EDINBURGH.- One day in fall 2018, British theater producer Francesca Moody was rummaging around in her bag for something to read during a train ride when she found a script she’d been meaning to look at for weeks.

Glancing at its first page, she read a scene in which a man logs onto his voicemail. “You have 50 new messages,” the cellphone’s robotic voice says. The messages are all from a woman named Martha.

For the rest of the train journey, Moody couldn’t take her eyes off the script of “Baby Reindeer,” a one-man play about a comedian’s struggles with a female stalker who he occasionally, with self-destructive results, encourages.

“It was just a thriller,” Moody recalled in a recent interview. “And what was amazing was it wasn’t a normal victim-perpetrator narrative. It was about all the gray areas in between.”

When the train reached its destination about an hour later, Moody didn’t get up. She stayed in the empty carriage to devour the script’s final pages. By then, Moody recalled, she’d already decided two things: That she had to produce this play, and it had to be at Edinburgh Festival Fringe — the best place in Britain to generate buzz for new plays and musicals by lesser-known writers.

Success there, she knew, could propel the show to success in London. Maybe in New York, too. Although at that moment, she couldn’t predict that “Baby Reindeer” would also secure a Netflix deal and 11 Emmy nominations.

Every August, more than 3,000 acts head to the monthlong Fringe to perform daily in tiny venues — anywhere from a dingy pub to a converted lecture theater — hoping that critics or TV commissioners notice them. Most productions struggle to secure even a newspaper review, but every few years a debut show — such as “Six,” the hit musical about the wives of Henry VIII, which was at the Fringe in 2017 — generates such word-of-mouth success that it sells out its run, and eventually goes global.

Over the past decade or so, Moody, 36, has been a driving force behind two Fringe breakout hits. Before “Baby Reindeer” (2019), she produced “Fleabag,” Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s 2013 show about a sexually adventurous cafe owner struggling to cope with a friend’s death.

Now, Moody is such a Fringe name that theater fans, critics and TV producers make a beeline for her shows. This year, she has three: “V.L.” a comedy about teenagers trying to land a first kiss; “I’m Almost There,” a musical comedy about a gay New Yorker’s romantic struggles; and “Weather Girl,” a fast-paced drama in which a weather presenter has a breakdown against the backdrop of California’s wildfires.

“Weather Girl,” written by Brian Watkins and starring Julia McDermott, is one of this year’s hot Fringe tickets, with a sold-out run and rave reviews. “Look out for the inevitable Netflix adaptation,” wrote Allan Radcliffe in The Times of London.

Moody said “the whole world and its wife” was now begging her for tickets to that show, and she was hoping for London and off-Broadway runs. But she dismissed questions about whether the play had potential to emulate the success of her previous hits. “For me, it’s unhelpful to look at plays thinking, ‘Is this going to be the next ‘Fleabag’?’” she said. “If you do that, you’ll fail.”

All producers in Edinburgh have a tall order to make their shows stand out. But Sonia Friedman, the Tony Award-winning producer of Broadway plays including “Stereophonic,” said by phone that this also had its benefits. The Fringe, she said, was a great and cheap “petri dish” for working out if a show actually chimed with audiences.

Friedman said she’d had plenty of her own Fringe successes, including talent-spotting Rachel Weisz at the festival early in her career. More recently, she saw “The Shark Is Broken,” a play about the making of “Jaws,” that she then staged on the West End and took to Broadway.

Moody also seemed to be flourishing in Edinburgh, Friedman said, adding, “She has that keen eye for new groundbreaking, thought provoking, boundary pushing work.” In the end, Friedman said, Moody simply had “great taste.”

That sensibility has been shaped by decades of attending the Fringe, an event that Moody said had been the center of her life for almost 20 years. At school she wanted to become an actor, and first came to Edinburgh when she was 17 as an intern for Scamp Theater, a tiny company.

During that summer in 2005, Moody recalled seeing a play called “Angry Young Man” that changed her perception of what theater could be. Previously, she’d seen flashy musicals including “Fame” and “Blood Brothers,” but “Angry Young Man” was “four guys all playing the same person — no set, no props — and it was funny and physical,” Moody said. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh! You can make theater like this as well!’”

She befriended Alex Waldmann, who was part of the show’s cast, and a few years later, he asked Moody to help him produce a Fringe show. Soon, she was putting on her own shows, too.

In 2013, another friend and colleague, Waller-Bridge, showed her a half-page sketch for a comedy monologue that begins with a character eating a “very slutty pizza.” It was still a work in progress, and Waller-Bridge had no budget, but she and Moody decided to take the play to Edinburgh.

Moody secured a venue for the show, called “Fleabag,” and went about raising funds online. (The project’s Kickstarter page is still viewable.) Then, to force Waller-Bridge to finish writing the play, Moody said she locked her and director Vicky Jones in a London rehearsal room.

Waller-Bridge recalled via email that a few days before the play was set to open at the Fringe, she still hadn’t written the ending and was panicking — until Moody came into the room “and gave the most beautiful speech.” That “grounded us all hugely, and we got back to work,” Waller-Bridge said, although when she went to the bathroom shortly afterward, she discovered Moody “crying with panic in a cupboard.” It was at that moment, Waller-Bridge added, that she realized “how insanely hard” Moody’s job was.

Moody “has more passion for new theater than anyone else I’ve met,” Waller-Bridge said: “Once she believes in your play, she will not stop until it is in front of an audience.”

In a video interview, Richard Gadd, the writer and star of “Baby Reindeer,” was similarly effusive. Moody “very much has a belief of letting the creatives be,” he said, rather than deluging them with suggestions for how to change a script.

For all Moody’s hits, there have been misses, too. In 2012, she produced “Nola,” a verbatim play about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that she said she had struggled to sum up in a pithy sentence and which didn’t grab audiences. Moody said she put that play on in a too-big, 220-seat theater. “We were getting 100 people a day, which is a great number for Edinburgh,” Moody recalled, but she said it was disastrous: “It felt empty.” Now, she said, she tends to put shows on in small venues because if they sell out, that generates buzz.

There are benefits of being a well-known producer at the Fringe, including that fans seek out your productions so more tickets sell and budgets increase. When Moody first staged “Fleabag,” she could only spend about 10,000 pounds, or about $12,700. This year, each of her shows has a budget of some 85,000 pounds, about $108,000 — money that Moody said she won’t recoup in Edinburgh, but might if a production transfers to London.

Even if Moody’s funds are now gigantic by Fringe standards, she still can’t avoid the realities of life at the festival, including the teething problems that many shows experience. At a recent performance of “Weather Girl,” Moody walked into the auditorium to find it filled with smoke because of a faulty haze machine. Shortly afterward, she learned that 10 people had sneaked in without tickets, so the venue was overcapacity and the play couldn’t start.

Moody walked across the stage waving fog away with a flyer, and went into a backroom to explain the situation to Julia McDermott, the show’s star. “You’re getting a real Fringe experience,” Moody recalled telling her. Then, Moody headed back into the auditorium to fix the machine and evict the interlopers. “A producer’s work is never done,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.