Five shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe, vol. 2
A boundary-breaking take on Chekhov, a new show from the festival's foremost performance poet, a clown show about food banks, and more. Plus: news and views on the festival elsewhere.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a Substack about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.
This newsletter is the second in a series of issues focusing on the Edinburgh Fringe, which runs throughout August. Each one will contain a brief round-up of updates from the festival, plus recommendations for five shows to see. Regular newsletters will resume in September.
There is a couple of things you can do to help me keep this newsletter and its coverage of fringe theatre going. Firstly, you can share it far and wide, forward it to anyone you think might be interested, and encourage them to subscribe. And secondly, you can become a paid supporter of The Crush Bar - it’s £50/year or £5/month - via the button below. Thanks.
The festival is fourteen days away…
In last week’s issue, I promised to flag up my piece in The Stage, detailing everything you need to know about this year’s festival. Here you go.
“There are 262 venues this year. Gilded Balloon Teviot – venue operator Gilded Balloon’s flagship space – is absent, as the building is being refurbished. Neither the Rose Theatre, the New Town Theatre nor King’s Hall are being used. Greenside is not returning to either its Nicolson Square or Infirmary Street spaces either – the latter will be converted into the Fringe Society’s new headquarters – but the venue operator is opening a six-space venue at the Royal Society of Edinburgh on George Street.
In an alarming development, Summerhall is up for sale. It will host shows this summer as planned, but its future looks uncertain. Other new spaces include the Quaker Meeting House on Victoria Terrace – run by C Arts and known as C alto – plus the Hibernian Supporters Club off Easter Road and the Wash House in Portobello. Perhaps the strangest space to host a show this year is a bathtub on Buccleuch Terrace.”
A few more pieces recommending shows at the festival have been published. Here is one from The Scotsman, one from The Times, and one highlighting LGBTQ+ acts from Pink News. Comedy writer Bruce Dessau is publishing previews in his Substack, too:
The Edinburgh Minute is a Substack published by Michael MacLeod covering local news here in the Scottish capital. If you want to know what is going on in Edinburgh during the festival, I very much recommend subscribing. He published a newsletter on Wednesday with all sorts of useful links in. You can find it here:
Also: The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society has launched a sponsorship partnership with American airline JetBlue; council representatives and unions are meeting today for talks about a potential bin strike in August; Gilded Balloon has launched a scheme called Postcode Pals offering discounted tickets for anyone with an EH, KY or FK postcode.
Sisters Three - Summerhall, 9.10pm
TheatreGoose - the emerging company led by writer and director Emma Howlett - made their Edinburgh Fringe debut last year with Her Green Hell, a vivid, disorienting one-woman play based on the real-life story German-Peruvian zoologist Juliane Koepcke, who survived eleven days alone in the Amazon after falling from a plane.
That show is now touring the UK, but the tour has been paused while TheatreGoose brings a brand new show to the festival. Sisters Three is a bold, boundary-breaking three-hander that lifts Olga, Masha and Irina - the three sisters from Chekhov’s Three Sisters - and sends them on a strange journey through the history of literature - from Greek mythology to modern-day pop-music - in search of freedom and happiness.
Written and directed by Howlett, designed by Ellie Wintour, and staring Sophie Kean, Abby McCann and Angela Sant’Albano, Sisters Three runs in Summerhall’s Anatomy Lecture Theatre throughout the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
Luke Wright: Joy! - Pleasance Dome, 2.55pm
Luke Wright’s show is always the first thing I circle in the Edinburgh Fringe programme. The performance poet has created a string of superb shows over the last decade, including his acclaimed trilogy of political epics What I Learned From Johnny Bevan, Frankie Vah, and The Remains Of Logan Dankworth, and his standalone collections Essex Lion, Stay-At-Home Dandy, Luke Wright: Poet Laureate, Luke Wright’s Late Night Dance Floor Fillers (Poems) and Luke Wright’s Silver Jubilee.
This year, Wright is back with a show all about joy. “Joy is famously difficult to capture in writing,” he says. “This show is defiantly not a live self-help book, nor is it a sixty-minute version of These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things. I touch on consumerism, family, stability and place - hopefully in unusual and engaging ways.”
You can read all the lovely reviews I have previously written about Wright’s work here, here, and here, and you can read my 2020 interview with him for The Stage - during lockdown he streamed short poetry performances every night - here. Joy! runs at Pleasance Courtyard until August 13. You can get tickets via the button below.
Stuffed - Pleasance Courtyard, 2.25pm
Ugly Bucket Theatre is a Liverpool-based clowning company that tackles serious subjects in silly ways. It first made a splash at the festival in 2019 with Bost-Uni Plues, about post-graduate depression, and 2 Clowns 1 Cup, about sex, then followed those up in 2021 with Good Grief, a hilarious and heart-breaking piece about bereavement.
Now, at last, Ugly Bucket is back with a brand-new show about food poverty, Stuffed. The company spent the pandemic volunteering with charities to distribute emergency food parcels to those in need, and have condensed their experiences into an hour-long show full of recorded testimony, original music, and amusing clowning. Audiences are encouraged to bring contributions to local foodbanks along to the show.
Directed by Grace Gallagher and Rachael Smart, Stuffed stars Angelina Moana, Jessica Huckerby, Canice War and Adam Nicholls, and runs at Pleasance Courtyard throughout the festival. You can read my 2021 interview with Gallagher here - she was the very first interviewee of this newsletter! - and get tickets via the button below.
Girlhood - Greenside @ Riddles Court, 6.30pm
This bold new play by actor and writer Tiegan Byrne is a six-handed, time-hopping drama about women confronting the prospect of motherhood. Set on New Year’s Eve in three different eras, it follows three different women wrestling with similar dilemmas.
“In the 1970s, there’s Nancy, who wants to have kids,” explains director Cecilie Fray. “In the 1990s, there’s Ivy, who has just found out she is pregnant. And in the 2020s, there’s Deja, who is not sure whether she wants to have children. These storylines overlap, like in Alice Birch’s Anatomy Of A Suicide or Chris Bush’s Standing At The Sky’s Edge.”
Girlhood is Byrne’s debut play, arriving soon after her first foray into audio drama with a Doctor Who story produced by Big Finish earlier this year. Director Fray, meanwhile, was nominated for an Offie Award for her 2023 production of Kate Danley’s Working For Crumbs at The Space, and was an associate director with Moulin Rouge! The Musical. Produced by Sam James, Girlhood runs at Greenside @ Riddles Court for the first fortnight of the festival, ending on August 17. You can get tickets via the button below.
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Super Second Rate - theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall, 5.20pm
New York City-based cellist Leah Coloff has recorded with musical legends, including David Bowie and Lou Read. She has worked with contemporary composers, including Philip Glass and Carla Patullo. And she has performed with celebrated shows, most recently Daniel Fish’s radical reworking of Oklahoma!. When clearing out her family home after her father’s death, though, she found a letter he wrote to her old tutor in which he admitted that he did not think she had it in her to become a professional musician.
Now, Coloff is exploring her journey in music, her relationship to her family, and her struggle with their expectations of perfection in Super Second Rate, an autobiographical storytelling show with songs. “It’s just me and my cello,” Coloff says. “Sometimes I’m telling stories. Sometimes I’m playing music. I play snippets of classical music. I play some folk rock. And I play my own songs, which I call classical-punk, or clunk.”
Super Second Rate is Coloff’s second show, following her autobiographical song cycle ThisTree, which ran to acclaim at New York City’s Prototype Festival in 2019. Directed by Raquel Cion, it previewed in New York City in June, before arriving for a fortnight-long run at the Edinburgh Fringe, ending August 17. You can get tickets via the button below.
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Thanks for reading
That is it for this issue. I will be back in your inboxes on Friday with five more shows to see at the festival. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all, really - just reply to this email or find me on Twitter, where I am @FergusMorgan.
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Fergus
Thanks for the shout-out Fergus. Really enjoying these round-ups 👍