Five shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe, vol. 4
A two-hander about bellringers, a solo show about a Broadway dresser, a devised piece about an imaginary invasion, 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 fourth 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 seven days away…
Fest Magazine has published its preview issue for this year’s festival, featuring interviews with Natalie Palamides, Amy Liptrott, Stef Smith, Dylan Mulvaney, Ugly Bucket, Sh!t Theatre, Virginia Gay, Lung Ha Theatre, Hannah Khalil, Michaela Burger, and David Ireland, plus a whole bunch of recommendations. You can read the online version here and keep up to date with reviews here.
The Scotsman’s arts correspondent Brian Ferguson has chatted to the directors of Pleasance, Gilded Balloon and Assembly about the challenges of staging the festival in the current economic climate. You can read what they had to say here.
“From Assembly’s point of view, since pre-Covid times our bought-in costs have gone up between 40 and 50 per-cent, staffing costs have probably gone up between 15 and 20 per-cent, and accommodation costs have gone up something like 300 per-cent, but our ticketing income has only gone up around 15 per-cent. When you put that picture together, we’re in a really difficult landscape.”
Joyce McMillan has also interviewed actor Charlene Boyd in The Scotsman, ahead of her new show made with the National Theatre Of Scotland and Grid Iron, June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music And Me, running at Summerhall.
“Ever since I was at the RSAMD 15 years ago, I’ve been singing in a Johnny Cash tribute band, doing what they once described to me as “backing vocals,” and I soon realised that meant June, so I became interested in this woman.”
A few more pieces recommending shows have been published. Here is another one from The Scotsman and one from Playbill.
There are several shows about women’s health at this year’s festival. Natasha Tripney has spoken to a few of the artists behind them in The Stage.
“The impact on me becoming a mother and the whole process of growing a human and giving birth would have been different if women as well as men had shaped our ideas, our language and concepts of the world 3,000 years ago.”
What is the point of the Fringe? Stephanie Hunter, artistic director of Glasgow-based company Scissor Kick, reflects on why she bothers bringing work to the festival in WhatsOnStage. Scissor Kick has two shows this year, both at Summerhall: Catafalque and Little Deaths.
“What we try and do, when participating, is think about how we can take part by making it as pain-free as possible for the artists we collaborate with. This work has to start with proper wages, appropriate expectations for what can be achieved, and tangible support for workers who require additional assistance.”
Also: the Fringe Society has partnered with Who Gives A Crap to put toilets on the Royal Mile; trams might be disrupted during the festival if workers vote to strike; the Edinburgh Comedy Award judges have been announced; waste disposal workers have rejected a pay deal, so more bin strikes now seem certain.
Bellringers - Roundabout @ Summerhall, 1.15pm
Producer Ellie Keel has a strong track record at the Edinburgh Fringe: Margaret Perry’s Collapsible, Mary Higgins and Ell Potter’s trilogy Hotter, Fitter and The Last Show Before We Die; Rafaella Marcus’ Sap; Nathan Queeley-Dennis’ Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz; and more. She also set up the Women’s Prize For Playwriting.
This year, Keel reunites with director Jessica Lazar and her company Atticist - the team behind Sap, which won several awards at the 2022 festival then transferred to the Soho Theatre and went on a national tour - to stage Daisy Hall’s debut play Bellringers.
Hall’s play was selected as one of five finalists for the Women’s Prize For Playwriting last year, out of over a thousand submissions. It focuses on Clement and Aspinall, two bellringers in a church tower at the end of the world. Starring Luke Rollason and Paul Adeyefa, it runs in the Paines Plough Roundabout all month, before transferring to the Hampstead Theatre in September. You can get tickets via the button below.
The Daughters of Róisín - Pleasance Courtyard, 1pm
Pleasance’s Edinburgh National Partnerships programme involves the Fringe venue operator collaborating with major theatres across the UK to support shows in attending the festival. It has thrown up some seriously good work in the past, including StammerMouth’s multi-award-winning show Choo Choo! last year.
This year, Pleasance is partnering with seven theatres from Pitlochry to Plymouth. The show from Northern Ireland, thanks to the support of the Lyric Belfast, is Aoibh Johnson’s The Daughters of Róisín, a harrowing solo show exploring the abuse inflicted on unmarried pregnant women by the church and state in Ireland over the last century.
Produced by Wee Yarn Productions and directed by Cahal Clarke, the show was first performed in 2018, and has since toured to Dublin, London and Adelaide. It now runs at Pleasance Courtyard for the whole festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
The Mosinee Project – Underbelly Cowgate, 3.30pm
The Untapped Award - the £10,000 prize awarded by Underbelly, the New Diorama Theatre and Concord Theatricals to company-led work - has been responsible for some of my favourite Edinburgh Fringe shows, including Ugly Bucket’s Good Grief, Nouveau Riche’s Queens Of Sheba, and Breach Theatre’s It’s True, It’s True, It’s True.
This year, the three winning companies are Our Day with Drum, piss / CARNATION (yep) with Ugly Sisters, and Counterfactual with The Mosinee Project, a zany retelling of a bizarre incident that occurred in the Wisconsin town of Mosinee in 1950, when the American Legion staged a mock communist invasion as a kind of anti-Soviet pageant.
Written and directed by Mumbai-born, Croydon-raised theatremaker Nikhil Vyas, co-created by Aaron Kilercioglu, and performed and devised by Jonathan Oldfield, Millicent Wong and former The Crush Bar interviewee Martha Watson Allpress, the show runs at Underbelly Cowgate throughout the festival, having previewed at the New Diorama Theatre earlier this week. You can get tickets via the button below.
The Hunchback Variations – theSpace @ Symposium Hall, various times
Tortive Theatre is a Berwick-upon-Tweed-based company founded in 2019 by artistic director Ben Humphrey, which both stages its own shows and brings innovative, entertaining work to British audiences from abroad. It made its Edinburgh Fringe debut in 2021 with an acclaimed production of TG Hofman’s Shakespeare’s Fool starring Robin Leetham, which subsequently returned to the festival in 2022, then toured the UK, visiting international Shakespeare festivals in both Romania and York.
This year, Tortive Theatre has three shows at the Edinburgh Fringe: The Whirligig Of Time, a new one-man play by Richard Curnow that imagines Malvolio’s life after the events of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; Cringe Effect, a darkly comic solo show from Cecelia Marshall about dealing with an eating disorder; and The Hunchback Variations.
Written by Mickle Maher, The Hunchback Variations is a short, absurdist two-hander imagining a conversation between Beethoven and Quasimodo about Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. This staging, directed by Rebecca Garron and starring Harald Djurken and Martin John Mills, is the play’s UK premiere. It runs at The Space @ Symposium Hall for the first half of the festival and you can get tickets via the button below.
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Unseen - ZOO Playground, 3.15pm
For a quarter of a century, Kimberly Prentice has worked as a dresser on Broadway shows. She has seen it all, from major actor meltdowns to embarrassing wardrobe mishaps. She has also wrestled with how being a backstage worker impacts your self-confidence and mental health. Now, Prentice is pouring all that and more into a new solo show that offers an intimate and entertaining peek behind the Broadway curtain.
Based on Prentice’s career, Unseen follows Pam, a dancer-turned-dresser in New York City, as she learns the ropes, grapples with the practical and emotional difficulties of the job, and experiences myriad outrageous incidents along the way. Directed by Misti B Wills, it involves Prentice transforming into more than thirty characters, from seen-it-all stagehands, to pretentious performers, to Broadway legends.
The show premiered at New York City’s United Solo Theatre Festival last Autumn, where it won the award for Best One Woman Show. Now, it arrives in Edinburgh for its European premiere with the help of experienced Fringe producer Allison Parker, whose previous festival hits include last year’s 17 Minutes and 2022’s Intelligence. It runs at ZOO Playground all month. 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