Scarborough's Winter Fringe and Art festivals return

Scarborough is about to get a lot busier for a few days. The Winter Fringe and Winter Art festivals are back for their second year, and they both kick off on Thursday 29 October. The Fringe is the short, sharp one, running only until Sunday 1 November, while the Art festival settles in for the month, carrying on right through to 29 November. Both are open-access, so the bill changes from one venue to the next, and some of it won't cost you anything at all.

The Fringe is where the variety sits. It pulls together theatre, music, comedy, dance, spoken word and children's shows, and because it's open-access, the line-up is hard to pin down to a single genre. A few things stand out, though. The Arts Coven is putting on Tales from the Vaults, a set of ghost stories based on real residents, with three performances on Saturday 31 October at the Market Vaults. Over at the Shakespeare Scratch Space, SCBO's Cheap Psychic Help is the interactive one, with tarot readings, aura readings, past-life regressions and ex-surpassing. And if you're up for a bit of a trek, One Man MacBeth is being staged at the Burniston and Cloughton Village Hall, mixing live performance with pre-recorded scenes and an original soundtrack. Spoken word is well represented too, with Laughter Lines returning after picking up best spoken word over the summer, alongside Gillian Brearley's Beyond the Blue and Abbie Ingham's The Witterings of the Lady with the Purple Hair. Prices are kept low across the board, and some shows are pay-what-you-want, so it's easy to see a few things in one evening without spending much.

The Art festival is the slower burn, and it's worth a wander whenever you can make it. Matt Nickels, the stained glass expert you'll know from The Repair Shop, is running Christmas glass fusing workshops in his Scarborough studios. Lynne Arnison is opening up her home studio to visitors, and Beccy Ware has an immersive exhibition on women's lives over at Mandy Apple. It's the kind of programme that rewards a bit of browsing rather than a fixed plan, and the longer run gives you plenty of room to fit it around the Fringe.

It's worth knowing where this all fits in. The Winter Fringe is a shorter version of the ten-day June Fringe, and both sit inside the wider Scarborough Fair, which keeps the town going year-round with Scarborough Streets in May and October, Scarborough Art in July and November, Scarborough Extreme in September and Scarborough Lights from late November. The whole thing is funded by the UK Government's Pride in Place and the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority Mayoral High Streets Fund, and it's run as a North Yorkshire Council project. For anyone who'd rather be on the other side of the curtain, artist registration is open at a flat rate of £15, with a half-price discount for YO11, YO12, YO13 and YO14 postcodes, and that covers a listing, box office services, marketing and free workshops. Applications close on 29 October, so there's not long if you want in on the next one.

Between the two, there's enough to fill a weekend or a whole month, and since a fair bit of it is free or cheap, it's an easy one to say yes to. The Fringe is the sprint, the Art is the marathon, and together they're a decent excuse to spend a few winter evenings in town.