Five shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe, vol. 3
A performance art piece about extinction, a one-man play about financial fraud, a winner of the Women's Prize for Playwriting, 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 last Friday’s issue.
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The festival is ten days away…
A few more lists of shows worth seeing have been published. Here is one in The Times. Here is one in The Edinburgh Inquirer. Here is one on WhatsOnStage, based purely on interesting titles.
Dave’s much-loved Joke Of The Fringe award has been cancelled after 18 years, but comedian Will Mars has stepped into the breach. There is more here, including a list of previous winning jokes, on Chortle.
Fringe Society chief executive Tony Lankester was interviewed on CNN, discussing his plans for the festival. There will be more from him in my Big Interview in The Stage next week.
TransPennine Express will run extra trains in and out of Edinburgh throughout August, reports Fiona Brown in The National.
Laura Corcoran, AKA Frisky from comedy duo Frisky and Mannish, will speak at the Fringe Society’s launch event, discussing how artists can get the most out of the festival. The Scotsman’s Jane Bradley has a preview.
Wild Thing! - Summerhall, 1.30pm
At the 2019 festival, performance artist Tom Bailey, who works under the moniker Mechanimal, premiered his show Vigil at Summerhall. It involved Bailey impersonating a huge variety of obscure endangered animals - jumping anchovy, excluded paphiopedilum, thespian grass mouse - in a stark, silly, and utterly devastating contemplation of the mass extinction caused by human activity.
The show picked up multiple awards, including a Herald Angel and a Lustrum Award, and has since toured nationally and internationally. It returned to the Fringe last year, when I gave it five stars in The Stage and labelled it “as playful and potent as ever.”
This August, Bailey is back with a sequel, Wild Thing!, which will see him attempt to do impressions of 48,000 endangered species - including the uglyface scorpionfish and the Darth Vader giant pill millipede - within an hour, backed by a sound design from Xaview Velastin. You can watch a trailer here and get tickets via the button below.
The Insider - Pleasance Dome, 3.30pm
The Cum-Ex scandal was a huge fraud committed by a network of European banks, which involved them exploiting loopholes in international law to claim multiple tax rebates on the same shares. Some estimates put the total amount scammed from the treasuries of Germany, France, Denmark and elsewhere as high as $60 billion.
The Insider is acclaimed Aarhus-based company Teater Katapult’s technologically ambitious exploration of the scandal through the eyes of one man. Written by Anna Skov Jensen and directed by Johan Sarauw, it sees Christoffer Hvidberg Rønje play a lowly tax lawyer at a major bank, tracing his involvement in the fraud from office to interrogation room. What makes it so thrillingly intense is that it all takes place inside a giant glass box, with the audience immersed in the action via headphones.
The show first ran at the festival in 2023, when it won a Fringe First Award and I called it “a slick, sophisticated European theatre version of The Wolf of Wall Street” in my four-star review. Now, it returns, running at Pleasance Dome as part of the #DANISH showcase. You can find a trailer here and get tickets via the button below.
Consumed - Traverse Theatre, various times
Since it was founded by producer Ellie Keel and Paines Plough in 2019, The Women’s Prize for Playwriting has discovered some terrific work, including the anonymous writer Ahlam’s You Bury Me and Amy Trigg’s Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me.
Karis Kelly won the award in 2022 with her play Consumed, a dark comedy focusing on four generations of Northern Irish women at a ninetieth birthday party, exploring “dysfunctional family dynamics, generational trauma, and national boundaries.”
Now, the play is finally being produced. Paines Plough is not running its Roundabout at Summerhall this year, but it is staging Consumed at the Traverse Theatre, ahead of a tour that will see it visit Coventry, Leeds, Guildford, and Sheffield this Autumn. Directed by Katie Posner, the show stars Julia Dearden, Caoimhe Farren, Andrea Irvine and Muireann Ní Fhaogáin. You can get tickets via the button below.
The Bacchae - Assembly Roxy, 12pm
Company Of Wolves is a Glasgow-based laboratory theatre company that tours bold, boundary-breaking productions – sometimes based on classic texts, often melding visceral movement and evocative music, always asking searching questions about the contemporary world – around Scotland. Previous hits include a one-man adaptation of Achilles, a five-handed staging of Julius Caesar, and a two-handed satire on evil.
The company’s latest project is a ritualistic, one-man adaptation of Euripides’ ancient tragedy about Pentheus, King Of Thebes, his mother Agave, and the bloody revenge the god Dionysus wreaks upon them when they reject his religious cult. Intriguingly, though, the story is told through the perspective of both characters whose inner lives were left unexplored by Euripides, and characters - like Dionysus’ mythological parents Zeus and Semele - who did not feature in his version at all.
Written and performed by company co-director Ewan Downie, with dramaturgy and sound design from fellow co-director Anna Porubcansky, design from regular collaborator Alisa Kalyanova, and direction from the late Ian Spink, who tragically died of lung cancer shortly after the first performances, The Bacchae was premiered in Aberdeenshire and St Andrews in 2023, and now returns for a full Fringe run at Assembly Roxy. You can watch a trailer here, and get tickets via the button below.
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Black Blues Brothers: Let’s Twist Again! - McEwan Hall, 3.30pm
Over the last five years, The Black Blues Brothers have become an Edinburgh Fringe institution. The acclaimed acrobatic troupe first formed when its five Kenyan members - Bilal Musa Huka, Rashid Amini Kulembwa, Seif Mohamed Mlevi, Mohamed Salim Mwakidudu, and Peter Mnyamosi Obundi - met Italian producer Alessandro Serena while training at Nairobi’s Sarakasi school of circus.
Since then, the troupe has performed its tribute to John Landis’ 1980 movie over 1000 times to more than 650,000 people, appearing at The Royal Variety Performance in 2020, and making celebrated visits to Edinburgh in 2019, 2022, 2023, and 2024.
This August, the troupe is back with a new show in a new venue. Set in a smoky train station, Black Blues Brothers: Let’s Twist Again! features the black-suited, sunglasses-sporting quintet performing spectacular acrobatic stunts to classic songs by Glenn Miller, Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin and more – and, for the first time, the show will be staged in the iconic McEwan Hall. You can get tickets 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