Five shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe, vol. 3
A comedy about Scottish schoolboys, a one-man play about cricket, a solo show about a Sheffield shopkeeper, 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 third 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 ten days away…
Francesca Moody is the original producer of Fleabag, Baby Reindeer, and Kathy And Stella Solve A Murder, all of which started as hit shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. She has three shows at the festival this year - see below for details - and has spoken to Anya Ryan for The Times. Or you could wait until my interview with Moody is published in The Stage soon. Up to you, I guess.
“In one way it is really good that producers are viewing the Fringe as a place to present and launch work. On the flipside, it’s indicative of the rising costs.”
A bunch more pieces recommending shows have been published. Here is Arifa Akbar’s in The Guardian. Here is Tim Bano’s in The Independent. Here is Dominic Cavendish’s in The Telegraph.
“National trinket” Miriam Margolyes is back at the Edinburgh Fringe with solo show Margolyes and Dickens: The Best Bits. She spoke to Chris Harvey in The Telegraph, about John Cleese, Israel, JK Rowling, and a tiny bit about her show.
“I just think people should be allowed to get on and be who they are, or be who they want to be, without all this nastiness.”
Also in The Telegraph, Anita Singh has surveyed the stuff artists do to fund their Fringe shows, from selling nudes on OnlyFans, to getting injected with malaria.
“I had to sign lots of forms, and most were agreements that I would not leave the study because if I left the study it was basically a guarantee that I would die. Not all malaria kills but the strain I was given absolutely does.”
Fringe Of Colour is a great initiative supporting work by artists of colour at the Edinburgh Fringe and beyond. It publishes a public database of all their work, which you can find here, and is operating a free/discounted ticket platform for audiences of colour. See below for details.
Chortle has gone through the festival programme and selected the top ten show names: my favourite is David Eagle: The Eagle Is Candid. They are all here.
VL - Roundabout @ Summerhall, 8.10pm
Six years ago, at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe, Square Go premiered in the Paines Plough Roundabout at Summerhall. Written by playwrights Gary McNair and Kieran Hurley, it was a riotous comedy about two Scottish teenagers hiding out in the toilets before a fight with the school bully. It remains one of my favourite Fringe shows of all time.
This year, McNair and Hurley are back with a sequel. VL - it stands for ‘“Virgin Lips”, FYI - sees actors Scott Fletcher and Gavin Jon Wright return as Max and Stevie. Where Square Go entertainingly saw them struggle with society’s expectations of masculine machismo, VL will see them grapple with their growing sexual angst.
One of three shows produced by Francesca Moody - the original producer of Fleabag, Baby Reindeer and Kathy And Stella Solve A Murder - at the festival, along with Todd Almond’s I’m Almost There and Brian Watkins’ Weather Girl, VL runs in the Roundabout all month. It will be great. You can get tickets via the button below.
Duck - Pleasance Courtyard, 3.40pm
Regular readers of this newsletter will know that, as well as being a big theatre fan, I am also a big cricket fan. When the two come together, I get very excited. The Stage even let me write 2500 words on cricket and theatre’s long relationship back in 2021, although, if you remember, there was very little else to write about at the time.
Duck, the debut play from maatin, a London-based writer who styles his name lower-case like that, ticks both those boxes. It is a one-man play, set in 2005, about a British-Indian teenager and promising cricketer at a posh private school, who struggles against the sport’s well-documented institutional racism.
Directed by Imy Wyatt Corner - a former interviewee of this newsletter, whose production of Mandy Chivasa’s Beasts was a hit at last year’s festival - Duck originally ran at London’s Arcola Theatre in May last year. It arrives in Edinburgh as a recipient of the Pleasance’s Charlie Hartill Fund. You can get tickets via the button below.
Sorry (I Broke Your Arms And Legs) - Pleasance Courtyard, 14.05pm
One of my favourite shows at last year’s festival, totally unexpectedly, was Pleading Stupidity, a farcical crime caper about a real-life incident in which two brainless Australian men attempted a bank heist that went catastrophically wrong.
This year, the comedy company behind that show, Maybe You Like It, is back with Sorry (I Broke Your Arms And Legs), a one-man PowerPoint presentation about a 12-year-old boy who is so desperate to become head boy that… well, the title tells you the rest.
Written and performed by James Akka, who was brilliantly funny in Pleading Stupidity, it runs at Pleasance Courtyard for the entire month. You can see a nine-minute sketch adaptation online here, and you can get tickets via the button below.
Leni’s Last Lament - Assembly Rooms, 5.25pm
Leni Riefenstahl was a German director who worked with the Nazis to produce propaganda, most famously the films Triumph Of The Will and Olympia. At the Nuremburg trials, she was designated a Mitläufer – a “fellow traveller” – and was not prosecuted for war crimes. She continued to work as an artist, dying at 101 in 2003.
Leni’s Last Lament is a provocative “macabre cabaret” from American playwright Gil Kofman that examines Riefenstahl’s complicated life with daring, disturbing humour. Directed by Richard Caliban and starring Jodie Markell – two stalwarts of American theatre – it features an elderly Riefenstahl reflecting on her career, protesting her innocence, and asking how much we are willing to ignore to pursue our ambition. “Jodie is as ballsy as they come,” says Kofman. “Every time we have done this play, she has the audience laughing and clapping, and by the end you can hear a pin drop.”
The play won several awards at the United Solo Festival in New York City, and now arrives at the Edinburgh Fringe for its European premiere, running at Assembly Rooms throughout August. You can get tickets via the button below.
This is promotional content.
Grandma’s Shop - Gilded Balloon Patter House, 12.20pm
For over three decades, Julie Flower’s grandmother Hilda ran an iconic second-hand clothes shop in Sheffield. From the early 1960s until the mid-1990s, she presided over a chaotic, four-storey empire of vintage outfits and carrier bags, using her takings to feed stray cats. Her shop became a mecca for the musicians and artists of Sheffield’s counter-cultural community. It was so remarkable that Hilda even featured in a Guardian article and an international study of the psychology of eccentric people.
Now, Flower – writer, performer, and an award-winning improviser with the troupes Twinprov and Improbotics – is remembering Hilda and her shop in her debut solo show. Directed by Sarah Chew, Grandma’s Shop involves Flower transforming into a range of customers to evoke the store at different moments in time and to explore what made it so special. “Every item of clothing tells a story,” Flower says. “And Grandma’s shop touched so people and their stories in so many ways.”
Having previewed in Brighton, Tunbridge Wells and London, Grandma’s Shop runs at Gilded Balloon Patter House throughout the festival, with Flower also appearing in Improbotics’ AI-based show there. You can get tickets via the button below.
This is promotional content.
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.
A quick reminder of the two ways you can support The Crush Bar. You can share it and encourage others to subscribe. And you can become a paid supporter. There are currently 3122 subscribers and 102 paid supporters. You can join them using the button above.
Fergus