Five shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe: the Here & Now Showcase
Six, actually: solo shows from Khalid Abdalla and Sutara Gayle, a collaboration between Ad Infinitum and Ramesh Meyyappan, a dance piece from SERAFINE1369, and more. Plus: festival news and views.
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.
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The festival has thirteen days left…
The first “Besties” of the festival were given out at a ceremony at the Festival Theatre on Saturday, with She’s Behind You, The Horse Of Jenin, Seltzer Boy, and PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD among the winners. You can read more here.
Liam Gallagher made his feelings on the festival clear during Oasis’ first gig at Murrayfield on Friday night. “What’s happening in Edinburgh then?,” he asked politely. “What’s all that thick shit? People juggling fucking bollocks and that? Swallowing swords? One-legged bicycles? What’s all that shit about? Shitty card tricks?” The band have one gig left in Edinburgh tonight.
A lack of funding and exorbitant accommodation costs swallowing up budgets have resulted in a gulf in production values between shows from UK-based artists and international artists at the festival, argues Lyn Gardner in The Stage.
Performance artist LULA.XYZ has teamed up with the City Of Edinburgh Council, Underbelly and Fringe Of Colour to launch a new pilot initiative aimed at promoting work from “global majority and non-white artists” at the festival. You can find out more about Edinburgh Fringe With Spice here.
A new award for previously unproduced playwrights - The Leodis Prize - is being launched today. The winner will win £2000 and have their debut play produced by Leodis Talent and Pleasance Theatre Trust at next year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
I will be on Front Row on Radio 4 tomorrow evening with Kirsty Wark and fellow critic Neil Cooper, discussing our favourite shows of the festival. Listen here.
International showcases are one of the highlights of the Fringe. These curated programmes bring exciting work to Edinburgh from around the world, and are useful both for industry professionals in their hunt for interesting international work, and for regular punters in navigating the vast array of shows on offer at the festival.
This year, there are 17, hailing from Belgium, Brazil, China, Ireland, Denmark, England, Hong Kong, Australia, South Korea, Luxembourg, Scotland, Quebec, Sao Paulo, Canada, Singapore, Northern Ireland, and Taiwan. The Here & Now Showcase, which platforms work from England, is overseen by dance development organisation Fabric, Battersea Arts Centre, and Gateshead International Festival of Theatre.
Last year, it brought work by Bert and Nasi, Wet Mess, Krishna Istha, Nwando Ebizie, Ziza Patrick, Dickson Mbi and Luca Rutherford to the festival. This year, it runs from August 18 until August 24, with a similarly wide-ranging selection of shows.
This is promotional content.
Last Rites - Pleasance Courtyard, 3.50pm
Since 2007, Bristol-based company Ad Infinitum has been working with artists and theatres around Britain and beyond to create innovative, imaginative shows. Its latest, Last Rites, is a collaboration between company co-artistic director George Mann and Ramesh Meyyappan, the celebrated Singaporean theatremaker - who is Deaf - behind the mightily moving 2024 hit Love Beyond.
Meyyappan plays Arjun, a deaf man whose late father never learned to communicate through sign language, and who does not share his dad’s Hindu faith. Travelling from the UK to India, the non-verbal show follows Arjun as he finds his own way of honouring his father, incorporating mesmerising movement, stunning projections, a resonant soundscape from Tayo Akinbode that can be felt as well as heard, and more. “It’s a complex show, but it’s not dark,” comments Mann. “It’s ultimately uplifting and visually spectacular.”
Entirely accessible to both D/deaf and hearing audiences thanks to its innovative use of captions and sign language, Last Rites first ran at MimeLondon and Manipulate festivals in 2024, then toured the UK to acclaim earlier this year. It now arrives in Edinburgh for the final week of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
Nowhere - Traverse Theatre, various times
Khalid Abdalla is best known for his roles in the films United 93 and The Kite Runner, in the series The Crown and Day Of The Jackal, and in the recent remount of Complicité’s seminal devised show Mnemonic at the National Theatre. The 44-year-old actor has also spent years as an activist, though, campaigning tirelessly for democracy in Egypt, rights for Palestinians, and other causes. Often, he has risked his own safety: he protested with thousands against the regime of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011 and was interviewed under caution by the Metropolitan Police after taking part in a demonstration against Israel’s war in Gaza earlier this year.
All of that and more is explored in Nowhere, Abdalla’s celebrated solo show tracking his own experiences as an actor and activist against the world events that have shaped them. Directed by Omar Elerian and designed by Ti Green, it traverses colonialism, conflict, revolution, and more through a fusion of storytelling, sound and projection.
Produced by powerhouse company Fuel, Nowhere first ran at Battersea Arts Centre in October, and now makes its Scottish premiere at the Traverse Theatre, running throughout the second half of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
IV - Assembly @ Dance Base, 3.50pm
SERAFINE1369 is the alias of Jamila Johnson-Small, a London-based artist and researcher who uses dance as a tool to ask profound questions about society, politics, philosophy, corporeality, and more. IV is the latest in a series inspired by the conflict between SERAFINE1369’s concerns with group choreography – with telling other people what to do with their bodies – and their desire to connect athrough dance.
Set to a score co-created with Josh Anio Grigg that layers a stormy soundscape with a speaking clock and snatches of music, the show is divided into minutes, each loosely defined choreographically, but within which all four dancers – Steph McMann, Darcy Wallace, Natifah White and SERAFINE1369 themself – are free to express themselves. “The work is exploring this desire I had to dance together with more people in a way that feels connected and freeing, not prescriptive or homogenising,” Serafine1369 says.
Originally commissioned by Hackney Wick’s Yard Theatre in 2023, IV now runs at Dance Base for the last week of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
The Legends Of Them - ZOO Southside, 5.25pm
Sutara Gayle, previously known as Lorna N Gayle and by her musical alias Lorna Gee, has had a remarkable life. She grew up in South London in the 1970s; suffered the loss of her sister Cherry Groce, who was shot by the police in 1985, sparking the Brixton uprising; carved out a trailblazing career as a reggae artist in the 1990s; then retrained as an actor in the 2000s, going on to star in the films Run Fatboy Run, One Day and The Dark Knight, the soap EastEnders, the series Silent Witness, and the musical Tina.
Gayle covers all that and more in her autobiographical solo show The Legends Of Them, which uses storytelling, song, and a striking staging to weave a tale that stretches from eighteenth-century Jamaica, to Brixton in the 1980s, and beyond.
Directed by Jo McInnes, The Legends Of Them was created with Hackney Showroom and first performed at Brixton House in 2023, then remounted at the Royal Court Theatre last year, when The Financial Times’ Sarah Hemming labelled it a “singular, hypnotic show.” Now, it arrives in Edinburgh. You can get tickets via the button below.
A Citzens Assembly/Sleight Of Hand - various venues, various times
Alongside the above shows, which are all open to the general public, the Here & Now Showcase is also bringing two further shows to the festival this year, which are only for audiences of industry professionals: A Citizens’ Assembly and Sleight Of Hand.
Created by Andy Smith – a collaborator of influential theatremaker Tim Crouch – and Lynsey O’Sullivan as part of Smith’s innovative Plays For The People project, A Citizens’ Assembly involves a debate about the climate crisis in which audience members are asked to become performers. Guided by Smith, several spectators are assigned various characters with differing opinions, then handed a script to act out, before the discussion takes on a life of its own as the show progresses.
Sleight Of Hand, meanwhile, is an experimental installation devised by multi-disciplinary artist Jo Bannon, which invites participants to take part in a series of touch encounters with unknown objects, materials and matter, against an immersive ASMR soundscape. You can find more about both shows via the button below.
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That is it for this issue. I will be back on Friday. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.
Fergus