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 Festival Fringe, with twice-weekly issues featuring updates from the festival and recommended shows. Here, in case you missed it, is Friday’s issue.
If you want to support The Crush Bar, you can sign up as a paid supporter. Outside of Edinburgh Fringe, that gets you another email - Shouts and Murmurs, a round-up of theatre news, reviews, interviews and more - in your inbox every Tuesday.
Theatres, companies, agencies and other organisations can also sign up as champion supporters of The Crush Bar, which gets their name in this dedicated tab on The Crush Bar’s Substack homepage and in the footer of every Friday and Fringe issue.
The festival is three days away…
Two Jewish comedians, Rachel Creeger and Philip Simon, have had shows cancelled by their venues. Whistlebinkies pulled shows from both due to “safety concerns”, before Banshee Labyrinth cancelled Simon’s second show citing “significant conflict” between views expressed by him on social media and the venue’s “stance against the current Israeli government’s policy and actions.” Both say the cancellations were motivated by antisemitism. Chortle has more.
Separately, Scottish comedian Susan Riddell has cancelled her own show because the bail conditions imposed after her recent arrest prohibit her from entering the city. She was arrested earlier this month in connection with an incident that involved a van being driven into the fence of the Edinburgh factory of Leonardo, an Italian firm that manufactures equipment used by the Israeli military.
A lot of preview pieces have focused on how expensive it is to perform at the festival. The National’s Nan Spowart has chatted to a bunch of different artists about finances. Rich Pelley tried to spend a day at Brighton Fringe without spending any money. And Jonathan Rudge wrote in The Standard about how he is skipping Edinburgh due to costs in favour of the Camden Fringe this year.
Accommodation is obviously the biggest expense. Nica Burns says nothing can be done. I do not agree, and neither does Carl Woodward, writing in his Substack. Interestingly, The Scotsman’s Jane Bradley reports that nearly a fifth of the Fringe Society’s affordable accommodation - around 80 rooms at the easily accessible Queen Margaret University for £294 per week - remains empty.
Writing in The Financial Times, Louise Lucas has made the case for corporate sponsors to consider backing the Fringe and EIF, despite the scrutiny that comes with funding the arts. Earlier this month, festival bosses warned that there had been a “wholesale collapse of arts sponsorship” in recent years.
Plenty more lists of recommendations have been published. Here is one from Isobel Lewis in The Independent. Here is one of LGBTQ+ acts from Alastair James in Pink News. Here is one from Natasha Tripney in Café Europa.
Ohio - Assembly Roxy, 3pm
Francesca Moody is the producer behind the two biggest success stories to emerge from the Edinburgh Fringe in the last twenty years: Fleabag and Baby Reindeer. This year, she is back with a new show, two returning hits, and a new venue.
Alongside previous hits Garry Star: Classic Penguins and How To Win Against History, Moody is behind Ohio, an autobiographical “musical experience” from married couple Shaun and Abigail Bengson, AKA American indie-folk duo The Bengsons, about Shaun losing his faith in the church and confronting acute degenerative hearing loss.
On top of that, Moody has also launched Shedinburgh, an in-person iteration of her lockdown pop-up at Edinburgh College of Art, which is hosting a range of one-off performances of former Fringe favourites, works-in-progress, and more. I’ll be part of a panel hosted on criticism hosted by Tim Bano on Wednesday 6 August. You can find out more about Shedinburgh here and book tickets for Ohio via the button below.
Lunchbox - Pleasance Courtyard, 4.45pm
Local actor, writer and comedian Lubna Kerr has become a fixture at the Edinburgh Fringe in recent years, earning acclaim for Tickbox and Chatterbox, her one-woman plays about her Pakistani parents’ arrival in Scotland and her own childhood here.
This year, Kerr is back with the third instalment of what has become a trilogy. Inspired by her own adolescent experiences, Lunchbox is set in a Glasgow high school, and focuses on the dynamic between a troubled Scottish boy and a Pakistani girl, exploring issues around identity and bullying through the lens of playground politics.
Directed by Emily Ingram with dramaturgy from Jen McGregor, it runs at Pleasance Courtyard throughout the festival, with Chatterbox returning for the final week, too. You can get tickets for that here, and tickets for Lunchbox via the button below.
Alright Sunshine - Pleasance Dome, 4.20pm
Isla Cowan is a Scottish playwright and performer whose previous work includes She Wolf, an eco-feminist, magical-realist monologue that ran at the Fringe in 2022; To The Bone, a tense three-hander than was produced at Pitlochry Festival Theatre in 2023; and To Save The Sea, a musical about Greenpeace’s 1995 Brent Spar protest co-created with composer Andy McGregor, which ran at the Tron Theatre last year.
Cowan’s one-woman play Alright Sunshine was first produced by Glasgow’s long-running lunchtime theatre company A Play, A Pie and A Pint in 2022, then revived by the Tron Theatre as part of its Studio3 season earlier this year. Now, it finally arrives in Edinburgh - the city it is set in - in a new version produced by Wonder Fools, the exciting and industrious Scottish company led by Robbie Gordon and Jack Nurse.
Directed by Debbie Hannan, it features Molly Geddes as Nicky, a female police officer tasked with keeping the peace on Edinburgh’s Meadows, and starts out as an amusing portrait of the city’s stereotypes before growing a lot deeper and darker. It runs at Pleasance Dome throughout the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
Making A Show Of Myself - Just The Tonic at The Mash House, 4.35pm
Ten years ago, Mary Kate O Flanagan was persuaded to attend The Moth StorySLAM, an open-mic storytelling competition, in Dublin. She impulsively entered, and won, progressing to a GrandSLAM event at The Abbey Theatre later that year, when she won again. The following year, she entered again in Los Angeles, and won for the third time, making her the only GrandSLAM winner on two continents. One of her stories – about how she and her sisters came together and fell apart after the death of their father – has gone viral on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok multiple times.
In 2023, O Flanagan, who works as a story consultant for film and television by day, turned her true stories into a show with a difference. Alongside her funny, sad, ridiculous and hopeful tales, she shares insights into the art of storytelling, her belief that the stories we tell shape our futures, and her advice on harnessing that power.
Making A Show Of Myself has since done three sell-out runs at Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre and toured festivals around Ireland. Now it arrives in Edinburgh, running at Just The Tonic at The Mash House all month. You can get tickets via the button below.
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Madonna On The Rocks - Assembly Roxy, 11.55am
Every year, thousands of women are forced to forgo their professional dreams of working in theatre after becoming parents. A 2018 study by researchers at Birkbeck, University of London, revealed that 44 per-cent of women leave the arts industry due to childcare responsibilities, compared with just 23 per-cent of men.
Marie Hamilton’s solo show Madonna On The Rocks is an exploration of the human stories behind that shocking statistic. Inspired by Hamilton’s own experiences, and the experiences of many more women in the arts industry, it is an entertaining and unflinching look at what happens when parenthood and professional dreams collide, set to a soundtrack featuring Nina Simone, Peaches, Madonna and more.
Written and performed by Hamilton, who trained at Paris' Ecole Philippe Gaulier and had a touring hit last year with anarchic opera adaptation Polly, the show has dramaturgy from Bryony Kimmings, direction from Hildegard Ryan, and music from Ben Osborne. It previewed at Bristol’s Wardrobe Theatre earlier this month, and now runs at Assembly Roxy for the whole festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
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Thanks for reading
Thanks to all 4578 subscribers, to all 133 paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.
The Crush Bar’s champion supporters: The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Ellie Keel Productions; The Women’s Prize for Playwriting.
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That is it for this issue. I will be back on Tuesday. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.
Fergus