Five shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe, vol. 10
A two-person crime caper about kidnapping Jeremy Corbyn, a performance art piece about Germaine Greer, a storytelling show about London, 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 tenth - and penultimate - in a series 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 has thirteen days left…
The bin strikes have been called off! They were due to start tomorrow and run for twelve days, and would have resulted in similar scenes to those seen in 2022, when uncollected bins overflowed and rubbish piled high in the streets. It was horrible! But they have been suspended while unions consult members on a new pay offer.
In more good news, Playbill’s FringeShip - the cruise ship they have parked at Leith Docks and attempted to stuff with American tourists - is less than a third full! Here’s Brian Ferguson in The Scotsman on what it is like on board. Let’s hope this is the end of that particularly egregious idea.
The inaugural winners of the new Skinny-Fest Festival Awards - aka The Besties - were announced on Saturday. The Sexy Award for Sexiness went to Eline Arbo’s production of Penthesilea, which ran as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, while the New Writing Award went to Chalk Line Theatre’s The Chaos That Has Been And Will No Doubt Return At Summerhall. You can read about all the other winners here. More awards are going to be given out this weekend.
Speaking of awards, you can watch the entire Fringe Firsts ceremony from last Friday here on DailyMotion and read about all the winners here. More of those are going awarded on Friday, too.
And Nick Cassenbaum’s comedy Revenge: After The Levoyah - see more about that below - was the first winner of one of Summerhall’s Lustrum Awards, too. I was actually at the performance it was given out in, which was lovely.
Lyn Gardner has reopened the debate about star ratings in The Stage, the influence of which is particularly pronounced at the Fringe…
“We – critics, artists, audiences – have all bought into and accepted and colluded with a system in which the value of art is reduced almost entirely to ratings. That is exacerbated in a festival where artists are fighting with their peers to get attention, sell tickets and attract industry in to see their work. A single star can make the difference between whether that does or doesn’t happen.”
Fringe Society chief executive Shona McCarthy has shared her three top tips for navigating the Edinburgh Fringe on Twitter/X.
There are too many articles and interviews about the festival being published to keep up with, but I particularly liked Mark Fisher’s piece in The Guardian on unusual Fringe venues over the years.
Natasha Tripney’s latest missive on the festival in her newsletter Cafe Europa covers four shows: Ugly Sisters at Underbelly Cowgate, Instructions at Summerhall, Jonny and the Baptists: The Happiness Index at Assembly George Square Gardens, and Lessons On Revolution at Summerhall. You can read it here…
Lastly, several outlets have published lists of their four-star and five-star reviews. Here is one in The Stage, one in The Scotsman and one on WhatsOnStage.
Revenge: After The Levoyah - Summerhall, 3pm
This two-handed comedy from writer Nick Cassenbaum is set in 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader and the media was hysterically pumping out stories accusing him of antisemitism. It follows two Jewish twenty-somethings in the days after their grandfather dies, when they get roped into a ramshackle plot to kidnap and kill the politician that involves radical rabbis, holocaust survivors, Mossad, and more.
Emma Jude Harris’ production plays out like a Guy Ritchie movie - all madcap car chases and explosions and gunfights - and features two cracking performances from Gemma Barnett and Dylan Corbett-Bader, multi-roling as myriad crazy characters.
It is an extremely funny and extremely silly show, but hidden behind the humour is a frustrated portrait of what it means to be young and Jewish in the UK today, and an important point about the diversity of opinion and experience within the Jewish community, and the media’s frustrating refusal to recognise that. You can read my four-star review in The Stage here and get tickets via the button below.
Ugly Sisters - Underbelly Cowgate, 6.30pm
On the day that Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was published in the US, the Australian author was met by a transgender woman, who thanked her for her work. Almost two decades later, Greer recounted the moment in a cruel, dehumanising article in The Independent entitled On Why Sex Change Is A Lie.
One of three winners of the New Diorama Theatre and Underbelly’s Untapped Award, this piece of performance art from piss / CARNATION - AKA Laurie Ward and Charli Cowgill - is essentially a dramatisation of the discourse that has sprung up around that moment, that article, and around Greer and her views in recent years.
It features some gloriously messy bits - including the nameless transgender woman assassinating Greer with a leaf blower - but it also contains some raw, vulnerable moments in which Greer is both celebrated and criticised. You can read my four-star review in The Stage here and you can get tickets via the button below.
16 Postcodes - Pleasance Courtyard, 3.30pm
Two years ago, Canadian theatremaker Haley McGee had a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe with Age Is A Feeling, an innovative and moving storytelling show in which she asked the audience to help her shape the narrative during each performance.
16 Postcodes, the debut storytelling show from Jessica Regan, sees the Irish actor do something similar. She asks the audience to select several postcodes out of a choice of sixteen, each representing a different place she has lived at in London - from council flats to sofa-beds - and each leading to a different story centred on that place.
The stories, which are all based on Regan’s real-life experiences, cover everything from love affairs to landlords to mice infestations to make-or-break auditions. Cumulatively, they offer a portrait of the impermanence of life in modern-day London. No two shows will be the same. You can get tickets via the button below.
You Heard Me - ZOO Southside, 4.30pm
Luca Rutherford is a Newcastle-based writer-performer, an associate at ARC Stockton and Cambridge Junction, and a movement practitioner with Frantic Assembly. She has collaborated with Chris Thorpe, RashDash, Selina Thompson and others, and impressed at the 2019 Fringe as part of the core creative team behind Hold On Let Go, a thoughtful two-hander about memory and the role it plays in relationships.
The same year, Rutherford was attacked while out running. She escaped, but only because she found it within her to scream. In her latest, 45-minute show, You Heard Me, she interweaves storytelling, playful movement and recorded narrative to address to the power of the female voice and the importance of refusing to be silent.
Directed by Maria Crocker and designed by Bethany Wells, with dramaturgy from Tanuja Amarasuriya, lighting from Bethany Gupwell, movement direction from Linzy Na Nakorn, and a score from Melanie Wilson, You Heard Me runs at ZOO Southside for six days at the end of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
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Must I Cry – Paradise In Augustines, 8.45pm
Theatre du Pif was formed in Scotland in 1992 by Bonni Chan and Sean Curran, then relocated to Hong Kong in 1995, where it established a reputation for devising bold, bilingual, cross-cultural productions. Now, for the first time in over 20 years, the company returns to the Edinburgh Fringe with a remarkable new show, Must I Cry.
Created and devised by Chan and inspired by the writing of celebrated Hong Kong author Xi Xi, Must I Cry interweaves three stories: a daughter grieving after the death of her father; the story of Sudan, the last living Northern White Rhino, who died in 2018; and the evolution of Hong Kong as it transitions away from British rule. All this atmospherically evoked by Chan through storytelling, projection, music and more.
Must I Cry makes its world premiere in Edinburgh as part of the Hong Kong Soul showcase, which also includes TS Crew’s No Dragon No Lion and dance double-bill This Is Not My Body Chapter 3.5 / This Is. It runs at Paradise in Augustines for the final week of the festival, beginning on August 19. 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