Five shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe, vol. 4
A comedy remake of The Lord Of The Rings, a new show from Ontroerend Goed, an acclaimed Canadian play, 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 Festival Fringe, with twice-weekly issues featuring updates from the festival and recommended shows. Here, in case you missed it, is Tuesday’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 seven days away…
Campaign group Arts Workers For Palestine Scotland has published an open letter accusing the Edinburgh International Festival of “political hypocrisy, selective silencing, and deep failure of moral leadership” over its “silence on Palestine”, its programming of Simon Fanshawe, and its relationship with Baillie Gifford. EIF has defended itself. There is more here in The Stage.
A bunch more articles recommending shows have been published. Here are some free shows in The Scotsman. Here is The Skinny’s theatre picks. And The Telegraph has published a huge guide to the festivals here.
The Edinburgh Minute is a popular local Substack run by Michael MacLeod. Throughout August, in addition to its daily round-ups of local news, it will be publishing a daily newsletter dedicated to festival-related stuff. Find it here.
ScotRail has announced extra services, including late-night trains between Edinburgh and Glasgow every night. There are details here.
More travel news. Omio has been named the official travel partner of the Fringe and is offering a 12% discount to all new users headed to Edinburgh here.
And, if you are an artist that needs a way of getting around the city during the festival, comedian Dion Owen runs the Cyclopath Bike Program, which provides free bikes for performers. You can sign up here.
Fly, You Fools! - Pleasance Courtyard, 3.10pm
Last year, comedy theatre company Recent Cutbacks had a hit with Hold On To Your Butts, a lo-fi, shot-for-shot recreation of Jurassic Park that subsequently transferred to the Arcola Theatre, then the West End’s Arts Theatre, where it is currently running.
Recent Cutbacks will return to the Fringe with that show this summer as part of a back-to-back double-bill with the UK premiere of Fly, You Fools!, which does pretty much exactly the same thing with The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring.
Directed by Kristin McCarthy Parker, with Foley sound effects from Kelly Robinson, it sees performers Nick Abeel, Kyle Schaefer and Regan Sims use a variety of props, shadow puppetry, choreographed mime and more to condense 178 minutes of fantasy film into 60 minutes of theatre. You can get tickets via the button below.
Thanks For Being Here - ZOO Southside, 1.45pm
The impossible-to-pronounce experimental theatre company Ontroerend Goed has been one of the biggest names at the festival for nearly two decades, thanks to boundary-breaking shows like The Smile Off Your Face, which saw blindfolded audience members ferried around various sensuous experiences in a wheelchair, Are we not drawn onward to a new erA, a palindromic play about the climate crisis, and £¥€$, which was a Monopoly-like gambling game about the 2008 financial crash.
This year, the Belgian outfit is back with Thanks For Being Here, a show “that celebrates the most essential element of theatre: the audience.” Details about what actually happens are scarce, of course, but it will involve the audience being filmed on entry, then that footage somehow being layered with pre-recorded voices and live footage captured during the performance, if that makes any sense. Audience suggestions made following the show will then be used to shape future performances.
Directed by Alexander Devriendt and performed by Karolien De Blese, Charlotte De Broyne, Patricia Kargbo and Leonore Spree, it runs at ZOO Southside throughout the second half of the festival as part of the always-intriguing Big In Belgium showcase, which you can check out here. You can get tickets via the button below.
Our Brothers In Cloth - Assembly George Square Studios, 12.15pm
Ronan Colfer’s previous plays include The Trapped Language Of Love, a playful comedy that won Best Short Play at the New York Theater Festival in 2017, and A Foray Into Innocence, a counterfactual history play that ran to acclaim at Camden Fringe in 2023. His short film, A Lone Star Love, premiered at Austin Film Festival in 2021.
Now, Irish writer’s new play, Our Brothers In Cloth, premieres at the Edinburgh Fringe. Inspired by true stories of abuse within the Irish Catholic Church, and marking twenty years since the landmark Ferns Report, it is set in the sleepy village of Bunderr and follows one man’s attempt to uncover the truth about his brother’s suicide.
Staged by Birkbeck-trained director Ryan McVeigh, it stars Jake Douglas, Rosalind Stockwell, Oli Fyne, Kevin Glynn, Micheal Lavin, and Colfer himself, and runs at Assembly George Square Studios all month, in partnership with The Survivors Trust, Nexus NI, and activist Colm O’Gorman. You can get tickets via the button below.
The Little Prince - Pleasance Courtyard, 12pm
Over the last decade, poet and theatremaker Toby Thompson has earned a reputation for intimate, imaginative solo shows that charm adults and children alike, including his vinyl-inspired For The Record, which did an award-winning run at the Fringe in 2018, and his globe-trotting Herman Hesse adaptation I Wish I Was A Mountain.
Thompson’s latest work is an ambitious adaptation of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s mind-expanding, much-loved 1943 novella about the adventures of a planet-hopping prince. First staged at commissioning theatre The Egg in Bath in 2024, it now arrives for a full run at the Fringe at Pleasance Courtyard.
Written and performed by Thompson – a winner of Glastonbury’s Poetry Slam Competition, who has been commissioned by everyone from the Royal Shakespeare Company to the Royal Geographical Society, and hailed by Akala, Kae Tempest and more – The Little Prince is directed by Nik Partridge and features a design from Anisha Fields, projections from Nick Laws and an original score by Alex Heane, Bethany Stenning and Joseff Harris. You can get tickets via the button below.
This is promotional content.
Red Like Fruit - Traverse Theatre, various times
Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch has spent twenty years writing for the stage, earning acclaim for East Of Berlin, her 2007 drama about the son of a Nazi scientist; for This Is War, her 2012 work about soldiers in Afghanistan; and for Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, her 2017 musical about her Jewish grandparents.
Moscovitch’s star has risen even higher in recent years: her 2020 two-hander Sexual Misconduct Of The Middle Classes was revived Off Broadway by Sonia Friedman and Ian Rickson earlier this year, with Hugh Jackman in the cast; her television projects Interview With A Vampire and Little Bird were widely celebrated; and her new “post #MeToo” play Red Like Fruit – in which a spiralling female crime reporter asks a male friend to narrate her own life to her – was a hit when it ran in Halifax and Toronto.
Now, Red Like Fruit arrives in Edinburgh. Directed by Christian Barry, produced by his Nova Scotia-based 2b Theatre Company, which has visited the festival multiple times previously, and starring Michelle Monteith and David Patrick Fleming, it runs at the Traverse Theatre for the whole festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
This is promotional content.
Thanks for reading
Thanks to all 4573 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.
Your organisation can become a champion supporter of The Crush Bar, join that list, and help keep its independent coverage of theatre going via the button above.
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
Thank you for these! So very helpful when planning for my Fringe this year!