Five shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe, vol. 3
The third newsletter focusing on the festival, featuring five shows in the Horizon Showcase of work made in England.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a Substack newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.
This issue is the third of a series of specials I am sending out during late July and August, all focused on shows performing at the festival. Each issue will highlight five shows worth seeing. Usually, three will be picked by me, and a couple will be paid promotions. Hope that is okay.
This one, though, is a bit different. It is a promo issue, featuring five shows that in Edinburgh as part of the Horizon Showcase - a collection of work made in England, commissioned by Arts Council England and delivered by a consortium of producers, including Battersea Arts Centre, FABRIC, Fierce, GIFT, MAYK and Transform. You can find out more information about the Horizon Showcase here and you can catch it in Edinburgh from August 20.
One last thing: you can support this newsletter in a couple of ways. Firstly, you can share it with anyone that might be interested. And secondly, you can become a paid supporter for the cost of a cup-and-a-half of coffee a month using the button below. That’d be just great.
The Talent - Summerhall, 14.35
Experimental performance duo Action Hero was founded by Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse in 2005, and has subsequently earned an international reputation for creating playful, provocative deconstructive performances – 2008’s Watch Me Fall, 2009’s A Western, and 2013’s Hoke’s Bluff among them. The company was knocked down but not out after losing its National Portfolio Organisation status earlier this year, and returns to Edinburgh with its new show nonetheless.
The Talent sees Action Hero’s co-artistic directors Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse team up with playwright Deborah Pearson, one of the founders of influential organisation Forest Fringe. Created by the three of them, dramaturged by Tania El Khoury and designed by Camilla Clark, the eerie, existential, hour-long show involves Paintin playing a commercial voiceover artist, trapped in a sound booth on stage, with two disembodied voices making increasingly ridiculous requests of her.
It arrives in Edinburgh for six days during the festival’s final week – it is at Summerhall from August 22 – after a long tour of the UK and Europe, which included a three-week run at Battersea Arts Centre, when TimeOut’s Andrzej Lukowski called it “thrillingly strange and funny.” You can read that review here, Lyn Gardner’s interview with Action Hero here, and get tickets using the button below.
Little Wimmin - ZOO Southside, 22.20
Little Wimmin is, as the title suggests, a stage version of Louisa May Allcot’s much-loved nineteenth-century novel Little Women, but do not expect anything remotely respectful about this adaptation. Figs In Wigs, the five-strong, female-led performance company behind the 105-minute show, which runs at ZOO Southside during the festival’s final week, have been making adventurous, experimental, and utterly irreverent dance-theatre-comedy for ten years, and they are not about to stop now.
First performed at Battersea Arts Centre in 2019, Little Wimmin sees Figs In Wigs – that is, Alice Roots, Sarah Moore, Suzanna Hurst, Rachel Gammon and Rachel Porter – retell the story of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy via a series of outrageous, absurdist skits, sketches and dances, dressed entirely in matching orange costumes and wigs. Expect phallic ice sculptures, lethal lime cocktails, and more.
The Stage’s Natasha Tripney called it “deliciously bizarre” and “as deft as it is daft”, The Guardian’s Kate Wyver “a boisterous piss-take of theatre, literary analysis and the canon.” You can read Andy Field’s paean to Figs In Wigs in The Guardian here – they are “defiantly, gloriously radical,” he writes – and you can get tickets to Little Wimmin’s Edinburgh Fringe run via the button below.
Things Hidden Since the Foundation Of The World - Traverse Theatre, various times
Things Hidden Since The Foundation Of The World is the third and final part of Manchester-based British-Iranian theatremaker Javaad Alipoor’s acclaimed trilogy of innovatively staged shows exploring how technology has changed our relationship with the world around us.
It started in 2017 with The Believers Are But Brothers, a chilling exploration of online radicalisation that invited audience members to interact via WhatsApp. It continued in 2019, with Rich Kids: A History Of Shopping Malls In Tehran, which examined conspicuous consumption using Instagram. And it ends with this, an intelligent investigation into the murder of Iranian musician Fereydoun Farrokhzad and the ways in which Wikipedia influences our understanding of the world.
Created in collaboration with writer and performer Chris Thorpe, designed by Ben Brockman and performed by Alipoor, Asha Reid and Raam Emami, the show premiered in Manchester last year – when The Guardian’s Catherine Love called it “theatrically thrilling” in her five-star review – then ran at Battersea Arts Centre, and now arrives in Edinburgh for the second half of the festival, playing at various times in the Traverse Theatre’s main space. You can get tickets via the button below.
TOM - ZOO Southside, 18.25
Born during the pandemic, BULLYACHE is a company created by Courtney Deyn and Jacob Samuel that incorporates music, dance, theatre and circus into its shows. The duo’s new work TOM premiered at Hackney Wick’s Yard Theatre as part of performance art festival NOW 23 earlier this year, and now arrives in Scotland for the final week of the fringe, marking BULLYACHE’s Edinburgh debut.
TOM sees Bullyache collide the myth of Orpheus with the reality of the Department for Work and Pensions. Five elaborately costumed performers – Belen Laroux, Ed Mitchell, James Olivo, Lewis Walker, Yen Ching-Lin – are sat in a waiting room, anticipating an audition that never arrives. They use auto-tuned music and energetic contemporary dance in an expression of queer, working-class identity and pop-culture. Dance Art Journal’s Pooja Sivaraman called it “an exploding, colourful, synth-pop drizzled exploration of queerness and the taxing pursuit of its preservation.”
Co-directed by Samuel and Deyn, with design from Alan Scott and lighting from Laurie Loads, TOM runs at ZOO Southside from August 21. You can read Sivaraman’s review of the show at NOW 23 here, and book tickets for its run at the Edinburgh Fringe using the button below.
Always Already - The LifeCare Centre, Stockbridge, 11.30
There are few shows at the Fringe like Always Already. Created by experimental artists Karen Christopher and Tara Fatehi under the aegis of Christopher’s company Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects, it is a durational performance installation that involves the two women constructing a machine made from wood, rope and sheep wool over the course of eight hours.
Audience members are welcome to come and go throughout the day, witnessing the small performances that punctuate proceedings, with one hour-long performance occurring during the show’s seventh hour. “The room becomes a loom, where songs and dances encapsulate themes of patience and perseverance,” reads the show description. “The seventh hour is a thicker weave.”
Christopher has a long history of experimental performance, having been a member of influential Chicago-based collaboration Goat Island for twenty years, until the company disbanded in 2009. Recently, she has focussed on devising duet performances with other artists, of which Always Already is the latest. The show is part of the Summerhall programme but takes place at Stockbridge’s LifeCare Centre in New Town. Audience members can book an “installation only” ticket, or an “installation plus performance” ticket using the button below.
Thanks for reading
That is it for this issue. I will be back in your inboxes in a few days with five more shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all, really - just reply to this email. Or you can find me on Twitter, where I am @FergusMorgan.
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See you again in a few days.
Fergus