: More Best Bits is at Pentland theatre at Pleasance at EICC till 24 August. Baxter vs the Bookies is at Gilded Balloon Patter House till 25 August. Diva is at Assembly Rooms, Drawing Room, till 24 August. These Mechanisms is at Dance Base till 20 August