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LIVE from the Edinburgh fringe 2026: Final Queen! The drag horror spectacular

OUTCAST WORLD

Monday, 24 August 2026 - 35 minutes

Some Fringe shows you have to see to believe, and Final Queen is very much one of them, so this week I sat down with its creator and star Harrison Sweeney to work out how on earth you build a drag circus horror comedy about a queen road-tripping across the Australian outback to audition for Kylie Minogue, getting hopelessly lost, and ending up in an abandoned farmhouse fighting off chainsaw-wielding bushrangers, ghosts and a rolling cast of slasher villains, each one staged as a different circus act. It is, on paper, one of the maddest pitches of the whole festival, and it opened to four stars on its very first preview, which tells you the madness is the good kind. Harrison came to drag during lockdown and to the stage through circus school in Melbourne, where he trained in aerial rope and hula hoops long before he ever put on a wig, and his co-creator Rachel Carey is a horror specialist with lesbian vampires and demonic parodies already on her CV, so between the two of them Final Queen was probably always going to look exactly like this. Underneath the fake blood, though, there is a real argument, and it is the reason this one belongs on Outcast World. We get into why drag is inherently political, why the final girl who survives the horror film turns out to be such a natural fit for a drag queen, and the shared history of three art forms, slasher cinema, queer performance and circus, that were all once dismissed as too low to count. We also cover the far less glamorous reality of a Fringe run, which for Harrison means scrubbing stage blood out of a white dress by hand in the shower every single night. It is funny, it is warm, and it is a proper conversation about what queer survival actually looks like in 2026. In this episode How a year-long game of "what if" turned into the Fringe's most demented pitch Grace Lightning, the love child of the final girl trope, a queer circus performer and a camp Aussie drag queen Why drag is political whether it means to be or not, and what the tagline "who are the real monsters?" is really asking The shared outsider history of slasher films, queer art and circus What sets Australian drag and its larrikin humour apart from the Drag Race UK aesthetic The unglamorous truth about blood, laundry and twenty-four shows in twenty-six days Networking, faith in the work, and missing your castmates when the show is just you A quickfire finish, one Kylie track to die to, one to kill to, and the one thing Grace could never survive Final Queen runs at Big Belly, Cowgate, at 9.30pm nightly until 30 August, with rest days on the 17th and 24th. If you are anywhere near Edinburgh, go, and tell them Outcast World sent you.