Five shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe, vol. 1
A four-hander from Fringe favourite TheatreGoose, an extraordinary piece from Ireland, a solo show about Albania, and more. Plus: news and views on the festival elsewhere.
Welcome to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre from Fergus Morgan.
Throughout July and August, The Crush Bar will be focused on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues featuring updates from the festival and recommended shows. Here, in case you missed it, is last Friday’s issue, which contains experienced Fringe-goers sharing their best tips on surviving and thriving at the festival.
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The festival is seventeen days away…
There have already been a lot of articles pointing towards shows worth seeing. Here is a list of shows already well reviewed elsewhere in The Guardian. Here is a list of new musicals in WhatsOnStage. Here is another list in TimeOut. And here is a list in The Stage, to which I contributed some Scottish picks.
The Scotsman has detailed its coverage of the Fringe, the Edinburgh International Festival, and more here, and the BBC has done the same here.
Gilded Balloon is running its Postcode Pals scheme again, through which anyone that lives in areas beginning EH, KY and FK can get £6 tickets to over 125+ shows at Gilded Balloon venues. There are other ways of getting cheap tickets, too.
Summerhall Arts has launched the Bragi Awards, which replace the Lustrum Awards and will be given out each week to "work that truly reflects the ethos” of the festival. They are looking for someone to design the actual awards themselves. There are loads more awards up for grabs during the festival, too, detailed here.
The Fringe Society and the EIF are right at the heart of the ongoing discourse around corporate sponsorship of the arts. Last week, new Fringe Society boss told me it was a “minefield”, a line that has been picked up a lot elsewhere.
A few comedians have spoken to The Times’ Dominic Maxwell about the difficulty of finding affordable accommodation - and their ways around that.
Aether - Summerhall, 7.15pm
TheatreGoose - the company led by writer, director and producer Emma Howlett - made its Edinburgh Fringe debut in 2023 with Her Green Hell, a disorienting one-woman play about Juliane Koepcke, the German-Peruvian zoologist who fell from an exploding plane in 1971, then survived eleven days alone in the Amazon.
The company impressed again last year with Sisters Three, a meta romp through the trios of women that proliferate across Western culture, from the Gorgons of Greek mythology, to the witches in Macbeth, to Chekhov’s Three Sisters, to the Sugababes.
This year, Howlett and her company are back with Aether, a show about our desperation for discovery that describes itself as “part science lab on the cusp of discovery, part Victorian seance, part unauthorised Nobel Prize Ceremony.” It stars Sophie Kean and Abby McCann, who were both great in Sisters Three, plus Anna Marks Pryce and former The Crush Bar interviewee Gemma Barnett, who was a riot in Revenge: After The Levoyah last year. You can get tickets via the button below.
In The Land Of Eagles - Pleasance Courtyard, 3pm
Alex Reynolds is a London-based actor and writer who has previously performed at the Almeida Theatre, Southwark Playhouse and elsewhere, and had short plays staged at the Royal Court and Theatre503. In The Land Of Eagles is her debut solo show.
Inspired by Reynolds’ own experiences, it follows a young woman and her expat Albanian grandfather on an eventful journey through the land of his birth, exploring the misunderstood country’s complicated history, rich culture and remarkable people.
Produced by experienced Edinburgh Fringe regular Natalie Allison, directed by rising star Martha Geelan, and featuring a sound design from Nicola T Chang, who previously worked on Nouveau Riche’s acclaimed show For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy, Reynolds show runs at Pleasance Courtyard throughout the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
Lost Lear - Traverse Theatre, various times
Dublin-based theatremaker Dan Colley impressed at the festival two years ago with his weird and wonderful adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1968 magical-realist short story A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, the final show he made as part of Collapsing Horse, the acclaimed company he co-founded with Matt Smith.
This year, Colley is back with Lost Lear, a brilliantly clever, smartly staged and deeply moving show about an elderly actor suffering with severe dementia, who believes she is in rehearsals for a production of King Lear, and lives in a care facility that operates the SPECAL method whereby those delusions are indulged rather than denied.
I saw it at Dublin Theatre Festival in 2022 and was blown away by its intricacy and intelligence, and I could not be happier that it is now arriving at the Traverse. You can read my five-star review here and find my interview with Colley in The Crush Bar below. There will be a discussion about the show’s themes following a preview on 27 July. You can get tickets for that, and for the entire run, via the button below.
Yes, We’re Related - Underbelly Cowgate, 2pm
Yes, We're Related is a three-handed dark comedy about two dysfunctional sisters dealing with grief over the death of their mother in different ways. Younger sister Sara is convinced that her late mum has reincarnated into a red squirrel named Gerald. Older sister Saskia is more practical and pragmatic, and planning on throwing a party to celebrate her mother with her quirky partner Mark. Over the course of the play, sibling spats erupt, family tensions spark, and difficult truths are revealed.
Written by Royal Central School of Speech and Drama graduate Florence Lace-Evans and developed through Soho Theatre’s Edinburgh Lab, Yes, We’re Related was a hit when it did a limited run at the festival last year as a recipient of the Fringe Society’s Keep It Fringe Fund, then transferred to London's The Other Palace in November.
Now, redeveloped, it returns to Scotland for a full run in partnership with charity Sue Ryder. Directed by Francesca Davies-Cáceres, it features Lace-Evans as Sara, Alexandra O’Neill as Saskia, and Jonas Moore as Saskia’s boyfriend Mark. It runs at Underbelly Cowgate all month and you can get tickets via the button below.
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Troubled - Summerhall, 11.45am
This time-hopping, semi-autobiographical solo show focuses on a Northern Irish woman, Alice, who grew up in Belfast during the Troubles, exploring the way that formative experience still shapes her life and relationships thirty years later.
Shot through with dark humour, and including tea and biscuits for audience members, it jumps from 1993, when Alice was surrounded by division and death, to the present day, when the adult Alice struggles to find peace under the shadow of her past.
Written and performed by theatremaker Suzy Crothers, who has trained with solo show trailblazers Hayley McGee and Bryony Kimmings, and directed by Amie Burns Walker, with BAFTA-nominee Roisin Gallagher as executive producer and Rachael Halliwell as producer, Troubled runs in Summerhall’s atmospheric Anatomy Lecture Theatre, before touring later this year. You can get tickets via the button below.
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That is it for this issue. I will be back on Friday. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.
Fergus