Welcome back to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre by Fergus Morgan.
For the rest of August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please do forward.
In case you missed it, here is Friday’s issue, containing five more recommendations…
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The festival officially begins today!
There are currently 4248 shows in the official programme, which is the highest number ever at this stage of the festival, although there are a few caveats to that figure. Fringe Society boss Tony Lankester says it proves the festival is still a “healthy marketplace.” More from me here in The Stage.
Also from me in The Stage, a big bit on the issues surrounding the festival as it gets underway, from the tourist tax to vibe-coded planners to transport chaos.
Where else can you find my stuff throughout the festival? Thanks for asking. I’ll be reviewing for The Stage, The Scotsman and The Financial Times. I’ll be reporting in The Stage, too. I’m going to be doing a panel at Shedinburgh on Sunday and chatting on Front Row on BBC Radio 4 next Wednesday evening. I’ll share as much as I can here and on The Crush Bar’s new Instagram page. And, of course, I will be hosting The Crush Bar Live next Thursday. More on that below.
Activists from Art Workers for Palestine Scotland and Mothers Against Genocide Scotland gathered outside The Hub this morning to protest against EIF’s links to Baillie Gifford over the investment firm’s ties to the Israeli military and fossil fuel companies. Baillie Gifford calls their claims “hugely misleading.” More from Katie Chambers in The Stage here.
A petition calling for Amanda Knox’s show Cartwheel to be cancelled has gathered 6000 signatures online. Meredith Kercher’s sister Stephanie has backed it on BBC News. Knox has responded on Instagram, saying the petition “completely mischaracterises” the show. More from Jane Bradley in The Scotsman.
The Fringe Society, EIF, and other cultural organisations are set to receive a funding boost from the council, paid for via the tourist tax, if plans are voted through at a council meeting on Thursday. More from me soon in The Stage.
Rachel Zegler is in town. She went to see Disenchanted! at the EICC yesterday.
The Herald’s Brian Ferguson has published a list of the most powerful people at the festivals, topped by Nicola Benedetti. I don’t really agree with it - in principle or in practice - and not just because I don’t appear on it anywhere.
2for1 tickets are available on Monday and Tuesday, and the Half Price Hut opens on Wednesday. You can find more information and tips here. The EIF is running a “£10 On The Day” ticket scheme, too. You can check that out here.
Exeunt’s big preview issue is well worth reading, particularly because it contains Natasha Tripney’s annual poem cut-and-pasted from the programme blurbs…
Two more vibe-coded tools: Festies, a Fringe-specific planner-cum-social-media-platform, and EdFringeMap, which has plotted out the location of all 4248 shows.
There are various launch events taking place over the weekend - I got a nifty new cap from the Shedinburgh one last night - but the festival’s unofficial opening stunt, comedian Dan Boerman folding a fitted sheet on Calton Hill in front of hundreds of people, took place successfully on Wednesday evening.
A lot of the news I share here, I find via Michael MacLeod’s award-winning local newsletter The Edinburgh Minute, which I cannot recommend enough.
Next Thursday, at 11am in Pleasance Courtyard’s Cabaret Bar, I will be chatting to fellow critics Tim Bano (Standard, FT), Holly Williams (Exeunt, Times), and Mickey-Jo Boucher (100k+ followers on YouTube) - and with the audience - about the best shows we have seen at the festival so far. Come along. It’ll be fun. And it’s free.
Crybabies: The Scaring - Pleasance Courtyard, 8pm
Crybabies is a comedy trio made up of Michael Clarke, James Gault and Ed Jones, who specialise in making narrative sketch shows, and who you might recognise from their social media skits. Their debut Danger Brigade was nominated for the Best Newcomer Comedy Award in 2019, and they followed that up with the similarly celebrated Bagbeard in 2023 and a BBC Radio 4 series.
Now, after cancelling a run last year, the troupe is back with a third show, The Scaring. The plot follows a tormented priest attempting to exorcise a demon from a haunted hotel, but that is basically just a framework within which to stuff as many stupid gags and eccentric characters as possible. Jones’ fastidious, floor-licking hotel manager is a particular highlight.
Produced by Francesca Moody and Plosive, and staged by Fringe veteran Jon Brittain, the original director of Baby Reindeer, it runs at Pleasance Courtyard all month. Aware that the next three weeks might be a bit stressful and keen to start my festival with something fun, I made this my first show last night, and I’m glad I did because it is great: layered, surprising, silly, satirical and surprisingly strikingly staged. You can get tickets via the button below.
The Wreck - Summerhall, 10.30am
Buzzcut Productions is an emerging company led by writer and director Gabe Winsor, which makes technically and thematically playful shows incorporating live cinema. Previous productions include Sockpuppet, an exploration of deepfakes that was a hit at VAULT Festival in 2023, and Bark Bark, which inventively presented the world through the eyes of a dog and was widely celebrated at the Fringe in 2024.
This August, Buzzcut is back with a new show, The Wreck, about two siblings who return to their seaside hometown following a parent’s illness, and spend their time diving a local shipwreck while they wrestle with a big decision over the future of the family discotheque. “Wes Anderson meets Katie Mitchell,” reads the blurb.
Written and directed by Winsor, performed by Camilla Anvar and Morgan Beale, and produced with Natasha Ketel, the show runs in an early morning slot in Summerhall’s Old Lab all festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
Chopin’s Nocturne - Assembly George Square Studios, 2.40pm
Aidan Jones is a big fan of Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat Major (you do know it, promise) and that love infuses this gentle, funny, clever and surprisingly stirring autobiographical solo show from the piano-playing Australian comedian.
Sat at an upright piano, Jones takes us through the music note by note, section by section, explaining how it works musically through a variety of amusing metaphors. The tension of a diminished chord is like the anxiety of seeing a drunk on a train. The sadness of a minor cadence is like being denied a cookie. A major resolve is like coming home. Around this, he weaves anecdotes about his life, stories about Chopin, and plenty of silly jokes and physical humour, deploying his blokey charm to great effect. When he plays the piece all the way through at the end, it is really moving.
I saw it at last year and it took me completely by surprise in the best way. Now, it is back, running at Assembly George Square Studios throughout the festival. You can read my four-star review for The Scotsman here and get tickets via the button below.
FLIGHT/COMA/ARCADE - Assembly George Square/Pleasance Dome, various times
For ten years, Darkfield has been entrancing audiences around the world with its intelligent, unsettling, and thoroughly immersive shows inside iconic custom-built shipping containers. The Edinburgh Fringe, though, is the company’s spiritual home, and it is back at the festival this year with three of its most popular experiences: FLIGHT, COMA and ARCADE.
FLIGHT, which premiered in 2018, explores alternate realities by placing audience members in an uncanny imitation of an Airbus 320. COMA, which debuted in 2019, lies them down in hospital beds for a mysterious medical trial. And ARCADE, which first ran two years ago, offers participants the chance to play a 1980s-inspired video game set in a war-torn dystopian world.
All three use state-of-the-art technology to stimulate the audience with smells, sensations and binaural sound, all three last about twenty minutes, and all three will be running throughout the day all festival, with COMA and FLIGHT situated at Assembly George Square and ARCADE sat nearby outside Pleasance Dome. You can read my 2021 interview with Darkfield’s artistic directors Neath and Rosenberg in The Stage here and get tickets via the button below.
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The Pigeon Factory - Underbelly Cowgate, 12.55pm
Inspired by BF Skinner’s experiments in conditioning the behaviour of birds, The Pigeon Factory is an absurdist one-man play about an oddball called Walden, who inhabits a weird world in which he cares for a factory-line of pigeons and feasts on their eggs with his mannequin wife.
This bizarre, Beckettian show is the work of writer and performer Aaron O’Neill (labelled “the best comic writer at work in theatre in Cork” by Substack Tripe + Drisheen) and director Dee Finn of Cork-based Irish company Oh!Scare Wilde Productions, which has been staging work around Ireland to acclaim since it was founded by University College Cork graduates in 2017.
The Pigeon Factory debuted at Cork’s Midsummer Festival in 2023, and has subsequently toured Ireland several times, with The Irish Times’ Mary Leland praising its “intellectual and physical ingenuity” in her four-star 2024 review. Now, after preview dates at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre in late July, it arrives at the Fringe, marking Oh!Scare Wilde Productions’ debut at the festival, running at Underbelly Cowgate all month. You can get tickets via the button below.
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That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.
Fergus
Thanks for the shout-out Fergus. I come here looking for news too! 🤝 Sending all my best for the month ahead. Good luck.