Throughout August, The Crush Bar has focused on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. This final missive, though, is a list of my top ten shows of the festival out of the 67 I have seen so far, with any info I could glean about their future lives.

In case you missed it, here is Tuesday’s issue, featuring five observations about this year’s festival, from the quality of theatre to the tourist tax shenanigans…

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 weekly 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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

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The festival has three days left…

• The final round of Fringe First Awards were handed out this morning at a ceremony at Pleasance Courtyard. They went to One Hundred Voices, Adam Riches: The Captain, Tether, Turn Your F*cking Phones Off, Little Animals, and Slayers. More from me here in The Stage.

• A few other awards were handed out at the same event. The Brighton Fringe Award went to Campitalism: Three Gays Try To Fix The Economy; the Holden Street Theatres Award went to Amnesia, the Filipa Bragança Award went to OnlyFans For Therapy, and the Mental Health Foundation Award went to Huge Ass Mindset. Here is the same link again.

• Earlier this week, The Stage revealed its Fringe Five breakout theatremakers. We chose Hannah Maxwell for Turn Your F*cking Phones Off; Sean McVerry and Andy Roninson for The Real Kyle McCarren; Ellen Robertson and Charly Clive for Jitters; AJ Turner, Sam Rees and Ella Dale for Gameplay; and Ros Watt for Trans People Are Awful.

• Foriegner, Good With Faces, You and Me (and Whoever Comes Next, Tell Me and Playback won in the second batch of Summerhall’s Bragi Awards. More here.

• The nominees for the Comedy Awards have been revealed. In the running for the main prize are Chris Cantrill, Dan Tiernan, Harriet Dyer, Lara Ricote, Li Jin Hao and Spencer Jones. Up for the Best Newcomer prize are Dom McGovern, Fatiha El-Ghorri, Freddie Meredith, Marty Gleeson, Omar Badawy, Tom Towelling and Underground Monk Show. The winner will be revealed tomorrow.

• Sally Stott, a reviewer for The Scotsman, was singled out by a comedian in a show she was covering, offered a “noose with which to hang” herself. She gave the show one-star. The Scotsman’s Jane Bradley explains more here. The incident has sparked a conversation about the limits of empathy at the festival on Reddit.

• The Fringe Society and EIF are now set for a 25 per-cent boost to their annual council funding via the tourist tax, after an SNP amendment to the council’s proposed 11.5 per-cent increase was voted through at a committee meeting this morning. Things are still up in the air, though, as the decision has now been referred to a full meeting of the council. In any case, it still only equates to an £18.7k uplift for the Fringe Society, despite the festival estimated to have added £6m to the council’s coffers through the visitor levy.

• James Graham and Richard Gadd are the latest figures to sound the alarm over the exorbitant cost of performing at the Edinburgh Fringe pricing out working-class artists and risk-taking work from the festival.

• Princes Street will finally reopen tomorrow, with three days of the Fringe to go, Michael MacLeod reports in The Edinburgh Minute

• More details about the planned replacement for the TV Festival, which departs for Manchester next year, have emerged. Jane Bradley has more in The Scotsman.

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Now, without further ado, here are my ten favourite shows of the festival this year…

Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It - Summerhall, 9.10pm

Xhloe and Natasha chalk up a fourth festival hit - and a fourth Fringe First win - with this swift, smart satire on conspiracy theories and mass hysteria, which sees the NYC-based duo rapidly hop, skip and jump through a range of characters to tell the story of a sasquatch hoax in a small town in the Appalachian Mountains that spirals catastrophically out of control. It transfers straight to Soho Theatre in September following the conclusion of its sold-out run at Summerhall. You can read my four-star review in The Stage here.

Book tickets here

Mayflies - Brown’s Of Leith, 4pm

Grid Iron’s site-specific adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s 2020 novel is a show of two halves: the first followed two teenage pals from Ayrshire through a riotous weekend in Manchester in the 1980s, the second caught up with them thirty years later, as one of them faced up to a terminal cancer diagnosis. Propulsive, plangent and passionately performed, it is skilfully staged by Ben Harrison amid the rusting apparatus of an old warehouse in Leith. It seems unlikely to get another life, given its site-specific nature, so your only hope is somehow snaffling a ticket over the next few days. You can read my four-star review in The Financial Times here.

Book tickets here

The Jolly Fisherman - Underbelly George Square, 12.45pm

This time-hopping two-hander from writer John Dinneen and his emerging company Kick It Anywhere takes a real story - the conversion of a Barking pub into a Mosque - and spins it into a moving study of cross-cultural friendship in a polarising world, with Layla Madanat’s engrossing production featuring strong performances from Jonny Khan and Alex Hill. There is no news of a transfer elsewhere… yet. You can read my four-star review in The Stage here.

Book tickets here

Salty Brine: How Strange It Is (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show) - Summerhall, 9.30pm

The latest in Salty Brine’s Living Record Collection series, in which he takes famous albums and classic books and spins them into exuberant shows stuffed with feeling and philosophy, this ninety-minute show sees the NYC-based cabaret artist find resonances between Neutral Milk Hotel’s cult 1998 record In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, The Diary Of Anne Frank, and his own adolescent experiences. Directed by Max Reuben and backed by a superb four-piece band, it is punchy, provocative and infectiously fun, and I am excited to see what combinations Salty Brine comes up with next. Like Xhloe and Natasha, he is transferring his show straight from Edinburgh to the Soho Theatre.

Book tickets here

The Distance - Summerhall, 6pm

Few productions capture the euphoric thrill and bitter despair of sport as well as Ben Norris’ solo show about elite athletics inspired by his own abortive adolescent career as a long-distance runner. When he is not jogging on a treadmill, Norris clambers around the steel climbing frame set, delivering a pacy story of excellence, ambition and obsession, and what happens after all that disappears. Again, there is no news of a future life for the show elsewhere, but it seems overwhelmingly likely there will be. You can read my four-star review in The Stage here.

Book tickets here

Our Other Organ - Summerhall, 4.15pm

This extraordinary show from Boaz Barkan involves Israel-born, Denmark-based performance artist conducting both a literal anatomical demonstration - he manhandles and manipulates circus artist Joel Degerfelt’s prone body in macabre fashion - and a historical dissection of the way in which the scars of antisemitism have manifested in the modern world. It addresses huge themes in gripping, grisly style and I would love to see it add more UK dates to its touring schedule. You can read my five-star review in The Scotsman here.

Book tickets here

Elf Lyons is The Woman on the Edge - Pleasance Courtyard, 9.30pm

This sharp, strange, and subversive show from Elf Lyons sees the Gaulier-trained actor, comedian and clown transform into a hysterical mid-century, mid-Atlantic actress to explore her struggles with romance, relationships and self-confidence, with loads of other stuff intricately layered in as well, including plenty of references to Apollo 13. It is cleverly constructed, brilliantly funny and really moving, and I am shocked it has not been shortlisted for the Comedy Award, seeing as it was perhaps the buzziest show of the festival. She is performing sixteen shows at SoHo Playhouse in New York from late September, and more dates will surely be announced soon.

Book tickets here

Campitalism: Three Gays Try To Fix The Economy - Pleasance Courtyard, 2.05pm

The debut show from company BOY Theatre, this riotous satire sees writer-performers Maria Telnikoff, Kit Miles and Cherry Eckell sprawl around in suits, gurning and guffawing as three coked-up cut-throat capitalists to send up everything from crypto to Huel to the 2008 financial crash, occasionally slipping in more serious sections of autobiographical storytelling to explore how Britain’s broken economy has impacted their own lives, attitudes and identities. It would be great to see it secure future dates elsewhere, but I look forward to BOY Theatre’s next show nonetheless.

Book tickets here

Man Sings the Same Song Over and Over Again for an Hour - Summerhall, 7.45pm

Yes, this show involves exactly what the title promises: an Australian clown called Conk sings the same song fifteen times in a row, introducing all sorts of silly business along the way, until the entire audience is up on their feet, dancing on the stage and belting it out alongside him come the hour’s conclusion. It is one of the shows of the Fringe this year. And, no, I am not going to tell you what the song is. I will tell you, though, that you can catch it in London at Underbelly Boulevard Soho on Thursday and Saturday next week. You can read my five-star review in The Stage here.

Book tickets here

Turn Your F*cking Phones Off - Summerhall, 3.40pm

Hannah Maxwell’s fourth Fringe show is her finest yet. Inspired by her experiences working for a shady company in Whitehall, it entertainingly explores the disturbing ways in which society is being manipulated via social media and smartphones, its restlessly imaginative format - Maxwell incorporates Bond jokes, audience games, TikTok reels, and more - an adroit reflection of our diminishing attention spans. I didn’t review it, but I would have given it five stars if I had. Summerhall has added extra late-night shows in its Main Hall this weekend. There is no news of a transfer to London or elsewhere yet but there definitely will be.

Book tickets here

Other shows I have seen and enjoyed: Crybabies: The Scaring, Overtone, Tether, Prophets, The Plot, Baby Everything, You and Me (and Whoever Comes Next), Nesting, Succubus, The Real Kyle McCarren, Adam Riches: The Captain, Amnesia, Transmission, Target Audience, The Van Gogh Shogh, Heart Beats Strong, I Bought A Flip Phone, Bachelors Of Fine Arts, House Fly, Steve Burns: Alive; Mr Bergmann of Deadman’s Point

And at the Edinburgh International Festival: A Trial, Angels In America, Hang Time, Al-Sirah Al-Hilaliyyah, When Prophecy Fails.

That is it from me here in The Crush Bar for the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. There are a few more loose ends to tie up: The List Awards and the Edinburgh Comedy Awards will be announced tomorrow; the final box-office figures will be revealed on Monday; and the tourist tax shenanigans shall inevitably continue for months. I will be covering all of that in The Stage.

The Crush Bar will be back in a few weeks, probably at the beginning of October, until which time I shall be going on holiday, chairing the audio drama judging of the British Audio Drama Awards, and looking after the budding canine critic below.

If you have appreciated this newsletter’s coverage of the Edinburgh Fringe this summer, please do think about becoming a paid supporter or, if you represent an organisation somehow, a champion supporter. That would be much appreciated.

Thanks for reading

Thanks to all 5178 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

Throughout August, The Crush Bar has focussed on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, most featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. In case you missed it, here 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 weekly 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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Subscribe now

The festival has six days left…

• More awards business was conducted over the weekend, including a second batch of The Skinny/Fest’s Besties, plus the shortlist for the Comedian’s Choice Award, the shortlist for The List Festival Awards, and the longlist for the ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards (not to be confused with the Edinburgh Comedy Awards), to which Damien Warren-Smith, AKA Garry Starr, has just donated £1600. The final Fringe First Awards and The List Festival Awards will be revealed on Friday morning, and the Comedy Award winners will be announced on Saturday.

• The Edinburgh Minute has published a round-up of loads of five-star reviews.

• Pleasance was forced to cancel a show in 10Dome after water cascaded through the ceiling on Friday following the rain. Katie Chambers reports in The Stage.

• Under new council plans, due to be debated on Friday, Edinburgh’s major arts organisations will get a 11.5 per-cent funding boost from the tourist tax, but that would actually only equate to £8625 for the Fringe Society, because 11.5 per-cent of not very much is not very much. More from The Herald’s Brian Ferguson here.

• The departure of the TV festival for Manchester next year will not deter screen producers from scouting work at the Fringe, according to SNL UK producer Alex Cartlidge, speaking on a panel at Shedinburgh. More from The Scotsman’s Jane Bradley here. You can keep up with Bradley’s entertaining Festival Diary here, too.

• Scottish culture secretary Màiri McAllan and Fringe Society boss Tony Lankester launched the Made In Scotland showcase on Thursday. I was on the selection panel this year. You can check out all the stuff we chose here.

• You may have spotted the war of words between ex-Etonian Underbelly founders Ed Bartlam and Charlie Wood and the Fringe Society’s Tony Lankester in the news. In her Substack, journalist Jackie Kemp sides with the latter…

• Also on Substack, in his sporadic newsletter, Time Out’s Andrzej Lukowski reflects on his Edinburgh Fringe experience this year, with his five favourite shows and some interesting reflections on the long shadow of Fleabag…

Cinema of moral anxiety

Some thoughts on the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe ft my top five shows

Greetings from hour seven of my four hour journey home to London from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe… is how I started to write this newsletter and FYI it took me ten hours to complete the journey, but unfortunately I lost both the will to live and write Substacks so I’m finishing this almost a week later…

Read more

8 days ago · 7 likes · Andrzej Lukowski

• Finally, in The Scotsman, festivals editor Andrew Eaton-Lewis discusses the fraught thirty-year phenomenon of star ratings at the Fringe.

I will send out one last Edinburgh Fringe newsletter on Friday with a list of my top ten shows - I am still catching stuff! - before going into hibernation for a month. Today, though, instead of bothering you with another list of five shows worth seeing, I thought I would use this newsletter for some sporadic reflections on the festival this year. And, no, I am not going to mention Amanda Knox or the Sauna Theatre.

Has this been a bad year for theatre? Or have critics not done their jobs well enough?

Whenever I have had a chance to chat to my critical colleagues over a coffee or a beer over the last fortnight, there has been a consensus that, while there are plenty of decent theatre shows at the festival, none of us have had our socks blown off by something that feels fresh and exciting and game-changing as in previous years.

Lyn Gardner has written about this in The Stage, bemoaning the “very, very average” work she has trawled through and laying the blame at the financial barriers associated with presenting work at the festival and consequent market-oriented approach taken by many producers. “Risk,” she writes, “has been priced out of the Fringe.”

Is this actually true, though? Could it be that my colleagues and I, time-poor and PR-reliant as we are, are simply not looking in the right places? We only ever see the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reviewing theatre at the Fringe: surely there is weird and wonderful stuff beneath the waterline? And, if we can’t seek it out, who can?

The comedy-theatre crossover (and the Edinburgh International Festival) is where the exciting stuff is

In the 2010s, when I first started covering the Edinburgh Fringe, the buzziest stuff was the playful, provocative work being devised by emerging ensembles, most of whom seemed to have met as students at Warwick University. I would theorise that this was rooted in the impact of influential companies like Complicité and Improbable. Then, the financial circumstances got harder and the Fleabag effect took hold, and the festival was flooded with solo shows about awful things.

In recent years, the festival wheel has turned again, away from theatre (see above!) and towards the uncategorisable, conceptual stuff that straddles the boundary between theatre and comedy, and often involves people being extremely silly or disgusting. I am thinking of shows like Conk’s Man Sings the Same Song Over and Over Again for an Hour, Garry Starr: Classic Penguins, and Underground Monk Show, and, on the more serious (but still quite silly) end of the spectrum, shows like Elf Lyons is The Woman on the Edge, Baby Everything, Megasquirt: Fully Loaded, and Birds. Is it glib to hypothesise that artists are responding to a ridiculous world by making ridiculous shows?

And, while we are discussing where to find the good stuff: whisper it, but the Edinburgh International Festival has programmed some really interesting stuff this year, just as it did last summer: Christiane Jatahy’s Ibsen experiment A Trial, Ivo van Hove’s fantastically fleet Angels In America, Missy Mazzoli’s surreal opioid opera The Galloping Cure, and Zora Howard’s brutal Beckettian three-hander Hang Time, There is more to come this week, too: I am particularly excited about When Prophecy Fails. I would still like to see fewer orchestras and more theatre in the programme, but hats off to Roy Luxford for introducing EIF’s august audiences to some spicy stuff.

The Edinburgh Council is screwing up the tourist tax

Ahead of the Fringe, all the talk was of Edinburgh’s new visitor levy, the first of its kind in the UK, having an adverse impact on the festival by further increasing the cost of accommodation and thus putting off both artists and audiences alike. We will only know if this has actually happened when the Fringe Society releases its data next week, but it doesn’t feel like it, does it? To me, the city centre feels as rammed as ever.

Where the council has messed up, though, is in divvying the funds raised by the tourist tax among Edinburgh’s major arts organisations. The details are too complex to cover comprehensively here (that’s part of the problem) but several plans have been proposed and then pulled. The latest, which will be debated at a committee meeting on Friday, is to increase major arts organisations’ annual funding by 11.5 per-cent.

That sounds good for, say, the Lyceum, Capital Theatres and the EIF, who are already fairly well supported by the council and will see their grants jump by £37k, £67k and £220k respectively. It is a slap in the face for the Fringe Society, though, which only gets a paltry £67k annually and would therefore only get an extra £8625. For a festival that is worth hundreds of millions to Edinburgh’s economy and is estimated to pour £6m into the council’s coffers via the tourist tax every year, that seems insane. There needs to be a rethink and the Fringe Society deserves much more, although that would, of course, annoy the venue operators that resent its administrative dominance.

New venues are welcome, but festival infrastructure is going to become an issue

One of the more joyful aspects of this festival has been the return of some much-missed venues, including Gilded Balloon’s Teviot HQ and the redeveloped King’s Theatre, and the opening of some new ones, like Francesca Moody’s Shedinburgh, the Sauna Theatre, and the Fringe Society’s new home on Infirmary Street. I still miss the Paines Plough Roundabout, though. Fingers crossed it is back in business next year.

One problem that has become apparent this year, however, is that much of the existing infrastructure is going to struggle during future festivals. Fringe venues, as we saw last week, are simply not capable of coping with extreme heat or heavy rain.

As our climate becomes more extreme, with more downpours and more droughts, festival venues will need to adapt if they are to remain appropriate places for artists and audiences alike. Or, of course, they could all convert to sauna theatres.

Space for informed, insightful critical discussion is vital amid the miasma of AI and influencers

This feels like the first year that AI has actually had an impact on the Fringe. I can see some legitimate some uses for it, particularly around mining the mountain of box-office data the festival sits on so that artists can make more informed decisions, but the AI-generated posters, the vibe-coded planners, the search engines scraping publications for content and not paying them a penny? That can all get in the bin.

Also, earlier this month, in a haphazard attempt to further this newsletter’s reach, I logged onto Instagram for the first time in a decade and made it an account. There is a high chance I will be logging off and closing it in the near future, though, partly because I have neither the time nor the skill it demands these days, but mainly because, well, it sucks, doesn’t it? All the content I see is attention-chasing videos about performers with no audience (what is this, 2023?), irritating influencers giving out terrible recommendations (Lannan? Please!), and theatre companies lamely jumping on the latest inane social media trend (kinda chic to shut the f**k up, eh?).

Amid all of this, I think that informed, insightful and independent coverage of the Fringe is more important than ever. That is (partly) why I trawl through dull council reports and catch as many shows as I possibly can. That is (partly) why I write as much as I do, for The Stage, The Scotsman, The FT, and here on Substack. And that is (partly) why I experimented with a live critical discussion a fortnight ago, and am planning on developing that idea into something more significant next year. Maybe you think this stuff is worthwhile, too. Maybe you want to prove that right now...

Thanks for reading

Thanks to all 5184 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for today. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

For the rest of August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please do forward.

In case you missed it, here is Tuesday’s issue, containing five more recommendations…

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 weekly 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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Subscribe now

A quick note: most publications will start winding down their Edinburgh Fringe coverage over the next few days, but I will be sticking around until the bitter end.

I may not send out a newsletter on Tuesday, but there will definitely be one next Friday listing my favourite shows of the festival. Until then, I plan on catching as much stuff as possible, so if you know of anything fresh, strange, or fantastic that has hitherto been overlooked, then let me know by replying to this email.

The festival has ten days left…

• The second batch of Fringe First Awards were given out this morning at a ceremony hosted by Joyce McMillan and Bryony Kimmings. They went to Amnesia, The Distance, Parasocial Activity, HAM and Salty Brine: How Strange It Is (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show). More details here from me in The Stage.

• The List has also announced the longlists for its awards, which will be handed out at a ceremony next Friday. You can find all the details here.

• It rained quite a bit on Wednesday. Some venues were forced to cancel shows due to leaks. Katie Chambers reports here in The Stage.

• The Guardian’s chief critic Arifa Akbar and The New York Times’ chief critic Helen Shaw have reported on their Fringe-going adventures here and here, while Tim Bano has ranked eight shows based on how Fringe-y they are in The Financial Times: the clown funeral for Greyfriars Bobby takes the top spot.

• Time Out theatre editor and sauna-hater Andrzej Lukowski has written about conquering his fears in the Sauna Theatre for Exeunt…

Exeunt

Can the Sauna Theatre cure our critic's terror... of saunas?

By Andrzej Łukowski…

Read more

12 days ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Exeunt

• In The Herald, Grace Hussey ponders whether social media influencers are spoiling Edinburgh during the festival.

• Every publication has cottoned on to the fact that articles listing the funniest jokes at the Fringe are extremely well read. Here is The Guardian’s iteration.

Our Other Organ - Summerhall, 4.15pm

This short, sly, extraordinary show from Israel-born, Denmark-based performance artist Boaz Barkan and his company NoLands presents an macabre anatomical dissection of how our bodies carry trauma, how antisemitism has impacted Jewish people, and how the scars of the Holocaust have manifested in the modern world.

It begins with Barkan chatting about his interest in the anatomy and his allegorical theory of how we have another organ that soaks up hate and, when saturated, spreads it throughout the body. Then, over 30 minutes, he performs a disturbing demonstration of his ideas on the prone body of circus artist Joel Degerfeldt, grabbing his stomach, sucking his fingers, and flexing his legs. As he does so, he ponders profound - and, to some, provocative - allusions about his family history, the traumas suffered by Jewish people, and the genocidal crimes of the Israeli state.

It is one of the strangest, darkest, deepest productions I have seen at the festival this year - the fact that it takes place in Summerhall’s Anatomy Lecture Theatre is perfect - and the only show I have awarded five stars to so far. You can read that review in The Scotsman here, and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Parasocial Activity - Gilded Balloon Patter House, 5.40pm

This impressive solo show from Scottish writer and performer Briony Martha begins like a bad rom-com: an aspiring actor meets James McAvoy in Costa on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow (that actually happened to Martha), he gets her tickets for a play he is appearing in (Cyrano, presumably), and the pair strike up an online relationship, messaging each other incessantly on Instagram (that bit did not happen).

Or do they? As the show continues, we start to question whether Martha’s increasingly manic character is the most reliable narrator. What starts as an unlikely romance transitions, with gleefully dark humour, into a resonant and timely study of loneliness, professional frustration, and AI psychosis.

Under Megan Brewer’s direction, Martha performs her own play with enjoyably deranged dynamism, manipulating a forest of microphones into other characters in the story and chatting to a male voice (surely not the real McAvoy?) over the sound system. She deservedly won a Fringe First this morning. You can read my four-star review here in The Stage and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Salty Brine: How Strange It Is (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show) - Summerhall, 9.30pm

In his series of shows The Living Record Collection, NYC-based cabaret artist Salty Brine takes famous albums and classic books and spins them into exuberant shows stuffed with feeling and philosophy. Previously combos include Annie Lennox’s Diva and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Led Zeppelin’s IV and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

His latest takes Neutral Milk Hotel’s cult 1998 record In The Aeroplane Over The Sea and The Diary Of Anne Frank, plus some autobiographical stuff, some truly terrible poems, and a whole load of other stuff and turns it into an imaginative meditation on the joyful thrills, unbearable pain and sheer unlikeliness of young love.

Under Max Reuben’s direction, Salty Brine performs with captivating charisma, alongside a superb four-piece band comprising his collaborator Nate Weida and a trio of local musicians. It also picked up a Fringe First this morning. You can read my colleague Paul Vale’s five-star review here and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

The Faustus Project - Underbelly Cowgate, 9.05pm

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is an intense and imaginative play, full of magic, angels and demons, and culminating in its diabolical deal-making protagonist being dragged down to hell. How do you stage such spectacle and surprise within the constraints of the Edinburgh Fringe?

Half Trick Theatre’s bold answer is to cast a different guest as Faustus every night, and subject them to an hour of increasingly unhinged tasks, challenges and mayhem. Unwitting performers are presented with an edited version of Marlowe’s text and asked to deliver it. Along the way, a four-strong ensemble present them with everything from vodka shots to marshmallow assaults. Created – with real care – by Caden Scott, and performed by Scott, Courtney Bassett, Alex Medland and Moira Hamilton, the boundary-breaking show first ran at the Fringe in 2024, returned last August, then made an award-nominated appearance at Brighton Fringe in May.

Now, The Faustus Project is back at the Fringe for the third time, running at Underbelly Cowgate now the Edinburgh-based Kiwi company’s new show Waiting For Wonka has concluded its run at Gilded Balloon Patter House. Previous Faustus performers include comedian Eleanor Morton, actor Pip Utton, and Why I Stuck A Flare Up My Arse For England creator Alex Hill. Who will be brave enough to meet Mephistopheles this year? You can find out via the button below.

Book tickets here

This is promotional content.

Anatomy Of Survival - Assembly @ Dance Base, 7.45pm

A woman walks into a coffee shop. There is a mix-up with her order. She explodes. Twenty-two people witness the incident. Each of them has a different perspective on what transpired. Over an hour, all these perspectives are unfolded through drama, movement, and music.

That is the intriguing premise of Anatomy Of Survival, a new dance-theatre piece from acclaimed German-born, London-based choreographer and psychotherapist Frauke Requardt and award-winning playwright Vivienne Franzmann, whose work includes 2010’s Mogadishu and 2017’s Bodies. Designed by Hannah Clark and performed by actor Kath Duggan, dancers Neil Callaghan and Bea Bidault, and drummer Stefano Ancora, it is a precise yet playful interrogation of how our nervous systems work, of the subjective nature of reality, and more.

Conceived during a residency co-run by the Royal Court Theatre and The Place, Anatomy Of Survival first ran at The Place and Shoreditch Town Hall last year and now arrives in Edinburgh at Dance Base for the final week of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

This is promotional content.

Thanks for reading

Thanks to all 5184 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

For the rest of August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please do forward.

In case you missed it, here is Tuesday’s issue, containing five more recommendations…

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 weekly 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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Subscribe now

The festival has thirteen days left…

• ACE has donated £80k to “kickstart” next year’s Keep It Fringe Fund, which was vastly depleted this year after UK government funding that sustained it in 2024 and 2025 ended. The ACE money is only available to artists based in England, but the Fringe Society is fundraising for more. My report for The Stage is here.

• Shows Elf Lyons is The Woman on the Edge, House Fly, Stanislavski Can’t Save Me From The Apocalypse, and Ethan and Gigi present The Movement were recognised at the first round of The Besties on Saturday, while Eva Peroni picked up the Emerging Talent Award and Xhloe and Natasha won the Fringe Legend Award.

• At Summerhall, the first wave of Bragi Award winners includes Nesting, Turn Your F*cking Phones Off, Sand and, at the Traverse Theatre, For Dolores.

• Edinburgh Art Festival has laid on a free daytime shuttle bus between Queen Charlotte Street in Leith and St Andrew Square in an attempt to alleviate the travel chaos caused by the fire on Princes Street. More here.

• Lyn Gardner is not having a great festival. In her weekly column in The Stage, she confesses that she has seen a lot of “very, very average work” and worries that the strictures involved with staging shows at the Fringe are eroding the festival’s “bedrock” of radical, risk-taking work.

• A performer drinking piss, a man singing the same song over and over again, shows in saunas: Holly O’Mahoney reports on the rise of “extreme theatre” at the Fringe in iNews.

• A show from Amanda Knox, a musical about January 6th, a comedy about a school shooting: in The Scotsman, Jane Bradley asks festival bosses about the limits of free speech at the Fringe.

The Distance - Summerhall, 6pm

In this superb and sweaty one-man play, writer and performer Ben Norris (a regular on The Archers and co-creator of The Choir Of Man) fictionalises his adolescent experiences as an elite long-distance runner in thrilling fashion. It is almost as impressive as the 30-minute 10k he clocked in May 2012.

Produced by Grace Dickson, Nic Doodson and Global Creative, the show sees Norris play Chris, a Nottinghamshire teenager who discovers a talent for running, becomes obsessed, and graduates through event after event to the cusp of international attention, before his nascent athletic career is cruelly cut short.

Few shows dramatise the euphoria and despair of sport as well as this. The text is sparse, lyrical and witty. The staging from Locascio is slick and intense. And Norris captivates, spending a good chunk of the hour jogging on a treadmill, and the rest of it clambering around the metal climbing frame that surrounds it. One of the performances of the festival? It is in the running. You can read my four-star review in The Stage shortly and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

The Real Kyle McCarren - Pleasance Courtyard, 13.50pm

Everyone remembers lost loved ones differently. That is the central theme of this moving new American musical from Jonathan Larson Grant recipient Andy Roninson and Sean McVerry, which sees Roninson ponder the premature death of his high school bandmate Kyle and confront the fact that his perception of his pal differs from everyone else’s idea of him.

Over a fluid 75 minutes of gig-theatre, Roninson reflects on his teenage friendship with Kyle and on the disorienting days that followed his death at the age of 21, with the help of an imaginary iteration of Kyle himself, played by McVerry. It isn’t perfect (the show does not sufficiently distils its meditations into tangible drama) but Roninson’s writing is clever and neurotic, the seven-strong ensemble is excellent, the staging from directors Lonny Price and Matt Cowart is imaginative, and the songs are superb, particularly this one.

This is the first the UK has seen of The Real Kyle McCarren, but it seems unlikely to be the last, given the attachment of Operation Mincemeat producers Avalon. It is well worth catching it now, though, and not just so you can boast that you caught it in an early iteration. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Elf Lyons Is The Woman On The Edge - Pleasance Courtyard, 9.30pm

Could this be Elf Lyons’ year? The Gaulier-trained actor and comedian has spent a decade creating weird, amusing and utterly original shows, each one completely different from the last, from her ridiculous 2017 reworking of Swan Lake, to her Stephen King-inspired 2022 horror-comedy Raven, to her acclaimed 2024 equine experiment Horses.

This year, in perhaps her most personal show yet, Lyons transforms into a hysterical mid-century, mid-Atlantic actress to explore her recent struggles with romance, relationships and self-confidence. Other stuff (an operatic rendition of the absurd things men have said to her, some impressive lip-syncing, and a load of references to Apollo 13) is intricately layered throughout.

It is sharp, strange, subversive, cleverly constructed, brilliantly funny and ultimately extremely moving, and it is one of the buzziest shows of the Fringe this year. Lyons was nominated for the Comedy Award nine years ago. She seems a strong contender for the big prize again this festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Slayers - Assembly George Square Studios, 12.15pm

What do you do with all the rage? That is the question at the heart of this gripping new one-woman play from Edinburgh-based writer and producer Corinne Salisbury, which follows Liane, a forty-something woman, single mother and survivor of domestic abuse, as she tries to find ways to reclaim power after a real-life encounter with the manosphere, while her ten-year-old daughter starts to suffer from misogynist bullying.

Inspired by dramas about the darker sides of motherhood, like Frances Poet’s Gut, plus series including Bad Sisters and I May Destroy You, the play is a blackly comic drama that interrogates the limits of empathy, the need to protect our children from harm, the temptation to meet violence with violence, and what happens when that impulse goes too far.

Produced by Salisbury’s company Rupture, which is also behind These Are Our Neighbours at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre in October, directed by Jo Rush, and performed by Zoe Hunter, Slayers was first aired at a Summerhall Surgeries scratch night in March and now returns for a full festival run at Assembly George Square Studios. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

This is promotional content.

Jessie North Is Broken - Pleasance Courtyard, 11.50

This one-person spoken-word poem-play from writer and performer Martha Godber takes place over the course of one night, following a young working-class woman from her stressful shift as a care worker for elderly people, through an eventful evening out in Hull, and back again.

Inspired by interviews with young carers around the country, by the hard-hitting work of Alexander Zeldin and James Graham, and by a frustration at the lack of northern female voices on stage, it contemplates the pressures and joys of contemporary working-class life in rapid rhythmic rhyme, backed by an infectiously energetic soundtrack of Dua Lipa, Raye, and more.

Produced by the John Godber Company (e prolific playwright is Martha’s dad) and directed by Millie Gaston, the show arrives at the Edinburgh Fringe after premiering at York Theatre Royal in May, running at Pleasance Courtyard all festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

This is promotional content.

Thanks for reading

Thanks to all 5189 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

For the rest of August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please do forward.

In case you missed it, here is Tuesday’s issue, containing five more recommendations…

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 weekly 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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Subscribe now

The festival has seventeen days left…

• The first batch of Fringe Firsts were awarded at a ceremony at Pleasance Courtyard this morning. They went to: The Bridge at Assembly Roxy, Supposing and The Singer at the Traverse, Toast and Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It at Summerhall, and Mayflies down in Leith. More soon in The Stage.

• I went on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row on Wednesday evening, chatting with Kirsty Wark about the Sauna Theatre, Mayflies, A Trial, and more, including whether an ATG-backed musical has a place at the festival, the ongoing tourist tax debate, and the introduction of dynamic pricing. You can listen here and here…

• At 2pm today, 154 years after he died, Greyfriars Bobby will finally get the funeral he deserves when a whole bunch of clowns gather at his much-bothered statue to commemorate him. You are welcome to join them. More from Bruce Dessau here.

• Tomorrow, at 11.30pm, Awkward Productions and Xhloe and Natasha will fight to the death and maybe kiss in Awkward Productions and Xhloe and Natasha Fight To The Death (and maybe kiss) at Underbelly Bristo Square, in aid of Queer Was Always Here.

• Fifteen Fringe shows are offering free tickets to striking workers at the National Galleries of Scotland. More from Katie Chambers in The Stage here.

• There was drama at a council meeting yesterday morning, when a debate over tourist tax funding for the festivals was abruptly postponed, much to the dismay of the festival bosses present. It is too complicated to explain here, but Katie Chambers get into the details in The Stage. The Scotsman’s leader today covers the situation, too.

• Chambers has also reported on a war of words between Underbelly boss Ed Bartlam and Fringe Society chief executive Tony Lankester. Bartlam said the Fringe Society was “bloated.” Lankester responsded it operated “one of the lowest-cost ticketing operations in the world, despite its scale and complexity.” Really, this is a battle over the box office. You can read more on that here.

• Emma Brünjes has replaced Nica Burns as executive director of the Edinburgh Comedy Award. Read more in Chortle here.

Hey! Thanks to everyone who came along to The Crush Bar Live yesterday morning. Thanks, too, to Pleasance for giving us the room for free, and to my panellists Tim Bano, Holly Williams and Mickey-Jo Boucher for a fun, wonderful, wide-ranging conversation featuring loads of observations, insights and show recommendations.

We managed to record the discussion. I’ve not had a moment to edit it at all, but I thought you might be interested to hear it sooner rather than later, so here you go…

Have a listen to find out our opinions on the Sauna Theatre, clowning, Amanda Knox, and more. And let me know what you think. What worked? What didn’t? Should we do it again next year? Should I never go near a microphone again?

Nesting - Summerhall, 4.30pm

Francis is an older man, a widower, who lives with his pregnant daughter. When he is diagnosed with motor neurone disease, he begins to consider committing suicide to spare her the burden of looking after him. This idea manifests anthropomorphically as a savage seagull that pecks and squawks at him as his body and his relationship with his daughter suffer.

That is the concept of this quirky, compelling and deeply moving drama from writer Peter McCormick, director Ben Standish and their new company Trolley Problem, which previously produced an acclaimed Scots adaptation of Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo in Glasgow earlier this year.

It is a stylish and strange take on a tricky topic, and it features two astonishing physical performances from Scottish theatre legend Billy Mack as the deteriorating Francis, and from Michael Guest as the nasty, nipping bird that bothers his conscience. It is at Summerhall all festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

The Bridge - Assembly Roxy, 7.40pm

Alaa Shehada’s show The Horse Of Jenin was one of the big hits of last year’s festival. A funny and moving story about growing up under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, it was heaped with acclaim and awards, and transferred to the Bush Theatre in December.

Now, alongside a return run of The Horse Of Jenin, the charismatic Palestinian performer is premiering a new storytelling show, The Bridge, which retells a torturous journey of enormous queues, unbearable heat and Israeli checkpoints he went on to deliver a prized bottle of olive oil from his home in the West Bank, across the Allenby Bridge, to his aunt in Jordan.

It is an amusing, infuriating, but ultimately hopeful portrait of the sheer frustration of living as a Palestinian under Israeli occupation, when the simplest tasks take forever to complete. It just won a Fringe First Award this morning and runs at Assembly Roxy for the rest of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

DeepFake - Underbelly Cowgate, various times

This uncanny solo experience casts participants as employees at a company called MirrorMind. After being handed a pass and ushered to a computer, you meet a coder via Zoom. They have developed a powerful tool that can create avatars of anyone with perfect precision. The potential uses - and potential gains for the company - are vast. So, too, are the dangers. In five minutes, you have a meeting with your boss, and you have to decide whether to press ahead with the project or press pause on it.

Created by Minh-Anh Day and Grace Goheen of NYC-based collective 404 Theater, the experience last just fifteen minutes, but still manages to raise profound questions about artificial intelligence, commercial imperatives, individual autonomy and more. It is also quite fun. Depending on your sensibility, you can either play along with proceedings or push the boundaries. With alarming ease, I reinvented myself as an unethical corporate stooge, recently returned from a holiday in Vietnam.

The festival is full of imaginative, provocative experiences like this. It is well worth including a few in your schedule alongside more traditionally staged stuff. You can often squeeze them into gaps between other shows. This one runs at Underbelly Cowgate throughout the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Landsfrau- Summerhall, 2.50pm

What do you think of when you think of Afghanistan? Cycles of conflict stretching back decades? The US-led NATO occupation that lasted twenty years and ended with a chaotic withdrawal in 2021? The oppressive Taliban regime that withdrawal resulted in? Berin-based actor Mariann Yar is familiar with these perceptions, but she also knows another Afghanistan: an Afghanistan rich with music and movement, culture and community, life and love.

Landsfrau is a multi-disciplinary show that skips through time, memory and myth to explore the tension between those polarised perceptions of Afghanistan. Inspired by Yar’s own experiences, it incorporates Afghan folk music, electronic beats, traditional dance, audience interaction and more, revolving around Ariana, a German woman with Afghan ancestry.

Devised by Doris Crea Collective – a German company that includes Yar, Leonard Dick, Andrzej Agranovski and Alessa Maria Karešin – the show premiered in Berlin in 2023 and has subsequently toured Germany to acclaim. Now, it arrives in Edinburgh under the aegis of Berlin-based agency Aurora Nova and BOW Production, hoping to connect with Afghan audiences in Britain and beyond. It runs at Summerhall throughout the festival and you can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

This is promotional content.

The Van Gogh Shogh - Assembly @ St Andrew Square, 6.25pm

What would Van Gogh think were he to be magically transplanted from nineteenth-century Provence to the present day? What would he make of the veneration of his work? Would he be pleased with the proliferation of his paintings on postcards and tote bags? What would he say about the immersive installations – and countless Fringe shows – inspired by his art?

That ripe premise provides the inspiration for The Van Gogh Shogh, a highly interactive and wildly imaginative clown show from Philadelphia-based performer Donna Oblongata, which incorporates painting lessons, karaoke sessions and more to ask profound questions about the commodification of art and the value of creativity in contemporary society.

First performed at Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2023, the show has toured extensively across the US, and first arrived in Edinburgh for a short run last summer. Now, following dates at Camden People’s Theatre and the Rosemary Branch Theatre in London and Mezrab in Amsterdam, it returns to Scotland for a full Fringe run at Assembly Rooms, one of several shows hailing from Philadelphia at the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

This is promotional content.

Thanks for reading

Thanks to all 5182 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

For the rest of August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please do forward.

Today, though, is a bonus promo issue, dedicated to the House Of Oz Showcase.

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 weekly 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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Subscribe now

The House Of Oz showcase is back…

One of the best things about the Edinburgh Fringe is how international it is. Every August, the streets of the Scottish capital fill with extraordinary artists from all over the world, bringing work that impresses, inspires and expands horizons.

One of the best ways to discover this work is through the international showcases. There are sixteen official ones this year, hailing from Belgium, China, Denmark, Korea, Luxembourg, Singapore, Taiwan, France, Ireland, Canada and elsewhere.

One of the best-loved programmes, though, is the House Of Oz showcase, a philanthropy-funded operation that transports a variety of brilliant and boundary-breaking work from Down Under to Edinburgh every year. In recent years, House Of Oz has been responsible for bringing Two Strangers Walk Into A Bar, A Migrant’s Son, The State of Grace, Ten Thousand Hours and other celebrated shows to the Fringe.

This year, the House Of Oz showcase features eight shows. Here are five of them…

Birds - Assembly George Square, 7pm

Alex Hines is a Melbourne-based comedian and actor who exploded onto Australia’s comedy scene in 2022 with celebrated show To Schapelle And Back – a surreal exploration of the Schapelle Corby case – then continued to earn acclaim and awards for her stand-up, her television series Dee-Brief, and her frequent appearances as celebrity alter-ego Juniper Wilde. Sarah Stafford, meanwhile, is a Brisbane-based theatremaker, performance artist and musician, known for absurdist documentary Again You Have Trusted Me, her durational performances as Poly Lez Slut and for being one third of electro-pop trio Architects Of Sound.

Together, though, Hines and Stafford are Sons Of Susan, the duo behind Birds, a camp and crazy climate crisis satire about two absurdly attired women – five-time divorcee Shayna and mother-of-twelve Beverley – who escape to the beach while the apocalypse is wreaking havoc around them. One critic hailed it as “Waiting For Godot meets Kath and Kim.”

The show has been a huge hit Down Under, winning the Best Comedy Award at the Melbourne Fringe, the Golden Gibbo Prize at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and a bunch of other accolades. Now, it arrives in Edinburgh. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Concerts Of The Future - Summerhall, various times

Have you ever imagined what it might be like to perform with an orchestra? Well, in this 20-minute virtual-reality experience from The Sonicrats – an Australian team of musicians, researchers and technologists led by Ciaran Frame, Alon Ilsar and Erick Mitsak – you can.

No musical experience is required. Participants simply strap on a VR headset and find themselves on stage with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, playing along with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 with the help of an AirStick, a wireless gestural instrument that translates movement into music, offering users a range of six futuristic instruments, from the breathy stings of a Cellaris to the crystal plucks of a Velaphon, to deep drones of a Gravitone.

Developed with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Monash University’s pioneering SensiLab research facility, the project now arrives in Edinburgh, where wannabee virtuosos can experience it at Summerhall throughout the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Fuccbois: Live In Concert - Assembly George Square Studios, 5.05pm

This hit comedy pokes fun at fame, fandom, ghosting, gaslighting and other absurdities of contemporary online dating culture through the lends of a parody pop concert: the final gig of Fuccbois, the world’s biggest boy band, made up of Brenden, Brandon, Tyler and Brenden.

Written and composed by Sydney-based actor and comedian Bridie Connell – contributor to Tonightly with Tom Ballard, Australian improv champion, and co-creator of comedy play The Plan (and Other Plans) – Fuccbois: Live In Concert first ran to acclaim in Syndey in 2024, then returned to Adelaide Fringe and Melbourne International Comedy Festival last year.

Now, produced by Soft Tread Enterprises, directed by Richard Carroll, and featuring a five-strong cast of cross-dressing female and non-binary performers, the show now arrives in Edinburgh, running at Assembly George Square Studios all festival, ahead of a transfer to London’s Soho Theatre in September. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

How Not To Make It In America - Summerhall, 9.20pm

Shortly after graduating from drama school in 2001, Wales-born, Adelaide-based playwright Emily Steel moved to New York. Three weeks after she arrived, 9/11 happened. Two decades later, Steel’s experiences of the tragedy and its aftermath inspired a one-person play.

How Not To Make It In America follows Matt, an Aussie actor who arrives in America full of ambition, only for his dreams to be abruptly destabilised by the attacks on the World Trade Centre. Both a coming-of-age comedy and a moving evocation of extraordinary time, Steel’s play examines how unexpected events can radically realign our priorities.

Produced by Adelaide-based company Theatre Republic, directed by Corey McMahon, and performed by Jono Darby, taking on 28 different characters, the play premiered to acclaim in 2021 – The List labelled it a “beautifully told, deeply resonant piece” in a five-star review – and now arrives at Summerhall for the whole Fringe. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Glass Child - Summerhall, 1.30pm

This moving multi-disciplinary two-hander explores a remarkable, real relationship: that between Kayah Guenther, who has Down syndrome, and his older sister Maitreyah Guenther.

Using a combination of storytelling, projection, movement and more, the show jumps backwards and forwards in time to examine the evolution of Kayah and Maitreyah’s extraordinary bond, from their innocent childhood to their twin careers as dance-theatre artists, embracing their siblinghood in all its funny, frustrating and joyful complexity, examining how society has shaped it, and provoking profound questions about how we deal with difference. A Brisbane blogger labelled it “hands down the best piece of storytelling I’ve seen this year.”

Performed by Kayah and Maitreyah, produced by Gold Coast company The Farm, and directed by Kate Harman and Gavin Webber, Glass Child – the title refers to the syndrome in which the sibling of someone with special needs is overlooked – toured Australia last year, and now runs at Summerhall throughout the first half of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Thanks for reading

Thanks to all 5177 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

For the rest of August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please do forward.

In case you missed it, here is Friday’s issue, containing five more recommendations…

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 weekly 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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Subscribe now

The festival has twenty days left…

• The tourist tax debate continues, with Pleasance boss Anthony Alderson saying that it is “kneecapping” performers. The Stage’s Katie Chambers reports here.

• The tax is one of several points raised in this opinion piece from The Herald’s Brian Ferguson, which argues that Edinburgh Council, the Scottish government and the UK government are all guilty of neglecting the festivals.

• I did a panel at Shedinburgh on Sunday with Tim Bano, Lyn Gardner and Miriam Attwood about working as a journalist at the festival. Lyn expands on some stuff we discussed about the importance of context when it comes to criticism here in The Stage. Oh, and it is actually okay to pester her while she is having lunch…

• The Scotsman’s Jane Bradley reports here on another Shedinburgh panel about staging work at the Fringe here, at which producers agreed that, for all its flaws, the festival is still the best place to get work seen by a lot of people at once.

• Fringe bosses including Tony Lankester, Nica Burns and Katy Coren have defended Amanda Knox’s right to perform at the Fringe. Katie Chambers reports here in The Stage. Now can we please stop talking about that?

• My colleagues and I have been busy reviewing shows over the last few days. You can catch up with all the four-star and five-star reviews in The Stage here. Kate Wyver has also put together a good list for the Guardian. Other lists are available.

• The first awards of the festival will be handed out later this week, with the first Fringe First ceremony on Friday morning. There’s more info on awards here.

• In The New Statesman, Ralph Jones has interviewed Steve Bennett, founder and editor of Chortle, and “The most powerful man at the Edinburgh Fringe.”

This is your final reminder that The Crush Bar Live is happening on Thursday morning at Pleasance Courtyard’s Cabaret Bar. Tim Bano, Holly Williams, Mickey-Jo Boucher and I will be discussing the best - and possibly worst - stuff we have seen at the festival so far with the audience. Hope to see you there. Free tickets below.

Book tickets to The Crush Bar Live here

We Will Hear The Angels - Summerhall, 4.30pm

Edinburgh-based multidisciplinary company Magnetic North turned 25 last year, and celebrated by staging this odd and exquisite show at Fruitmarket Gallery. The title comes from the final lines of Uncle Vanya, but the show has little to do with Chekhov. Instead, it is an evocative investigation into heartbreak and the impulse to seek solace in songs.

Written by Nicholas Bone and co-directed with Marisa Zanotti, it focuses on several disparate characters that have each experienced some sort of romantic trauma. A lovelorn artist, a friend-zoned accountant, a lonely wife, and a repressed young woman each relay their stories in simple understated chunks, then break into song in turn, delivering soulful covers of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and Orange Juice.

I saw it in January last year and was entranced, labelling it “an exquisite evocation of how longing and loneliness are bittersweetly transmuted by song” in my four-star review for The Stage. Now, it runs at Summerhall throughout the festival, ahead of a Scottish tour in September. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Man Sings the Same Song Over and Over Again for an Hour - Summerhall, 7.45pm

My friend and colleague Tim Bano, who will be appearing alongside me at The Crush Bar Live on Thursday, told me today that this is his favourite show of the festival so far. Apparently, it involves exactly what is described in the show title: an Australian man called Conk (the clowning alias of Connor Dariol) singing the same three-minute song repeatedly.

“The first time you hear the song, it’s very funny,” Tim tells me. “The second time it’s quite funny, too. By the third time, you realise that the show is going to be exactly what it promises. But then the fourth time he sakes things up just a bit and it becomes funny again. By the twentieth time, the whole room is on their feet having had the most stupid, pointless fun you can have at the Fringe.”

The show won awards at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival earlier this year, and now runs at Summerhall throughout the festival. What is the song? Well, you’ll have to head along to find out. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Surreally Good - Summerhall, 5.20pm

This solo show from Teesside surrealist theatremaker Scott Turnbull combines lo-fi animation, live drawing and absurdist humour into something extremely odd but totally compelling.

The convoluted framing device pitches Turnbull as the scion of a once great, now ailing family education company that tours socially conscious seminars delivered via an old-school overhead projector, with the audience cast as students at one such session. His mind keeps wandering off into a series of increasingly bizarre stories, though, which he delivers via David Shrigley-ish live drawing, gentle audience interaction, a handful of quirky songs, and plenty of puzzling charm.

I saw it at last year’s festival and loved it. You can read my four-star review for The Scotsman here, and get tickets for its return run at Summerhall via the button below.

Book tickets here

Bad Boy - Underbelly Cowgate, 1pm

This solo show from Gothenburg-based actor, writer and director Daniel Adolfsson focuses on Jack, a Swedish musician stranded in Edinburgh after splitting up with both his band and his girlfriend, who drifts through his days gigging in bars, singing songs about his ex, drowning in self-pity, and looking after a rescue dog he doesn’t even like.

Written and performed by Adolfsson, co-created with Charlotte Davidson, and simply staged by London-based director Lilac Yosiphon, who recently worked on Summerfolk at the National Theatre, it is a bleakly funny and movingly tender meditation on love, ambition, and how to move on after your dreams have died.

The show marks the Edinburgh Fringe debut of Nerve Creations, a company co-founded by Adolfsson and producer Davidson that has made work on stage and screen across Scandinavia and operates Teater Trixter in Gothenburg. It runs at Underbelly Cowgate throughout the festival and you can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

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Crocodile Rock - Gilded Balloon Teviot, 4.30pm

Over the last fifteen years, Andy McGregor has established himself as a major force within musical theatre in Scotland. Under the aegis of his company Sleeping Warrior, he created crime caper Spuds in 2019, gig-theatre six-hander Battery Park in 2023, and environmental epic To Save The Sea in 2024, as well as countless smaller shows and Christmas productions.

Now, Sleeping Warrior is making its debut at the Edinburgh Fringe with one-man musical Crocodile Rock. Set in the seaside resort of Millport, this heart-breaking but joyous show follows a Scottish lad, Steven McPhail, through his troubled teenage years as he struggles to fit in at school, starts questioning his sexuality, then discovers his drag-queen alter-ego.

Written, composed and directed by McGregor, with dramaturgy from Fringe First winner Johnny McKnight and musical direction from Hilary Brooks, Crocodile Rock was first performed at Glasgow’s long-running lunchtime theatre A Play, A Pie and A Pint in 2019, revamped for a Scottish tour in 2022, then reworked again for a pre-festival ​in Glasgow earlier this year. Now, it arrives at the refurbished Gilded Balloon Teviot for the full festival, with River City star Darren Brownlie taking on the central role. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

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Thanks for reading

Thanks to all 5176 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

For the rest of August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please do forward.

In case you missed it, here is Friday’s issue, containing five more recommendations…

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 weekly 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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Subscribe now

The festival officially begins today!

• There are currently 4248 shows in the official programme, which is the highest number ever at this stage of the festival, although there are a few caveats to that figure. Fringe Society boss Tony Lankester says it proves the festival is still a “healthy marketplace.” More from me here in The Stage.

• Also from me in The Stage, a big bit on the issues surrounding the festival as it gets underway, from the tourist tax to vibe-coded planners to transport chaos.

• Where else can you find my stuff throughout the festival? Thanks for asking. I’ll be reviewing for The Stage, The Scotsman and The Financial Times. I’ll be reporting in The Stage, too. I’m going to be doing a panel at Shedinburgh on Sunday and chatting on Front Row on BBC Radio 4 next Wednesday evening. I’ll share as much as I can here and on The Crush Bar’s new Instagram page. And, of course, I will be hosting The Crush Bar Live next Thursday. More on that below.

• Activists from Art Workers for Palestine Scotland and Mothers Against Genocide Scotland gathered outside The Hub this morning to protest against EIF’s links to Baillie Gifford over the investment firm’s ties to the Israeli military and fossil fuel companies. Baillie Gifford calls their claims “hugely misleading.” More from Katie Chambers in The Stage here.

• A petition calling for Amanda Knox’s show Cartwheel to be cancelled has gathered 6000 signatures online. Meredith Kercher’s sister Stephanie has backed it on BBC News. Knox has responded on Instagram, saying the petition “completely mischaracterises” the show. More from Jane Bradley in The Scotsman.

• The Fringe Society, EIF, and other cultural organisations are set to receive a funding boost from the council, paid for via the tourist tax, if plans are voted through at a council meeting on Thursday. More from me soon in The Stage.

• Rachel Zegler is in town. She went to see Disenchanted! at the EICC yesterday.

• The Herald’s Brian Ferguson has published a list of the most powerful people at the festivals, topped by Nicola Benedetti. I don’t really agree with it - in principle or in practice - and not just because I don’t appear on it anywhere.

• 2for1 tickets are available on Monday and Tuesday, and the Half Price Hut opens on Wednesday. You can find more information and tips here. The EIF is running a “£10 On The Day” ticket scheme, too. You can check that out here.

• Exeunt’s big preview issue is well worth reading, particularly because it contains Natasha Tripney’s annual poem cut-and-pasted from the programme blurbs…

Exeunt

Exeunt's big Edinburgh Festival Fringe preview

It’s August already – and very nearly time for the Edinburgh Fringe. We’ve got a crack team of brilliant critics, new and old, heading up there to bring you loads of reviews and coverage, from sauna parties to interactive Ibsen sequels to the return of Forest Fringe. Before the madness begins, here are the team…

Read more

a month ago · 9 likes · Exeunt

• Two more vibe-coded tools: Festies, a Fringe-specific planner-cum-social-media-platform, and EdFringeMap, which has plotted out the location of all 4248 shows.

• There are various launch events taking place over the weekend - I got a nifty new cap from the Shedinburgh one last night - but the festival’s unofficial opening stunt, comedian Dan Boerman folding a fitted sheet on Calton Hill in front of hundreds of people, took place successfully on Wednesday evening.

• A lot of the news I share here, I find via Michael MacLeod’s award-winning local newsletter The Edinburgh Minute, which I cannot recommend enough.

Next Thursday, at 11am in Pleasance Courtyard’s Cabaret Bar, I will be chatting to fellow critics Tim Bano (Standard, FT), Holly Williams (Exeunt, Times), and Mickey-Jo Boucher (100k+ followers on YouTube) - and with the audience - about the best shows we have seen at the festival so far. Come along. It’ll be fun. And it’s free.

Book tickets to The Crush Bar Live here

Crybabies: The Scaring - Pleasance Courtyard, 8pm

Crybabies is a comedy trio made up of Michael Clarke, James Gault and Ed Jones, who specialise in making narrative sketch shows, and who you might recognise from their social media skits. Their debut Danger Brigade was nominated for the Best Newcomer Comedy Award in 2019, and they followed that up with the similarly celebrated Bagbeard in 2023 and a BBC Radio 4 series.

Now, after cancelling a run last year, the troupe is back with a third show, The Scaring. The plot follows a tormented priest attempting to exorcise a demon from a haunted hotel, but that is basically just a framework within which to stuff as many stupid gags and eccentric characters as possible. Jones’ fastidious, floor-licking hotel manager is a particular highlight.

Produced by Francesca Moody and Plosive, and staged by Fringe veteran Jon Brittain, the original director of Baby Reindeer, it runs at Pleasance Courtyard all month. Aware that the next three weeks might be a bit stressful and keen to start my festival with something fun, I made this my first show last night, and I’m glad I did because it is great: layered, surprising, silly, satirical and surprisingly strikingly staged. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

The Wreck - Summerhall, 10.30am

Buzzcut Productions is an emerging company led by writer and director Gabe Winsor, which makes technically and thematically playful shows incorporating live cinema. Previous productions include Sockpuppet, an exploration of deepfakes that was a hit at VAULT Festival in 2023, and Bark Bark, which inventively presented the world through the eyes of a dog and was widely celebrated at the Fringe in 2024.

This August, Buzzcut is back with a new show, The Wreck, about two siblings who return to their seaside hometown following a parent’s illness, and spend their time diving a local shipwreck while they wrestle with a big decision over the future of the family discotheque. “Wes Anderson meets Katie Mitchell,” reads the blurb.

Written and directed by Winsor, performed by Camilla Anvar and Morgan Beale, and produced with Natasha Ketel, the show runs in an early morning slot in Summerhall’s Old Lab all festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Chopin’s Nocturne - Assembly George Square Studios, 2.40pm

Aidan Jones is a big fan of Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat Major (you do know it, promise) and that love infuses this gentle, funny, clever and surprisingly stirring autobiographical solo show from the piano-playing Australian comedian.

Sat at an upright piano, Jones takes us through the music note by note, section by section, explaining how it works musically through a variety of amusing metaphors. The tension of a diminished chord is like the anxiety of seeing a drunk on a train. The sadness of a minor cadence is like being denied a cookie. A major resolve is like coming home. Around this, he weaves anecdotes about his life, stories about Chopin, and plenty of silly jokes and physical humour, deploying his blokey charm to great effect. When he plays the piece all the way through at the end, it is really moving.

I saw it at last year and it took me completely by surprise in the best way. Now, it is back, running at Assembly George Square Studios throughout the festival. You can read my four-star review for The Scotsman here and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

FLIGHT/COMA/ARCADE - Assembly George Square/Pleasance Dome, various times

For ten years, Darkfield has been entrancing audiences around the world with its intelligent, unsettling, and thoroughly immersive shows inside iconic custom-built shipping containers. The Edinburgh Fringe, though, is the company’s spiritual home, and it is back at the festival this year with three of its most popular experiences: FLIGHT, COMA and ARCADE.

FLIGHT, which premiered in 2018, explores alternate realities by placing audience members in an uncanny imitation of an Airbus 320. COMA, which debuted in 2019, lies them down in hospital beds for a mysterious medical trial. And ARCADE, which first ran two years ago, offers participants the chance to play a 1980s-inspired video game set in a war-torn dystopian world.

All three use state-of-the-art technology to stimulate the audience with smells, sensations and binaural sound, all three last about twenty minutes, and all three will be running throughout the day all festival, with COMA and FLIGHT situated at Assembly George Square and ARCADE sat nearby outside Pleasance Dome. You can read my 2021 interview with Darkfield’s artistic directors Neath and Rosenberg in The Stage here and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets for FLIGHT here

Book tickets for COMA here

Book tickets for ARCADE here

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The Pigeon Factory - Underbelly Cowgate, 12.55pm

Inspired by BF Skinner’s experiments in conditioning the behaviour of birds, The Pigeon Factory is an absurdist one-man play about an oddball called Walden, who inhabits a weird world in which he cares for a factory-line of pigeons and feasts on their eggs with his mannequin wife.

This bizarre, Beckettian show is the work of writer and performer Aaron O’Neill (labelled “the best comic writer at work in theatre in Cork” by Substack Tripe + Drisheen) and director Dee Finn of Cork-based Irish company Oh!Scare Wilde Productions, which has been staging work around Ireland to acclaim since it was founded by University College Cork graduates in 2017.

The Pigeon Factory debuted at Cork’s Midsummer Festival in 2023, and has subsequently toured Ireland several times, with The Irish Times’ Mary Leland praising its “intellectual and physical ingenuity” in her four-star 2024 review. Now, after preview dates at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre in late July, it arrives at the Fringe, marking Oh!Scare Wilde Productions’ debut at the festival, running at Underbelly Cowgate all month. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

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Thanks for reading

Thanks to all 5167 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

For the rest of August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please do forward.

In case you missed it, here is Friday’s issue, recommending a five-star two-hander, a storytelling show in a sauna, a site-specific production in Leith, and more…

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 weekly 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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Subscribe now

The festival is three days away…

• In a grimly predictable development, Underbelly is trialling a dynamic pricing structure at this year’s Fringe, telling artists it is about “maximising your potential return on ticket income where your sales are proving to be thriving and in high demand” and that they “hope to grow the scheme and apply it in greater measures in future years.” More here from me in The Stage.

• The Guardian’s comedy critic (and artistic director of A Play, A Pie and A Pint) Brian Logan is doing a live Q&A at 1pm today. You can find it here. Brian was also good enough to contribute to The Crush Bar’s Q&A a few weeks ago…

• Have questions about the Sauna Theatre? Co-founder James Grieve, who also set up Paines Plough’s Roundabout Theatre, answers them here in The Scotsman.

• What about the fact that Amanda Knox, the American convicted then acquitted then convicted then acquitted of murdering Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007, is doing a stand-up show? In this interview with The Telegraph, Knox claims Kercher would have appreciated it. Her parents are not happy at all, though.

• In The Stage, Lyn Gardner surveys the state of play in “Week Zero” of the Fringe, pointing out that, for all its flaws, the festival remains an extraordinary event.

• Hey, Edinburgh Fringe Instagram is just a whole load of engagement farming, isn’t it? This made me chuckle, tho.

• On Sunday, I’m doing a free panel at Francesca Moody’s Shedinburgh venue (along with Tim Bano, Lyn Gardner and Miriam Attwood discussing journalism at the festival and “how to get a five-star review at Fringe.” Come along.

I won’t bother you with the poster again, but consider this your regular reminder to book tickets to The Crush Bar Live. It is at Pleasance Courtyard at 11am on Thursday 13 August, and it involves me, Holly Williams, Tim Bano and Mickey-Jo Boucher chatting about the best shows we have seen with the audience. And it’s free!

Book tickets to The Crush Bar Live here

Tether 인연 - Summerhall, 4.30pm

Wonder Fools is a Scottish company led by seemingly tireless theatremakers Jack Nurse and Robbie Gordon, which has previously produced delicate, distilled stagings of David Greig’s The Events, Owen Sutcliffe’s Oran and Isla Cowan’s Alright Sunshine, as well as the shows 549: Scots Of The Spanish Civil War and The Kelton Hill Fair, and the impressive participatory project Positive Stories For Negative Times.

This August, the company is back at the festival for the fourth time with its biggest production yet, a show co-created over two years with South Korean company Theater SAN that incorporates original music, storytelling and ceilidh dancing to unfold a cross-continental story that spans sixty years and three decades.

Written and directed by Gordon, Nurse, and Yoon Jung-Hwan, artistic director of Theater SAN, and performed by a six-strong Scottish-Korean cast, Tether 인연 runs in Summerhall’s Main Hall throughout the festival, having previewed at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre over the weekend. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

For Dolores - Traverse Theatre, various times

Over the last twelve years, Irish actor and playwright Eva O’Connor has staged several striking shows at the Fringe, often involving impressive feats of performance. In 2019, she slathered herself in yellow condiment for Fringe First winner Mustard. In 2023, she squeezed into a back-breaking rooster costume for Chicken. Both were brilliant.

She is not performing at this year’s festival, sadly, but her new play For Dolores is being brought to the Traverse Theatre by Irish new writing company Fishamble, following dates in Limerick, Galway and Dublin. Set in Edinburgh and Glasgow, it follows an obsessive friendship between two women, Glaswegian Mo and Dubliner Réaltín.

Directed by Fishamble boss Jim Culleton and designed by Alyson Cummins, it stars Catriona Faint and Lara McDonnell and runs in Traverse 2 all festival, after getting some glowing reviews during its Irish tour. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Linus Karp Was Hit With An Umbrella - Underbelly Bristo Square, 8.20pm

Linus Karp and Joseph Martin are the two halves of Awkward Productions, the company behind riotous queer comedies Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story and Gwyneth Goes Skiing. Last year, they memorably got married on stage at the Fringe.

This festival, the duo are back with a new show inspired by a real incident. In 2024, Karp was the victim of a homophobic attack in Soho, in which a man beat him over the head with the handle of an umbrella. Linus Karp Was Hit With An Umbrella retells the story of the attack, then imagines the trial that never took place.

Written and performed by Karp and co-directed by Karp and Martin, with dramaturgy from Haley McGee (who created tear-jerking sensation Age Is A Feeling), the show runs at Underbelly Bristo Square throughout the Fringe. Awkward Productions are also doing a run of Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story for the final week of the festival. You can get tickets for that here, and tickets for the new show via the button below.

Book tickets here

Baby Everything - Summerhall, 10.10am

Lee Minora is a Philadelphia-based writer, performer and comedian who creates bold solo shows that grapple with the unresolved issues that torment us all. She has previously performed on the Free Fringe with her shows Cheeks in 2017 and White Feminist in 2018. This year, following an eight-year hiatus from the festival, Minora is back with Baby Everything.

Developed with and directed by fellow Philly-based theatremaker Rebecca Wright, Baby Everything is a “hypochondria-filled morning doomscroll” about our insatiable, destabilising desire for instant information via smartphones and social media, which follows one woman through a day-long spiral of stress about the state of the world, her physical health, and more, incorporating Minora’s trademark talent for clowning, improvisation and audience interaction. Think Susan Sontag meets Natalie Palamides.

Minora’s show arrives in Edinburgh after two acclaimed runs in Philadelphia, one of several shows from the Pennsylvania city at this year’s festival: company Lightning Rod Special, who took the festival by storm in 2018 with Underground Railroad Game and whose artistic director Alice Yorke directed early iterations of Baby Everything, are also at Summerhall with Lions. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

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Ulysses Of Scranton - Bedlam Theatre, 11am

How do you adapt a book like Ulysses? James Joyce’s Homer-inspired modernist masterpiece is famously one of world literature’s toughest reads, with its shifting styles and stream-of-consciousness prose. Translating it onto the stage, then, presents a formidable challenge.

American theatremaker Conor Kelly O’Brien’s meta solution is to dramatize that difficulty. His five-handed play Ulysses (Of Scranton) focuses on a group of actors during their fraught final run-through of an adaptation of Joyce’s novel, slipping back and forth between their modern-day rehearsal room and the Dublin of Leopold Bloom in 1904, until the two become impossibly intertwined.

The show premiered in Scranton, Pennsylvania, last year, then ran in Ireland at County Mayo’s Ballina Art Centre. Produced by Scranton Fringe Festival, which O’Brien co-founded with Elizabeth Bohan in 2015, and the city’s New Vintage Ensemble, it now arrives at the Edinburgh Fringe, running at Bedlam Theatre all festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

This is promotional content.

Thanks for reading

Thanks to all 5159 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

For the rest of July and August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please do forward.

In case you missed it, here is Tuesday’s issue, recommending shows about Scots, AI, conspiracy theories, and more, plus my critics panel at Pleasance Courtyard…

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 weekly 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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Subscribe now

One last thing up here. Against my better judgement, I have started an Instagram account for The Crush Bar. You can find and follow it here, should you wish to…

The festival is seven days away…

• FullHouse, a new “Letterboxd for theatre”, is launching at Summerhall during the festival. You can find out more from me here in this exclusive with The Stage.

• Also from me in The Stage: more on the ongoing travel disruption caused by the Princes Street fire; more on the debate around the new tourist tax; and a bit about Sold Out Board, a new platform operating ticket lotteries during the festival.

• Fallout from the TV festival moving to Manchester in 2027 continues. The National reports that the organisation received almost £600,000 of Scottish government funding before deciding to leave Scotland, while Deadline reports that conversations are underway about simply replacing it with another one.

• Another list of recommendations, this one from Natasha Tripney’s Café Europa…

Café Europa

Coming around again: 15 shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe

Just a head’s up that this newsletter is going to be very fringe-centric for the next few weeks, with normal service being resumed in September. You have been warned. Oh and for the two people who asked if there will be a fringe poem this year, there definitely will. It should appear on Exeunt shortly…

Read more

a month ago · 20 likes · 1 comment · Natasha Tripney

• It’s not really festival-related, but I have written the cover interview for The Stage’s August edition, which is focused on Scotland and the Fringe: it’s with Alan Cumming and features a few insights into his regime at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, plus some wonderful photos of him posing in Perthshire with his dog.

Have you booked your ticket to The Crush Bar Live yet?

A quick reminder that, at 11am on Thursday 13th August, in Pleasance Courtyard’s Cabaret Bat, I will be chatting to fellow critics Holly Williams (, The Times), Tim Bano (The FT, The Standard) and (100k+ subscribers on YouTube) about shows at the festival. You really should come along. It’s free.

Book tickets to The Crush Bar Live here

Shotgunned - Assembly George Square Studios, 3.10pm

I first saw Matt Anderson’s Shotgunned at the Fringe two years ago, in a cramped room with an awkward stage and sound bleed from the bar downstairs, and I was absolutely blown away by it. I have been shouting about it everywhere I can ever since, and I am delighted that it is returning to the festival in expanded form this year, as part of the Made In Scotland Showcase. Did I have something to do with that? Maybe.

Written and directed by Anderson, and featuring two beautifully naturalistic performances from Fraser Allan Hogg and Lorna Panton, the two-hander hops around in time to track the evolution of a relationship between Dylan and Roz, orbiting around a central trauma that tilts their lives entirely. For a debut play, it is astonishing: deftly constructed and achingly moving, and evocative of short, stylish plays like Lungs, Constellations and Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons.

You can read my original five-star review in The Stage here and my interview with Anderson below. You can watch the music video his company Kangaroo Court recently made for Staring in Spaces Dance With U (a track that is used beautifully in the show) here, too. And you can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Bubble Schmeisis (Remixed) - Summerhall, 4.30pm

You have almost certainly heard about the Sauna Theatre by now. The brainchild of director James Grieve and designer Lucy Osborne, it is an 80-seat sauna (the UK’s largest, apparently) that is being set up at Summerhall to host a mix of literary discussions, dance parties (yep) and Aufguss sessions (an immersive experience involving essential oils and towel wafting that is popular in Germany).

Appropriately, it is also hosting a tenth-anniversary remount of Bubble Schmeisis, Nick Cassenbaum’s celebrated one-man show about growing up amid the Jewish steam-baths of East London, which first ran at the Fringe in 2016.

How will the Sauna Theatre work? I have no idea. I have been invited to go and find out on Thursday and will report back somehow. In the meantime, you can read my interview with Cassenbaum here (conducted around his frenetically funny 2024 political satire Revenge: After The Levoyah) and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Mayflies - Brown’s Of Leith, 4pm

Grid Iron is an award-winning Edinburgh-based company, led by Judith Doherty and Ben Harrison, which has spent over three decades staging imaginative site-specific work everywhere from shipyards to swimming pools to Edinburgh Airport.

This August, they are taking over a warehouse in Leith with an adaptation of Mayflies, Andrew O’Hagan’s 2020 novel (made into a series in 2022) about a group of Ayrshire teenagers that go on a riotous weekend in Manchester in the mid-1980s, then reflect on their friendship as they face up to mortality in the modern day.

Adapted and directed by Harrison, it features a cast stuffed with Scottish talent including Lucianne McEvoy and Graham Mackay-Bruce, and should be well worth the trip down from the city centre (despite the absence of trams), not least because of the cool new food court next door. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

The Great Shakespeare Showdown - theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall, 3.10pm

Shakespeare was surprisingly popular in the Wild West. Troupes of actors would tour between towns and cities. Regular folk would memorise and perform passages for entertainment. Mines were named after Shakespearean characters: Ophelia, Cordelia, Desdemona, Miranda. There is even a ghost town named after the great man himself: Shakespeare, New Mexico.

American playwright, actor, educator and Edinburgh Fringe regular Dennis Elkins’ new comic work The Great Shakespeare Showdown is inspired by this Badlands bardolatry, and by a particular incident involving actors Edwin Forrest and William Macready in Manhattan in 1849. Set in Colorado in the early 1880s, it focuses on two esteemed actors – one American, one British – duelling with each other, not with pistols, but with Shakespearean soliloquies and insults.

Written by Elkins, directed by Penny Cole and produced by Flying Solo!, a company with a strong track record of bringing impressive work across the Atlantic to the Fringe, The Great Shakespeare Showdown runs at theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall for the first two-and-a-half weeks of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

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Extra Dry - Greenside @ Riddles Court, 3.05pm

This autobiographical one-woman play focusses on MJ, whose heavy-drinking, hedonistic lifestyle furnishes her with plenty of crazy stories that prove popular with her pals. What happens, though, when your social standing is built on a self-destructive habit? Is it better to lean into your status as an entertaining alcoholic? Or face up to a more mundane reality?

Written and performed by Tennessee-raised, New York City-based actor and playwright Michelle Renee Johnson, and co-created and directed by Lila Rachel Becker, Extra Dry began as a ten-minute personal monologue in 2023 then gradually grew into a fully-fledged show, which premiered to acclaim at New York City Fringe Festival in April this year.

Now, after preview performances at 59E59 Theatre’s East To Edinburgh showcase in New York City, the show arrives in the Scottish capital under the aegis of producer Allison Parker, who has a strong track record in bringing invigorating, entertaining work across the Atlantic. With a set by Patti Panyakaew, sound by Ryan Gamblin, lighting by Rebecca Mahar and costumes by Maeve Rose, it runs at Greenside @ Riddles Court all month. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

This is promotional content.

Thanks for reading

Thanks to all 5148 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

For the rest of July and August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please forward.

In case you missed it, here is Friday’s issue, recommending a play about a pub, a solo show about alopecia, a clown reworking of Frankenstein, and more…

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 weekly 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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Subscribe now

Hey! What are you up to on the morning of Thursday 13 August?!

If you are at the Edinburgh Fringe, or within a 200-radius of the Scottish capital, then I can think of no better use of your time than coming to The Crush Bar Live. Of course, you could be working, but maybe say you’ve got the dentist or something?

That’s right. With unprecedented levels of hubris, I have persuaded Pleasance Courtyard to give me their Cabaret Bar space for an hour from 11am, and corralled three of the UK’s smartest, sharpest and most stylish critics into joining me on stage.

Holly Williams (Exeunt, The Times), Tim Bano (The Standard, The Financial Times), Mickey-Jo Boucher (MickeyJoTheatre on YouTube) and I (The Stage, your inbox) will be chatting about the best and boldest work we have seen at the festival so far. Don’t know what to go and see? Come along and hear what we think is worth your time!

After we have rambled for a while, we will throw the conversation open to the room so the audience can share their thoughts and make recommendations as well. What did you think of the shows we discussed? What have you liked? What have you not liked?

Oh, and it’s totally free (although I may shove a SumUp machine in your face at the end). You do need to reserve a spot, though, which you can do via the button below. So, please, please, book a ticket, grab a coffee, come along, and chat theatre with us.

Book tickets to The Crush Bar Live here

The festival is ten days away…

• Assembly has shifted its George Street operations, including two venues hosting seventeen shows, to St Andrew Square, due to the Princes Street fire diverting buses onto George Street, thus making its pedestrianisation impossible. Beyond The Joke’s Bruce Dessau reports here.

• Trams are not running from the city centre down to Newhaven as a result of the fire, too, and venues down in Leith are worried about the impact this will have on ticket sales. More from me soon in The Stage.

• The council has warned festival participants to “prepare for potential disruption” and suggested “walking or cycling wherever possible.” It has not provided an update on when Princes Street will reopen since mid-July, when it said works to make the former Debenhams building safe would continued “into August.” The Herald’s Brian Ferguson reports here.

• On the plus side, North Bridge has opened both pavements to pedestrians for the first time in eight years. Read more in The Edinburgh Minute.

• If you can’t bear to be without your cats for a month, are you sure you’re cut out for the Fringe? Although, if you can wangle an article in The Times about your insane journey to get them from NYC to Edinburgh, maybe you are.

• What does the continued importance of the Edinburgh Fringe, despite the exorbitant costs involved with presenting work here, say about the UK’s touring ecology? Lyn Gardner answers in The Stage.

• The Telegraph’s Tristram Fane Saunders has listed some of the weirdest, wackiest shows at this year’s festival, from on-stage lie-detector tests to early-morning oboe raves. A real journalist would go along to it all.

• One more list for today: The Nerve asked me to recommend ten festival shows for their newsletter on Friday. You can find them all here.

Common Tongue - Scottish Storytelling Centre, 2.45pm

This one-woman play focuses on Bonnie, a Paisley lass whose native Scots dialect (a rapid and articulate patter full of slang and swearing) is variously ridiculed, fetishised and admired when she leaves home for St Andrews then America.

Written and directed by Fraser Scott (one of Scotland’s most exciting emerging theatremakers, who is also directing Jack MacGregor’s new play Prophets at Assembly Roxy), Common Tongue is a perceptive examination of the complexities that come with speaking Scots, and an entertaining celebration of the power and humour of the language. And it features a tremendous performance from Olivia Caw and a tartan-upholstered set from Mela Adela.

The show premiered in 2024, toured Scotland last year, and now runs at Scottish Storytelling Centre throughout the festival. You can read my four-star review in The Stage here and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Copycat - Pleasance Dome, 4.10pm

Fringe favourite Joe Sellman-Leava has spent over a decade crafting careful, insightful shows about important topics through his company Worklight Theatre. 2015’s Labels was an absorbing autobiographical exploration of migration and prejudice. 2022’s Fanboy was a warm and witty examination of the complexities of fan culture. And 2024’s It’s The Economy, Stupid was an entertaining and accessible economics lesson.

This summer, Sellman-Leava is bringing It’s The Economy, Stupid back to the Fringe, and premiering a new show about how big tech and AI are reshaping society, incorporating audience interaction inspired by classroom games.

Written and performed by Sellman-Leava, directed by Katharina Reinthaller and designed by Dylan Howells, Copycat runs at Pleasance Dome throughout the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It - Summerhall, 21.10pm

Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland are one of the Fringe’s stand-out success stories of recent years. The New York City-based duo, who perform as Xhloe and Natasha, arrived at the festival in 2022 for a week-long run with And Then The Rodeo Burned Down, their meta, queer, clown show about storytelling and the Wild West.

It unexpectedly sold out and won one of The Scotsman’s prestigious Fringe First Awards, as did their subsequent shows, 2023’s What If They Ate The Baby? and 2024’s A Letter To Lyndon B Johnson Or God: Whoever Reads This First, which took a similarly lurid, lucid approach to 1950s domesticity and military masculinism.

This year, the duo are back with a fourth Fringe show about another insidious aspect of American culture, Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It, which tackles conspiracy theories and mass misdirection. It transfers to Soho Theatre in September, after running at Summerhall all festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Lifelong - Assembly George Square Studios, 12pm

The relationship between Pepperdine University and the Edinburgh Fringe is long and rich. The California institution’s department of theatre first started staging work at the festival in 1985, then established the Pepperdine Scotland exchange programme in 2012, under the aegis of which several influential Scottish theatremakers have collaborated with students at residencies in both Malibu and the Highlands to create shows for the Fringe.

Backed by Playwrights Studio Scotland and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the programme has produced several hit shows at the festival, from Peter Arnott’s Why Do You Stand There In The Rain? in 2012 to Lynda Radley’s The Interference in 2016 (both of which won Fringe Firsts), to Morna Young’s Americana: A Murder Ballad in 2022.

This year, Pepperdine is working with Radley again on Lifelong, a dystopian thriller set in a facility where “lotus-eater” residents have been enjoying centuries-long lives thanks to an AI-dictated regime of life-extending therapies. Produced in association with Glasgow-based company Scissor Kick, it runs at Assembly George Square Studios for the first half of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

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Little Pink Dress - C Aquila, 5.35pm

In 2020, during the pandemic, at 4am one morning, a song popped into Joey Jennings’ head, a song he knew was destined to be performed on stage. Over the following five years, the New York City-based actor and musician wrote twenty more, recording them in sessions in Portland, Oregon and Nashville, Tennessee, and the result is his debut one-man show, Little Pink Dress.

Billed as a “gay coming-of-age country/rock opera one-man musical traumedy”, Little Pink Dress is an autobiographical account of Jennings’ life, encompassing his addiction-scarred adolescence in California, his turbulent time navigating queer culture, and his decision to abandon his acting career in Los Angeles for the bright lights of New York City post-pandemic.

Directed by Brooklyn-based Coral Cohen, Little Pink Dress premiered in NYC in May and now arrives at the Edinburgh Fringe, running at C Aquila throughout the festival. You can listen to three tracks from the show on Spotify here and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

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Thanks for reading

Thanks to all 5129 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

For the rest of July and August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please do forward.

In case you missed it, here is Tuesday’s issue, recommending an award-winning Scottish play, a verbatim piece of dance-theatre, a feminist sci-fi thriller, and more…

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 weekly 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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Subscribe now

The festival is fourteen days away…

• The “crippling” cost of accommodation has impacted risk-taking work at the Fringe, according to Jon Brittain, co-creator of festival hits Katyh and Stella Solve A Murder and Baby Reindeer. There is more here in this article in The Stage, lifted from the latest episode of my SDUK podcast A Sense Of Direction…

• Relatedly, Scottish Ballet has blamed its dropping of five shows in Edinburgh this winter on the city’s new tourist tax, which will see a five per-cent levy added to all paid overnight stays in the city, up to a maximum of five nights, from today. “The economics of touring to Edinburgh are fast becoming unsustainable,” says SB’s executive director Steven Roth. “I don’t disagree that hotel prices in Edinburgh have risen exponentially in recent years, but the responsibility for that lies with the hoteliers,” counters council boss Jane Meagher. More from me in The Stage.

• For a more in-depth look at the accommodation situation, take a look at Will Quinn’s long-read in The Edinburgh Inquirer, right here on Substack…

The Edinburgh Inquirer

You can still perform at the Fringe as cheaply as in the 1990s

Welcome to your midweek edition of The Inquirer…

Read more

a month ago · 2 likes · Edinburgh Inquirer

• Both ScotRail and TransPennine Express have added late-night services to help people that don’t live in Edinburgh get home from the festival.

• The Princes Street fire has rerouted buses onto George Street, so the usual pedestrianisation outside Assembly Rooms is not going to happen this year, and several pop-up venues are likely to be moved to nearby St Andrew Square, according to The Herald’s arts correspondent Brian Ferguson.

• Someone (I’m not sure who) has made a tool that lets you check whether or not a Fringe show has audience interaction, if that sort of thing concerns you.

• People do all sorts of wacky stuff to raise money for their Fringe runs. This guy performed the macarena for seven-and-a-half hours and raised over £1200.

• The List magazine has published its annual guide to the festivals, featuring loads of previews, interviews and articles, including a chat with Amanda Knox. You can pick it up for free all over town, or read a digital version here.

The Jolly Fisherman - Underbelly George Square, 12.45pm

Kick It Anywhere Productions is a new-ish outfit that staged Brixton Calling, a theatrical adaptation of Simon Parkes’ memoir about the Brixton Academy, at Southwark Playhouse last summer. Now, the company is making its Edinburgh Fringe debut with two-hander The Jolly Fisherman.

Written by John Dinneen and directed by Layla Madanat, it revolves around the closure of a popular East London pub, its conversion into a mosque, and the conflict that causes in the local community, focusing on two friends, Alan and Amir. The story is fictional, but the pub is real.

Starring Jonny Khan and Alex Hill (fresh from the New York City stint of his phenomenally successful solo show Why I Stuck A Flare Up My Arse For England), it runs at Underbelly George Square throughout the festival. You can read my interview with Hill here and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

The Plot - Summerhall, 7.30pm

Regular readers of this newsletter are probably sick of me shouting about Emma Howlett. The writer and director, who makes work under the aegis of her company TheatreGoose, has made a name for herself with a series of slick, sparky Fringe shows.

2023’s Her Green Hell was a disorienting one-woman play about zoologist Juliane Koepcke’s extraordinary eleven-day survival story in the Amazon rainforest. 2024’s Sisters Three was a three-handed gallop through literary trios of women, from the Gorgons to the Brontës to the Sugababes. And 2025’s Aether was a kaleidoscopic collage of female scientists that hopped from Ancient Egypt to the present day.

This August, Howlett is behind The Plot, a two-hander, starring her regular collaborators Sophie Kean and Abby McCann, about The Gunpowder Plot, conspirators Tom and Robert Wintour, masculinity and Macbeth. It runs at Summerhall all month. You can find out more about it in the interview with Howlett here and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Overtone - Pleasance Dome, 2.40pm

Tom Brennan is a founder of The Wardrobe Ensemble, the Bristol-based company behind several successful Fringe shows in the 2010s, including Riot, 1972: The Future Of Sex, Education, Education, Education, and The Last Of The Pelican Daughters.

This summer, he is collaborating with Oxford’s The North Wall arts centre and its former artistic director John Hoggarth (who staged Monica Dolan’s The B*easts and Karim Khan’s Brown Boys Swim at the festival, both of which won awards) on a new play.

Overtone jumps around in time to unfold the story of Maggie and Paul, who begin a long-term relationship as teenagers in a choir group, then are forced to confront their past following a chance encounter with their old teacher two decades later. It runs at Pleasance Dome throughout the festival, following preview dates at The North Wall. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

BASIC BALD B*TCH - Underbelly Cowgate, 3.55pm

What happens when you enter your twenties, confident, carefree and full of excited expectation about what life will look like – then all your hair falls out? That is what happened to Emily Glaze, who started getting alopecia at the age of 21, during her final year of university. Now, ten years on, the writer and performer is exploring her experiences in a semi-autobiographical solo show.

BASIC BALD B*TCH focuses on Amy, a popular young woman whose life is turned upside down when she begins losing her hair, weaving together comedy, drama, direct address and drag as it follows her through the daunting, difficult, and joyous process of navigating her appearance, her relationships, her family, her day-to-day life, and her unexpected new identity.

Glaze trained at Rose Bruford College, at Oxford School of Drama, and on Soho Theatre’s Cabaret and Drag Lab, where she developed the drag persona Balla Baldid. BASIC BALD B*TCH is her debut at the Fringe. Directed by Sarah Stacey with dramaturgy from Maddie Beautyman, it runs at Underbelly Cowgate throughout the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

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TO BE FRANK - Pleasance Courtyard, 2.05pm

In this radical reinterpretation of Mary Shelley’s famous gothic novel, Frankenstein becomes Frank, a big green monster getting to grips with his recently reanimated body, the weird world that surrounds him, and the tumult of powerful emotions that come with his new existence.

Created by New Zealand-born, London-based clown Michael Hockey, the show is both a riotously entertaining blend of grotesque comedy, audience interaction and live sound effects, and a moving comment on isolation, connection and adjusting to life’s emotional rollercoaster.

Performed by Hockey, who trained at Toi Whakaari, New Zealand’s national drama school, with live foley accompaniment from Edinburgh-based musician Alanna Hall and direction from London-based theatremaker Oli Bates, TO BE FRANK was conceived in New Zealand in 2022, ran to acclaim at Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2023, and now arrives at the Edinburgh Fringe. It runs at Pleasance Courtyard all month. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

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Thanks for reading

Thanks to all 5115 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

Throughout the rest of July and August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five recommendations for shows worth seeing, plus brief round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, which kicks off in a little over a fortnight’s time, please do forward.

In case you missed it, here is the last issue of The Crush Bar from two-and-a-bit week’s ago, featuring a range of festival experts - including producer Francesca Moody, comedy critic Brian Logan and Fringe Society honcho Chris Snow - answering readers’ questions on everything from flyering tactics to favourite cafes.

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 weekly 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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Subscribe now

The festival is seventeen days away…

• Plenty of outlets have already published lists of shows worth seeing: here is one from Mark Fisher in The Guardian; here is one from Tristram Fane Saunders in The Telegraph; and here is one in The Stage, to which I contributed five picks.

• Natasha Tripney has also done a round-up of where you can catch some exciting Fringe-bound shows elsewhere if you can’t make it to Scotland this summer.

• WhatsOnStage has done a list of the funniest show titles in the programme, the best of which is undoubtedly Putting The Ass In Brass, which you can catch at theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall during the final week, should you wish to.

• WhatsOnStage Editor Alex Wood has also chatted to Fleabag and Baby Reindeer producer Francesca Moody about how she is doing things differently with her pop-up venue Shedinburgh on The WhatsOnStage podcast…

• This will be the last August with the Edinburgh TV Festival co-existing alongside the Fringe, with the event set to relocate to Manchester next year, organisers citing both the cost of staging and the cost of attending the festival as reasons. Here is The Herald’s Brian Ferguson on why that is “a significant blow.”

• The latest episode of A Sense Of Direction, the quarterly podcast I produce and present for Stage Directors UK, features directors Jon Brittain and Jess Lazar discussing the practical and professional challenges of the festival…

• Some local news: there was a fire in the Debenhams building earlier this month and a stretch of Princes Street will be closed to both traffic and pedestrians for at least the first few days of the festival as a result, so expect disruption. Buses are being diverted and trams from the airport are terminating in the West End, with no service currently running to Newhaven. There is more info here in The Herald.

• For more local news during the Fringe - and outwith it - then I heartily recommend subscribing to Michael MacLeod’s newsletter the Edinburgh Minute.

Water Colour - Traverse Theatre, various times

Milly Sweeney’s debut play, the 2024 winner of the St Andrews Playwriting Award, premiered at Pitlochry Festival Theatre last May, blew me away, and subsequently earned Sweeney one of The Stage’s Debut Awards and the Best New Play prize at the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland, which I was delighted to present her with at the Citizens Theatre a few weeks ago.

The play follows two twenty-somethings - pot-wash Harris and art student Esme - through several months of mental turmoil as they pinball around Glasgow, never meeting, save for one fleeting, fateful encounter late at night on a bridge over the Clyde, around which their stories pivot like a fulcrum. In my five-star review for The Stage, indulging my trademark love of alliteration, I called it “a dynamic staging of a devastating debut about depression, desperation and connection.”

Now, finally, Water Colour is getting another life. Directed by Sally Reid, and starring Molly Geddes and Ryan J Mackay, it runs in Traverse 2 throughout the Fringe. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

As Far As We Know - Summerhall, 10.40am

Sam Ward, who makes work with producer Rhian Davies under the moniker YesYesNoNo, has been a regular presence at the Fringe for nearly a decade with his subtle, slippery storytelling shows that playfully mess with the relationship between performer and audience: 2017’s Five Encounters On A Site Called Craigslist; 2017’s the accident did not take place; 2022’s we were promised honey!; 2024’s Nation.

Ward makes uncanny, unsettling and provocative work in the vein of Tim Crouch, and he is back this year with As Far As We Know, a swift and surreal fable about a woman on a journey to understand some mysterious holes that appear in her garden, offering “a panoramic view of our contemporary world” of “data-centres, financial, speculation, dictators and digitalism.”

Written and performed by Ward, with dramaturgy from Nathan Ellis (work.txt, Instructions) and Clara Potter-Sweet (Landscape (1989), Ways Of Knowing), and supported by the New Diorama Theatre, Battersea Arts Centre and HOME, it runs at Summerhall all festival. You can read my 2022 chat with Ward here and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Woodhill - ZOO Southside, 2.25pm

Campaigning company LUNG make vital verbatim theatre that packs a powerful punch. 2018’s Trojan Horse thrillingly tackled the thorny topic of alleged radicalisation in predominantly Muslim state schools in Birmingham, while 2019’s Who Cares was a hugely moving snapshot of the traumatic lives of young carers. Both repurposed real people’s words into the mouths of actors to extraordinary effect.

Woodhill, which focuses on three male suicides at a failing prison outside Milton Keynes, is a bit different. Verbatim dialogue is voiced by actors over Sami El-Enany and Owen Crouch’s pulsating soundscape, dictating and driving the movements of four dynamic dancers on stage. The result is a truly unique piece of theatre, as galling as it is galvanising. Seriously, be warned: it is brilliant, but not an easy watch.

Written and directed by Matt Woodhead, Woodhill first ran at the Fringe three years ago, and returns this year, to ZOO Southside, at the start of a national tour that lasts until November. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Goodbye Dandelion - Underbelly Cowgate, 4.10pm

In 2017, Maddie Rice starred in perhaps the most famous Edinburgh Fringe show of the century, taking over from Phoebe Waller-Bridge for the festival return of Fleabag. The following year, Rice had her own hit with Pickle Jar, a hard-hitting but hilarious solo show about a young teacher.

This summer, she is back after an eight-year hiatus with new show Goodbye Dandelion, a storytelling show with songs following an unlikely friendship between two women, one 30, one 87, and exploring life, death, and the lessons different generations can learn from each other.

Directed by Katie Pesskin and featuring live music performed by Rice’s brother Marcus, AKA Hungry Tapes, Goodbye Dandelion arrives at the festival after preview dates at Soho Theatre and The Free Association, and as the inaugural recipient of Underbelly’s new Futures Fund Award. It runs at Underbelly Cowgate all festival. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

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Alone - Assembly George Square, 13.35pm

In the near future, two female astronauts – one an expert pilot, one a brilliant scientist – are stuck on a failing spaceship on its return journey to an earth ravaged by climate change. They carry with them a potential panacea for the planet’s problems – but they might never get there.

That is the premise of this feminist sci-fi thriller from New Zealand based writer-director Luke Thornborough, which unfolds in real-time over an intense hour, exploring the climate crisis, the silencing of female voices in STEM, and more. It premiered at Auckland Fringe Festival in 2020, picking up the Best Theatre Award, toured New Zealand and Australia, and arrived in Edinburgh in 2023. It proved hugely popular, returned last year, then transferred to London’s Theatre503.

This summer, the gripping yet touching two-hander returns for its third Fringe run. Co-produced by Paris-based Alchemy Theatre and Edinburgh-based Jewel Box Productions, co-directed by Thornborough and Stuart McDougall, and starring Anthea Freya Hill and original cast member Courtney Bassett, it runs in The Box – the intimate space that previously hosted hits including Ross & Rachel and Brutal Cessation – all month. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

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Thanks for reading

Thanks to all 5101 subscribers, to all 172 paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

This is the free Friday issue, which usually contains an interview with a theatremaker or an essay on a theatre-related topic. This week, though, I have assembled a panel of experts to answer readers’ questions about the Edinburgh Fringe, which kicks off in five weeks. After that, there’s your usual three show recommendations for next week.

In case you missed it, here is this week’s issue of Shouts and Murmurs, which is a weekly round-up of theatrical news, reviews, interviews and other articles…

You can get Shouts and Murmurs straight in your inbox every Tuesday - and help keep this newsletter going! - by signing up as a paid supporter of The Crush Bar.

Subscribe now

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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Become a champion supporter

One last thing: The Crush Bar is off on a two-week pre-Edinburgh Fringe holiday from today. When it returns in mid-July, the newsletter will be focussed on the festival for several weeks. Regular programming will resume in mid-September, probably.

This issue of is sponsored by FullHouse. Find out about advertising with The Crush Bar here.

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Two weeks ago, I asked readers for their questions about the Edinburgh Fringe.

They could be about anything, from the best strategies to sell tickets, to the big issues affecting accessibility, to the smartest way of soliciting reviews, to the ideal spot to have a coffee/meal/breakdown. I promised to then assemble a panel of experts from my extensive network of contacts to field them. You responded in your droves - well, some of you sent some over and I was enterprising enough to source more via other means - saving me the ignominy of having to make any up. Now for the answers.

My panel: comedy critic and artistic director Brian Logan; PR guru Chloe Nelkin; Fringe Society honcho Chris Snow; Summerhall producer and programmer Tom Forster; producers Francesca Moody and Ellie Keel; theatre critics Natasha Tripney and Kate Wyver; experienced comedians Stuart Goldsmith and David Hoare; and my wife. Below, they - and I, a bit - respond to your festival-related enquiries.

What do most people forget to do in preparation for putting on a show at the Edinburgh Fringe? - Gail Thomas, Patient 13, Zoo Playground

David Hoare: Travelling to the Edinburgh Fringe is knackering so don't overdo it when you arrive. Try and make the show something you look forward to performing everyday. Always believe the people in the audience who are enjoying it.

Chloe Nelkin: One of the biggest mistakes is trying to do everything at once. There’s a huge amount to organise so take a moment to breathe and work through your to-do list. The Fringe is a marathon, not a sprint. Not everything has to happen on day one.

Chris Snow: In the buzz and intensity of the festival run-up, it can be easy to lose track of what success at the Fringe looks like for you, so I’d say goal-setting. Zoom out and consider your actual ambitions. Take a second to decide what your ‘why’ is, and keep it at the front of your mind to guide all the decisions you make from then on.

Stuart Goldsmith: Before coming up, I’d highly recommend interviewing a few normal people about how important the Edinburgh Fringe is to them. You’ll probably find people will have only vaguely heard of it, or not really know much about it. It’s easy to lose your mind up here and think every decision is the most important one in the world, but a good mindset and a healthy sense that you’re really only there to work hard and enjoy yourself, plus the perspective that comes from someone you respect telling you beforehand they couldn’t care less about it, will keep your head straight.

What are the top five places to curl up in the foetal position and question your choices in life? - Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus, Big Stuff, Assembly Roxy

Stuart Goldsmith: I usually go for: my bed, my sofa (my bed), the gutter, the lobby of the Radisson Hotel, or a different bit of gutter.

Tom Forster: The Hopetoun Monument, Haddington EH41 3SJ

Wife: Soul Water Sauna in Granton, where there is a choice of two saunas, a plunge bucket, and the sea. The Scottish National Gallery, where you can cry for free in front of classics such as The Skating Minister. The Last Word in Stockbridge, where you can order an old-fashioned and curl up next to the fire. The queue for Lannan, for a sense belonging to something bigger than yourself. The Royal Yacht Britannia.

How can a lesser-known show by a relatively unknown artist break through the noise and get reviewers in seats early, without coming across as spammy? - Chris Sanderson and McKenzie Millican, B*tch Eat Dog, Greenside @ George Street

Brian Logan: My advice would be to make the show really good. Word of mouth helps bring things to our attention. At a festival with thousands of shows, it pays to have a hook – some newsy or eye-catching quality or content that arrests the attention or otherwise distinguishes it from the crowd. If I read an email or a press release that makes me go, ‘I never knew theatre/comedy could do /that/!’ - some element of form or content that I’ve not encountered before; some element that looks excitingly write-able about - then I’ll be far more likely to come. I try to make a point of not being led, or minimising the degree to which I’m led, by PRs and paid-for publicity, and am actively seeking encouragement to deviate from that path. But there’s no point pretending it doesn’t plot reviewers’ course to a substantial degree.

Natasha Tripney: In an ideal world, this is what critics should be doing at the fringe, right? Watching widely and finding gems. But, in truth, critics do tend to follow the buzz - and each other. It’s also often their editors who call the shots in terms of what they get to cover, not the critics themselves, though some critics may still have scope to take a punt on something, so it’s worth tailoring your approach, knowing a critic’s interests and conveying to them what why your show might be up their street. I would stick to email though. Don’t pester Lyn Gardner while she’s having her lunch.

Tom Forster: Personalise the email, read their historic reviews, explain why that reviewer specifically should come see your show. Follow up, once, next week. Move on.

Chloe Nelkin: Be clear about what makes your show stand out. Reviewers receive hundreds of emails so you need to be able to explain in a sentence or two why your show is worth their time. It’s also important to remember that reviewers programme their months differently and not everyone can see your show in the first week. If someone hasn’t booked immediately, don’t assume they’re not interested. Equally, if you’ve followed up once or twice and haven’t had a response, it’s best to move on.

Where is the best place to connect with nature during the Fringe? - Gail Thomas, Patient 13, Zoo Playground

Stuart Goldsmith: To connect with nature within five minutess of your festival-induced panic attack, just head to the roof garden of the Museum of Scotland on Chambers Street. It isn’t technically a secret but it’s near to impossible to find your way up there, and the staff like to pretend it doesn’t exist. You have to throw yourself confidently at an unmarked door, like some sort of adolescent magician.

Wife: The Botanic Gardens and Inverleith Park: check out the albino duck in the pond. The Water of Leith: walk upstream from Stockbridge, past the tourists at Dean Bridge, where it gets even nicer. The Crags, the cool kids’ alternative to Arthur’s Seat, where you can sometimes see skylarks. And the Royal Yacht Britannia.

What is the best way to get butts in seats early in your run? This is our first time at the Fringe and we’ve done everything we can think of: bought extensive outdoor advertising, leveraged our social following, hired PR, and arranged aggressive papering for the first week. Our show is great, we just need to make sure people see it! - Maria Bartholdi, Endometriosis: The Musical, Gilded Balloon Patter House

Francesca Moody: Strategically hand out tickets to your show. Focus on other artists and staff from the venues, as they’ll talk your show up if they like it. Think about taxi drivers and hair dressers, too, as they’re much more likely to recommend your show to strangers. As soon as you’ve had press in - and assuming you get good reviews - make sure you get your stars/quotes printed and on flyers/posters. It’s inevitable that audiences are drawn to things they can see have already had a stamp of approval.

Chloe Nelkin: It sounds like you’ve built a really strong campaign. If budget allows, advertising in publications such as The List or Fest can reinforce awareness. I’d also look beyond traditional marketing and think about how your show connects with Edinburgh itself. Are there community groups, charities, businesses or organisations linked to your themes that could help spread the word? Finally, don’t underestimate word of mouth. A packed first few performances, enthusiastic audiences and strong recommendations remain some of the most powerful marketing tools at the Fringe.

David Hoare: Flyer hard. Get your friends in. Film audience reactions to your show.

Our show is based on the $6 million sale of Maurizio Cattelan's Comedian (that banana duct-taped to a wall). This Fringe, we will be taping ourselves to a wall every night, but we’re unsure if the top dogs from Sotheby's realise this is their next big sale. What parties do we have to crash to get a high-art sugar daddy to buy us and/or breakfast? - Georgie Llewellyn, How To Art, Underbelly Cowgate

Editor: I think you can interpret this question as: ‘What is the best strategy for connecting producers and programmers at the festival?’

Chris Snow: Spend time at Fringe Central, go to the networking events, and make use of Fringe Marketplace. Talk to your venue and the Fringe Society team about who you should be inviting and how to reach them. Our accreditation might be less directly focused on attracting high-art sugar daddies and more on supporting programmers and producers, but I'm sure we can help find someone to buy you a croissant.

Francesca Moody: You should try and crash the FMP/Shedinburgh launch party of course! But on a serious note, get yourself a free ticket to one of the ShedX talks, especially How to Produce a Fringe Hit or How to navigate the UK touring network. There are bound to be loads of useful people floating around those events. 

Editor: also come to How to Get a Five-Star Review at Fringe, hosted by my good friend Tim Bano and featuring valuable insights from the likes of me.

Ellie Keel: Draw up a list of people and places you’d like to be in touch with and contact them nice and early, with a concise press release or e-flyer attached. Try to avoid long, waffly emails and be concise and punchy. You can follow up twice after the initial contact, and once at the start of the festival if you haven’t heard anything. Be clear about what you’re looking for. A transfer? A tour slot? Investment? Just a chat? There are also various mixer events organised by the Fringe and individual venues, which can be a useful forum for meeting new contacts.

It’ll be my husband’s birthday in the middle of the Fringe. Where should we go for a fabulous family celebration lunch? - Laura Corcoran, Frisky’s Remix Roulette, Assembly Rooms

Wife: The Outsider, Baba, Mother India, Spitaki, Tipo. Pepe Nero. Or The Fingal, the floating restaurant connected to the Royal Yacht Britannia.

When does a show stop being “well-made” and start being unforgettable? - Nadia P Manzoor, Jerk Off!, Underbelly Bristo Square

Natasha Tripney: It depends on what you mean by unforgettable here. It’s often the ‘what the fuck was that?’ shows that stick in the memory. The more out-there experimental stuff. The shows that take big swings. These are not always the ‘best’ shows, but they are the ones you end up talking about days and sometimes years later. The Fringe used to be the place to find that kind of work, but increasingly – for completely understandable reasons – people are less willing to take those risks.

Kate Wyver: The obvious answer is when it does something to stick to your conversations beyond the Fringe, when it comes back home on the train with you and makes you want to talk about it to people who don’t give a shit about the festival. There’s no one perfect thing that makes a show achieve that, but when you get it, I think it’s obvious. For the audience, it’s a feeling of awe that you got to be there, in that room, at that moment. A lot of shows are well-made but if you had to leave halfway through for some reason, you wouldn’t be too upset. With an unforgettable show, you would drop everything to get back in the room.

Editor: I’ll have a stab at this one, too. For me, an unforgettable, five-star show is less to do with the slickness of the staging or the quality of the space or anything like that. It is to do with insightful, stop-you-in-your-tracks ideas or sentiments being expressed in original, provocative style. Take perhaps the most famous of all Fringe successes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In her biography of Stoppard - yep, still reading it - Hermione Lee writes: “The ‘World Premiere’ of a play which was written for a big stage, with trapdoors and ‘other refinements,’ opened on 24 August 1966 in a small crumbling Fringe venue, the Cranston Street Hall, with a stage ‘the size of a ping-pong table.’” Plenty didn’t get it, but The Observer’s Ronald Bryden was entranced by Stoppard’s wit and imagination, despite the staging. He wrote a glowing review. Kenneth Tynan read it. Within a year, the play was running at the Old Vic.

As prices inflate at the Edinburgh Fringe, what can be done to ensure working-class artists’ voices are still present at the festival without totally ruining themselves in the process? - Malaika Kegode and Jenny Davies, Badgers, Traverse Theatre

Chris Snow: As costs rise, Fringe artists and venues really need financial support to maintain the open-access principle of the festival. Keep It Fringe has distributed 410 grants over the past few years and is intended to support artists who face barriers to participation. Over a third of those awarded have come from a working-class background. But this year we’ve only been able to secure funding to offer 16 grants, which is obviously very disappointing. While it isn’t the answer to everything, it is an example of a scheme - there are others across the Fringe - that tries to help address this issue. There are ways to take part in the festival at a lower cost, particularly through the brilliant Free Fringe routes, but really the answer has to be in funding.

Editor: I’ll chip in here, too. The primary obstacle for everyone coming to the Fringe, artists and audiences, is the cost of staying in the city during August. Tackling that is a fraught process, though, because the need for temporary accommodation for festival participants has to be balanced with the imperative to alleviate the year-round housing crisis caused by Edinburgh’s AirBnB-ification. That said, there are things that could be done to improve the situation, like unlocking more digs as the Fringe Society has done with Queen Margaret University, or increasing supply by streamlining the council process through which locals can get permission to let out rooms over the summer. I would like to see a new campaign from all stakeholders to encourage Edinburgh residents to put up participants for free, too. The relationship between festival and city should be culturally enriching, not financially exploitative.

How do you see the festival evolving over the years? - Karen Toftegaard, #DANISH Showcase

Brian Logan: In the thirty years I’ve covered it, it’s become more expensive for artists and audiences. It kept getting bigger and bigger, and kept boasting about it, until Covid halted that for a while. The balance between theatre and comedy tilted in the latter’s favour. Week zero became a thing, alas, making a long festival longer still. Geographically, it migrated away from the New Town to a regrettable degree. Its profile in the wider UK media significantly declined. But the continuities are just as striking as the changes. Notwithstanding the severe issues around cost and accessibility, it remains the only place to be in August for people who love the performing arts, and an absolutely overwhelming and thrilling carnival of creativity, self-assertion and dreaming. And as for the future, who knows? I hope the city of Edinburgh acts to ensure its golden goose doesn’t get throttled to death, by helping more to make it affordable for everyone. I have faith that the spirit of can-do and of experimentalism can maintain their delicate balance with the commercial imperative.

Chris Snow: I hope that the barriers to artists taking part - particularly the financial ones - start to get lighter, so the festival remains truly open-access. If that can happen then I think its future as an incredible place to launch and develop work is secure. I still feel that the earliest insight audiences can get into what the performing arts will look like in the coming years, what artists will write about and what sort of work we’ll see around the world, is glimpsed at the Fringe. It’s where ideas and artistic careers are born, where the next voices will emerge from and where hugely established artists and companies will return again and again to share their work with the world.

Editor: Two quick thoughts from me here, too. Firstly, when it comes to recent history, the Fringe has pivoted hard towards America in recent years, for various reasons, partly due to some intentional manoeuvres towards artists and industry stateside, partly because of increased visibility through social media and hit shows like Fleabag, and partly because there are simply deeper pockets on the other side of the Atlantic. Secondly, in terms of future developments, the use of data-driven, AI-assisted tools to help artists and audiences navigate the festival is going to become more common. There is a mountain of data stretching back over a decade on everything from audience behaviour to successful titles sat in the Fringe Society box-office. If that can be utilised responsibly, it could provide countless helpful insights.

If you could tell international artists to stop doing one thing and start doing another what would it be? - Lee Minora, Baby Everything, Summerhall

Editor: Stop touching Greyfriars Bobby’s nose. Start supporting The Crush Bar.

Is it true you can get haggis in your burrito and if so what is the best place to get a haggis burrito? - Drew Lausch, Friendliest, Gilded Balloon Teviot

Wife: I have no idea as I am a vegetarian, but they might do it at Bonnie Burrito on South Clerk Street. There’s also a great café opposite the Royal Yacht Britannia.

Three shows to see next week

The Market Deeping Model Railway Club - Nottingham Playhouse, until July 25

In May 2019, a group of teenagers drank a bottle of vodka then trashed a model railway exhibition in Stamford worth £30,000. A subsequent appeal raised over £100,000 - including £10,000 from model railway enthusiast Sir Rod Stewart - which partly went towards restoring the layouts and partly towards projects engaging young people in modelling. That heart-breaking, heart-warming story has now been turned into a play by William Ivory in Nottingham, directed by Adam Penford and starring - who else? - Adrian Scarborough. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Fun Home - Royal Exchange, Manchester, until August 1

At last. Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s musical adaptation of cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s - yep, of Bechdel test fame - graphic memoir Fun Home won five Tony Awards for its Broadway run back in 2015, then earned three Olivier Award nods when it arrived at the Young Vic in 2018. Clamours for a West End transfer went unanswered back then. Now, though, there is a new production in Manchester, directed by Sarah Frankcom. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Lear - Pitlochry Festival Theatre, until August 1

Alan Cumming’s first season at the Perthshire venue continues with director Finn Den Hertog’s take on Shakespeare’s King Lear, with Maureen Beattie in the gender-swapped title role, Forbes Masson as Gloucester, and Ailsa Davidson intriguingly doubling as both Cordelia and the Fool. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

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That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

If you are a free subscriber, you can usually only read the top bit. To access the stuff below the paywall, you have to become a paid supporter of The Crush Bar, which you can do for £50/year or £5/month, less than the price of a pint in a theatre bar.

This week, though, partly because its late, partly because I have written loads, and partly because this will be the last issue of Shouts and Murmurs until September, as The Crush Bar is going on a two-week pre-Fringe hiatus from Friday and will be focused on the festival when it returns in mid-July, I have removed the paywall, so everyone can read all of it. It’d still be nice if you chucked me a few quid, though.

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Last week in The Crush Bar:

Sorry this newsletter is a day late, again. Blame Paraguay and their sensational victory over Germany in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

It wasn’t just a good woche for fans of fußball-related schadenfreude, though. Nein. It was also an decent few days for supporters of big-money shenanigans and the erosion of British theatre’s soul at the hands of omnivorous corporate capitalism, with American billionaire Ari Emanuel’s Qatar-backed Mari Group reportedly in “advanced talks” to follow up their acquisition of ticketing outfit TodayTix by forking out £4.5 billion for ATG Entertainment. Some say that a guy that just sat next to Trump at that UFC stain on America’s history last month having free reign to further optimise ATG’s exploitative policy of piggybacking on artists and audiences with dynamic pricing, booking fees, pricy add-ons and expensive drinks at dozens of Britain’s historic theatres is actually bad. Others say this goal should have stood.

In other less-worrying-but-still-quite-concerning news involving large numbers, Trafalgar Entertainment has acquired Nicks Hytner and Starr’s London Theatre Company, and with it both the highly-flexible Bridge Theatre and vague immersive space Lightroom. It is, Hytner said, presumably with a faraway look in his eyes, “the right time to be moving on.” Why less worrying? Well, because Trafalgar Entertainment’s Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire are at least good old-fashioned British theatre multi-millionaire entrepreneurs with a more responsible approach to operating venues than that of the global corporation they founded then were unceremoniously ousted from. Why still quite concerning? Because Hytner and Starr have built something quite remarkable over the last nine years: a successful commercial theatre with an adventurous artistic soul, which has birthed such belting hits as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Into The Woods, such noble failures as Allelujah and Young Marx, and such complete trash as A Very Very Very Dark Matter. And now, much like they did at the National Theatre thirteen years ago, questions swirl over the Bridge Theatre’s future post-Nicks. Will it still be a producing house? Will it have an artistic director? And, most importantly, will they still do those tasty madeleines?

It was also, genuinely, a big week for fans of superhero David Byrne (not that one) and his ongoing crusade to save theatre, too. Not only has he recently renewed the Royal Court’s champion supporter-ship of The Crush Bar, thus doing his bit to sustain my career insightful and independent theatre journalism, he has also found time to somehow double production payments for directors and designers at his venue: a director working on a show in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs will get £18,250 in 2027, as opposed to £9000 in 2025, while designers will see fees jump from £7,850 to £15,000. Not only that, but Byrne also found time to jump on a Zoom call with Edinburgh-Fringe-headed Circus Zambia and me to explain how the two companies are working to support their similarly-named shows about Edward Makuka Nkoloso’s Zambian Space Program. “We’re using what could be a difficult coincidence to really amplify both shows,” trumpeted Byrne. “And with great power comes great responsibility.”

In further welcome news for theatre’s freelancers, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cameron Mackintosh and other rich men have joined Arts Council England in throwing some cash towards Freelancers Make Theatre Work, which will sustain the organisation and its ambitions for the next three years. On top of ACE hiring Yasmin Khan in a role dedicated to supporting freelancers and culture secretary for now Lisa Nandy announcing that she will finally appoint a freelance champion for the creative industries, Lyn Gardner ponders whether the industry has finally learned the lessons it said it would learn six years ago in The Stage. “Undoubtedly, there is still a very long way to go for the industry to have a more equitable and rewarding relationship with the freelancers who make the work and ensure it happens on our stages every night,” Gardner heavily caveats, “but there are welcome signs of movement.”

It was also a good week for fans of iconoclastic directors doing Shakespeare, with Joe Hill-Gibbins and Jazz Woodcock-Stewart set to stage Julius Caesar and the rarely-seen King John respectively in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse this winter, and James Norton set to give his Dane in German auteur Thomas Ostermeier’s globe-trotting take on Hamlet in the West End next year. “My first Hamlet has been touring the world for 18 years so I am honoured to have the opportunity to bring it here to London with James, who in my mind is a perfect Prince of Denmark,” boasted Ostermeier, who did that riotously good reworking of The Seagull last spring.

Finally up here: it was a great week for me, until it wasn’t. On Thursday night, it reached a glorious peak when my podcast A History Of Scottish Drama In Six Plays was highly commended - yes, highly commended - at the inaugural Scottish Podcast Awards: I got a little piece of paper proving as much, which I may well frame and display alongside my Best Attitude (read: Biggest Dweeb) trophy from a football camp I did when I was eight. Many thanks to the person who became a paid supporter of the newsletter so that I could afford an eye-catchingly expensive ticket to the ceremony. Alas. everything came crashing down on Sunday, though, when I accidentally put petrol in the AdBlue tank of my car and had to pay £520 to have it siphoned out. Ah well, as old Bill Shakespeare had it, “the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.” If only there was a way you could help me recoup that money while also supporting the future of an important journalistic endeavour…

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Show news: Jesus Christ Superstar is touring with Eurovision’s Sam Ryder; new musical Wild About You will run at Charing Cross Theatre; another new musical about Manchester in the 1990s featuring music from Radiohead, The Smiths and more will tour; there are some new Billy Elliots; Ugly Bucket’s Stuffed and a new show from piss / Carnation will run at the New Diorama; Spirited Away is doing a world tour; a new Timberlake Wertenbaker play about climate change, The Animals Come To The Table, will also run in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse this winter; there will be a stage version of Victoria Wood’s dinnerladies; new plays by Sami Ibrahim and Inua Ellams will run at Bristol Old Vic; Mel Giedroyc, Christopher Eccleston and more will do White Rabbit Red Rabbit; a gender-flipped Othello and a new Stewart Pringle play will run are in the RSC’s new season; Punchdrunk is doing a project at a luxury resort in the UAE, which doesn’t seem very rainbow rhythms, does it?

Other news: LWTheatres’ Darren Atkins has been appointed president of SOLT; new production company Act Two Entertainment are working with Matthew Dunster, Marisha Wallace and more on… stuff; you can buy art by actors for the fourth and final time at the MAMA exhibition in Brixton; Samantha Lane is leaving Little Angel Theatre; Colchester’s Mercury Theatre has launched an award for Essex-based playwrights; ACE has released details of its “clearer” application process for NPO funding; Callum Smith will jump ship from the Edinburgh Lyceum to Glasgow Citz; they had to do hydration breaks in the West End last week; the West End’s Duke of York’s Theatre has been rechristened, not to the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor Theatre, but in honour of the late, great Tom Stoppard.

The week in reviews: Pride, The Misanthrope, Sinatra The Musical, The Truth, and more…

Right, it was a big week, I wrote a lot up there, and Norway vs Senegal is about to kick off, so we are going to do this quickly. Let’s start at the National Theatre, in the Dorfman auditorium, where everyone apart from The Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish loved Matthew Warchus and Stephen Beresford’s stage adaptation of Pride, their own 2014 movie about Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and the remarkable relationship the campaign group forged with the small village of Onllwyn in Wales in 1984: it’s a joyous show about an inspirational story of solidarity, featuring a fabulous performance from History Boy Samuel Barnett. It gets five stars from Tom Wicker in Time Out, Arifa Akbar in The Guardian, and Sarah Hemming in The Financial Times. In the Lyttelton Theatre, though, The Misanthrope misfires: Martin Crimp’s third crack at a modern-day adaptation of Moliere’s classic comedy takes aim at myriad contemporary issues but doesn’t really have anything insightful to say about any of them. InRu directs well and Robert Jones’ design has an eye-opening trick up its sleeve, but star Sandra Oh struggles in the central, gender-swapped role of Alice. It gets two stars from The Times’ Clive Davis and three from almost everyone else.

“This time around Crimp has moved the action from 1666, the time of Louis XIV, to the modern day, the time of cancel culture and intimacy coordinators. As a plot device, it opens up a cornucopia of topics for Alice to mock and rail against – but it all proves too delicious to pass up for Crimp, who, like a kid in a candy store, can’t decide and so takes one of everything. The result is a broad satire filled with platitudes and generalised debates about female empowerment, the patriarchy and trolls on the internet. Crimp aims his satire like a fine spritz rather than the firehose jet of Molière’s original.”

Annabel Nugent, Independent

In the West End, another entertainment legend gets his legacy whitewashed via jukebox musical in Sinatra The Musical. Written by Joe DiPietro and directed by Kathleen Marshall, the show tracks Ol’ Blue Eyes’ life from the height of his early fame, through the nadir of the late 1940s and early 1950s, to his Oscar-winning comeback in 1953 film From Here To Eternity, but the more interesting elements of Sinatra’s story - the Mafia connections, the serial infidelity, the Civil Rights activism - are either overlooked or underexplored in favour of a hagiographic spin through the admittedly wonderful hits. The critics aren’t sure Joel Harper-Jackson has the requisite charisma to carry it all, either, and it gets a mix of two-star and three-star reviews. Also in the West End: Lindsay Posner’s star-studded revival of French writer Florian Zeller’s infidelity-themed farce The Truth, which first kicked off Zeller-fever at the Menier Chocolate Factory back in 2016, is either “seat-shakingly funny” if you believe Mark Lawson’s five-star write-up in The Guardian, or “neither funny nor incisive enough to really grip” if you prefer Dave Fargnoli’s two-star review in The Stage. Other opinions are available, covering all the ratings in between. Also in the West End: Simon Evans and Debris Stevenson’s celebrated RSC staging of Cyrano De Bergerac starring Adrian Lester and Susannah Fielding, which is still wonderful.

“The piece admirably attempts a warts-and-all portrait of the legendary singer, focusing on a rocky period early in his career, the toll his ambition took on his family and his serial infidelities. There are some meaty questions here about the strains of a showbiz career on relationships, the changing musical landscape, the brutal, segregated and chauvinist society of the 1940s and ’50s, and the egregious control wielded by record and film companies over an artist’s life… the trouble is that the format doesn’t allow for in-depth exploration of these issues, resulting in a somewhat superficial account of events — curiously anodyne too, given the extraordinary details of Sinatra’s life.”

Sarah Hemming, Financial Times

Elsewhere in London: new plays! Tia-Renne Mullings’ adolescent dating drama A To B at Soho Theatre is entertaining but underpowered, according to Anya Ryan in The Guardian; Ben Ockrent’s black comedy about bickering bereaved siblings Relics at the Lyric Hammersmith is “wince-makingly funny,” according to WhatsOnStage’s Alun Hood; Sophie Swithinbank’s exhilaratingly unconventional three-hander Sting at the Young Vic is a “masterful, destabilising examination of domestic abuse” according to Tim Bano in Time Out; Rajiv Joseph’s Beckettian riff on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand Archduke at the Royal Court is another “illuminatingly oblique” take on historic events that “addresses urgent current concerns,” according to The Guardian’s Mark Lawson; and Richard Nelson’s Tucci-free Springwood at the Hampstead Theatre is a “quietly magnificent, richly humane” portrait of the 1939 meeting between King George VI and FDR, according to The Times’ Dominic Maxwell. I reiterate my plea for someone to stage Nelson’s Rhinebeck Panorama on this side of the Atlantic.

Elsewhere, in Regent’s Park, Atri Bannerjee’s staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is imaginative but incoherent, according to The Telegraph’s Claire Allfree. In Yorkshire, Amy Leach directs an evocative adaptation of much-loved movie Brassed Off in Leeds Playhouse’s cavernous Quarry Theatre, according to The Guardian’s Nick Ahad. And, finally, in Glasgow, Bard In The Botanics opens its summer season with a lean, lucid five-man Othello adapted and directed by Gordon Barr, according to me. And that’s all for this week, and, indeed, until September, when regular issues resume post-Fringe.

Look out for: Jesus Christ Superstar and Trainspotting in the West End, Cleansed at the Almeida, The Oresteia at the Bridge Theatre, The Guilty at the Donmar, Lear, I Can Die Too and A History Of Paper at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, The Market Deeping Model Railway Club in Nottingham, My Fair Lady in Chichester, The Cherry Orchard and Game Of Thrones in Stratford, Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Globe, I’m Every Woman in Wembley, Cats in Regent’s Park, Death Note at the Barbican, and lots more.

The week in interviews: Stephen Mangan, Rosie Sheehy, Tanya Reynolds, and more…

• “When the camera and the audience got a bit closer, my face got funnier. So that sort of set the die, really.” Actor Stephen Mangan chats to The Times’ Alice Jones about his new West End role in The Truth, his thoughts on audience behaviour and ticket prices, his transition into comedy, the death of his mother, and more.

• “People always ask me, ‘When are you going to be in a comedy?’” Welsh star Rosie Sheehy stunned in the difficult dramas Guess How Much I Love You?, The Brightening Air and Machinal. Now, she is doing another laugh-a-minute show in Simon Stone’s The Oresteia at the Bridge. She speaks to The FT’s Sarah Hemming.

• “I’d love to do a Shakespeare comedy. I’d love a crack at Viola in Twelfth Night.” Actor Tanya Reynolds is currently starring in the West End’s hottest ticket, Ava Pickett’s 1536. I spoke to her for my Stage Directions interview in The Stage. Also, I chatted to singer Natalya Romaniw for the same slot in the opera special.

• “Finances are always at the mercy of the weather; but there is something quite Shakespearean about that” As his Glasgow company celebrates its 25th birthday, Bard In The Botanics artistic director Gordon Barr chats to The Scotsman’s Joyce McMillan about staging a quarter-century of Shakespeares in Scotland.

• “As the years have gone by and more and more people have started to make work that’s similar, I’ve started to move further away from it.” Artistic director of immersive pioneers Punchdrunk Felix Barrett is returning to regular theatre with The Guilty at the Donmar Warehouse. He converses with The Observer’s Olivia Ovenden.

Further reading: remembering Penelope Keith, Andy Burnham’s cultural legacy in Manchester, the use of gen-AI in designs, and more…

• “What we treasured was her ability to make us laugh and to suggest that under the starched conventionality of upper-class English womanhood lurked impishness, mischief and a desire for adventure.” We lost Penelope Keith, aged 86, this week. There are plenty of obituaries. Here’s The Times. Here’s The Telegraph. Here’s The Guardian. And here, in the same paper, is Michael Billington remembering her: she performed in the first play he ever reviewed for The Guardian, apparently.

• "If Aviva Studios attracted millions of new converts to the arts, you could argue that £242 million was money well spent. But does it?” With Andy Burnham set to move into Number 10 as our new PM imminently, The Times’ chief culture writer Richard Morrison surveys the cultural legacy of his tenure as mayor of Manchester.

• “I have never forgotten the look of haunted sorrow on the face of Dorothy Tutin’s Varya as she knelt downstage packing a trunk, awaiting the marriage proposal from George Murcell’s Lopakhin that never came.” More Billington in The Guardian: ahead of two productions of The Cherry Orchard, one in Stratford, one in the West End, he does that thing where he roams over his memories of seeing the play over the years.

• “Without wanting to seem naive, you do have to hope that where theatre might be able to do its bit in these hate-filled times is through the stories it tells and the plays it programmes.” The backlash to the backlash has begun over that UK Theatre “toolkit” instructing venues on how to engage with Reform. Here is Claire Allfree toeing The Telegraph line. Here, better, is Matt Hemley in The Stage. Here, best, is that Stewart Lee bit in The Nerve I shared last week again…

“What kind of theatre do these twats think Reform want them to make? A version of John Ford’s 1626 classic ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, but rewritten to reflect the views of Reform’s Robert Kenyon, who believes women have abortions “so they can shag anyone they want”? …or maybe a version of Larry Kramer’s Aids-crisis epic The Normal Heart, but with the script replaced by endless repetition of the joke about throwing fags into Michael Barrymore’s swimming pool that Nigel Farage told in a speech at his brother’s wedding?”

• “Especially noticeable was the final curtain, which drops as the finale number begins and displays an AI image” Here is Theatre & Tonic’s Emmie Newitt on a worrying trend of productions using gen-AI in their designs and marketing material, following reports that Something Rotten! in Manchester does exactly that. Apparently, The Greatest Showman, Thespian and 13 Going On 30 have been similarly accused…

That’s all for this issue. Thanks for reading and for supporting The Crush Bar.

If you want to get in touch with me about anything at all, just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

This is the free Friday issue, which usually contains an interview with a theatremaker or an essay on a theatre-related topic. This week, it is a chat with director and dramaturg Marlie Haco, whose revival of Phil Davies’ Firebird opens at Southwark Playhouse next month. After that, there are your regular show recommendations.

In case you missed it, here is this week’s issue of Shouts and Murmurs, which is a weekly round-up of the most interesting writing about theatre elsewhere…

You can get Shouts and Murmurs straight in your inbox every Tuesday - and help keep this newsletter going! - by signing up as a paid supporter of The Crush Bar.

Subscribe now

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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Become a champion supporter

One last thing up here: a reminder that you still have time to submit your questions to my panel of Edinburgh Fringe experts for next week’s issue of The Crush Bar…

Some plays lose their resonance over time. Others remain powerful. Or, as Tom Stoppard put it in a 1972 interview with The New York Times, some plays “get rotten like fruit” and others still work years later, “like ashtrays.”

Eleven years on from its premiere, Phil Davies’ 2015 debut Firebird seems like an ashtray, partly because the terrible issue it addresses remains as pertinent as ever. One of several plays to transfer from the Hampstead Theatre’s studio space to Trafalgar Studios in the mid-2010s - James Fritz’s Four Minutes Twelve Seconds and Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s The Wasp did, too - the three-hander unsparingly depicts the grooming and sexual exploitation of a vulnerable young woman, Tia, at the hands of an older man of South Asian descent, AJ. Originally, Davies was inspired by the scandals in Rochdale and Rotherham. Since then, grooming gangs have been uncovered across the UK in a range of communities. Now, with Keir Starmer having launched a national inquiry following the Casey audit, and right-wing factions attempting to weaponise the situation to stir up civil unrest, Firebird returns, with a reworked text, in a new production from director and dramaturg Marlie Haco, with Scottish actors Taqi Nazeer and Mollie Milne, alongside Kelise Gordon-Harrison.

Born in 1996, Haco grew up in London, studied at the University of Cambridge, then spent lockdown learning how to direct via various online classes with Katie Mitchell, Rob Icke, and others. She founded the company Double Telling with producer Toby Mather, under the aegis of which she has directed bold stagings of Bren Gosling’s Proud at the King’s Head Theatre in 2022, Daniel Bainbridge and Cam Scriven’s Good Day at VAULT Festival in 2023, and Chloë Moss’ Run Sister Run at the Arcola Theatre in 2025. I caught up with her earlier this week to discuss her inspirations, her aspirations, and her revival of Firebird, opening at Southwark Playhouse next month…

Firebird is Double Telling’s fourth show. How did it come about?

Usually, I find a play I love and try to get the rights to it, or I work on a new play with a writer, then pitch like crazy until a theatre says yes. This was the other way around. Ebenezer Bamgboye (see The Crush Bar’s interview with Bamgboye below) gave me the slot at Southwark Playhouse in August, and said he wanted a new play, or a play that hadn’t been staged in London for twenty years. I was developing a few new plays, but none of them were quite ready. I found a few plays, too, but either couldn’t get the rights, or could get the rights but the theatre said no. I said to Ebe that the twenty-year thing was making it difficult. Like, there’s a reason that plays don’t come back for twenty years, right? Maybe they aren’t relevant anymore, or our tastes have changed. So, we changed the timeframe. I read Firebird and I felt like it was the one. And Ebe agreed. We managed to get the rights, and here we are.

What was it about Firebird that appealed to you?

A lot of things. I’m always looking for character-driven stories and plays that focus on the female experience, and Firebird is both of those. I’m always looking for plays that allow me to work non-naturalistically, too, and it felt like there was an opportunity to do that with Firebird. Then, in terms of the subject matter, I had been really shocked by the documentary Groomed: A National Scandal and thinking about how theatre could address that in some way. When I read Firebird, I thought that reviving it was an interestting way of continuing the conversation. It was written in response to the Rochdale case. I have since met with the journalist Anna Hall, who made Groomed. Her view is that not much has changed since then. Cases have been exposed all over the UK. It’s a problem that has not gone away.

The topic of grooming gangs is a sensitive one. Were you wary about addressing it?

Not at first. I felt that the play was Tia’s story, and I wanted to stage it in a way that put her experience at the centre. Too often, these girls are not listened to. Too often, the focus is on the perpetrators. I wanted to shift the focus onto these girls and the trauma they continue to experience. A bit later on, once we had started working on the play and started having conversations, I realised we were walking into risky territory. I had a few days of existential crisis. I worried that what we were doing might be weaponised to incite racial tension, which is obviously not our intention. I wrote this long email to Phil and opened up a conversation about that. He has rewritten the play quite a bit.

How has the play been rewritten?

The provocation was: how can we stay true to the story while also being mindful of what people might take away from it? We didn’t want to change the ethnicity of AJ, the perpetrator, because that would feel like we were no longer telling the same story, but we did want to shift the focus. We wanted to consider the forces shaping AJ, too. Obviously, they are not comparable at all, but AJ has also been failed by the system. He has experienced racism and oppression. He is a product of his environment. We wanted to signal that. We wanted to make it a comment on systemic failure. The structure has remained the same, but every scene has changed a bit. One has been completely rewritten. There’s an extra character. And we’ve reset the play to contemporary Glasgow, so every line has been changed to fit that.

Why relocate the play to Glasgow?

I was always interested in relocating it, because I didn’t want people to think it was just a play about something that happened in Rochdale back then. Cases of grooming gangs have been revealed all over the country, after all. Glasgow partly came from the casting. We happened to see quite a few Scottish actors, particularly for the character of AJ. Then I found Mollie Milne to play Tia. They have helped a lot with the dialogue. There’s been a lot of back-and-forth to make sure it is right.

Have you thought about bringing your production to Scotland?

That’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Do you know anyone?

I know a few people. Leave it with me. You are working with designer Tomás Palmer, who you also worked with on Run Sister Run. Tell me about your staging.

The conversations Tomás and I had early on were about the amount of pressure that one person can withstand. He had this image of a crusher. He showed me all these videos of things being crushed. That became the starting point of the design. We have this raised platform, where most of the action takes place, then a ceiling mirroring it above, which comes down through the course of the play, so that Tia slowly gets crushed, in the same way that someone who is groomed gets increasingly controlled by the abuser. Other characters leave the platform, but Tia never does, as the entire play takes place inside her perspective, and the platform is her mind. In the penultimate scene, she is in a wheelchair, and the ceiling has dropped so far that she wouldn’t be able to stand up if she could.

Tell me about Double Telling, too. What does the company do?

It’s me and Toby, and then there are some people we regularly work with, like Ákos Lustyik, our composer, and Tomás Palmer, our designer, and Ben Jacobs, our lighting designer. We did Proud at the King’s Head Theatre in 2022, then Good Day at VAULT Festival in 2023, then Run Sister Run at the Arcola Theatre last year. Now we’re doing Firebird. We do lots of things. I’m also a dramaturg, so I’m always developing new plays. Some of them go on to become Double Telling shows. Some don’t. Sometimes we do revivals, like Run Sister Run and Firebird. I don’t really mind if it’s a new play or a revival, as long as there is a reason to revive something, and as long as there is an opportunity for me to do something different with it. The original production of Firebird at the Hampstead Theatre and Trafalgar Studios, for example, was really naturalistic. We are doing something very different.

How did you get interested in theatre?

I was born in London in 1996. I did a lot of theatre and dance growing up. My parents didn’t work in theatre, but they took me to see a lot. My mum took me to see a lot of Shakespeare and Chekhov and Ibsen. My strongest memory of seeing theatre is Billy Elliot, though, which I saw when I was seven or eight and was completely taken by. I was just like: ‘Wow. Whatever this is, I want to be involved.’

Did you start directing as a student?

I did English at Cambridge, and I did some directing there, but I was basically a nerd who just did my degree. I always feel pretty uncool because all these people were off doing theatre and I was just in the library. I knew I wanted to be a director, though. I used my degree to read as many plays as possible.

What work has inspired you?

Definitely Ivo Van Hove’s A View From The Bridge. That was incredible, as was All My Sons recently. I was so struck by how he stripped everything away until it was just bodies in space, and the story was so powerful as a result. I also loved Benedict Andrews’ production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic with Gillian Anderson and Vanessa Kirby. And then Rebecca Frecknall’s revival of Summer and Smoke at the Almeida, obviously. I actually wrote about that production at university as part of a dissertation on Tennessee Williams.

How did you learn how to direct?

I didn’t formally train. I guess I was actually really lucky with lockdown, because there were suddenly loads and loads of free directing classes online. I did six weeks with Katie Mitchell. I did eight weeks with Sacha Wares. I did weeks on end with Lyndsey Turner and Rob Icke. All the people I admired were suddenly not working and had all this time to give back to aspiring directors. After that, I felt like I had done a lot of theory, and I was just really hungry to go and make something. I did the National Theatre’s directing course last year as well. That was really useful.

How challenging has it been to build a career as a director?

I mean, it’s fucking hard. That’s why Double Telling had a bit of a break between Good Day and Run Sister Run. Finding a play, finding a theatre, and finding the money is such an enormous challenge. It takes a while, too, and that makes it feel like every production matters a lot. 2024 was quite an unsatisfying year for me creatively. I did some assisting and I was hired as a director for a show, but I wasn’t making my own thing and I found that frustrating. Toby and I had lots of conversations about whether we should just make something quickly, but his view was to wait for the right thing to come along. It’s better to make something that you really care about than just make something because you feel like you need to do something. Run Sister Run was the right thing. Firebird is the right thing, too.

You are also a dramaturg. How does that work?

The difficulty has been monetising that, to be honest. In the beginning, I was just trying to get experience, so I worked with a lot of friends on their plays. They found it useful and started recommending me to people, which was great, but I was also like: ‘I need to make money doing this.’ I was getting into positions where people hadn’t paid me, or I wasn’t being credited for work I’d done on plays. I got a bit savvier and started with contracts. Now I have an agent, so that makes things easier.

What does being a dramaturg actually involve?

It depends if I am working as a dramaturg on a play I might go on to direct with Double Telling, or if someone has come to me for help in developing their play. With the former, I build the concept with the writer and we go on a journey together. With the latter, I am not trying to shift them in a particular direction, I am just asking questions and giving them feedback. My job there is to help the writer achieve their intentions. I’ve worked on lots of new scripts and read for a lot of prizes. You get a feeling of what works and what doesn’t in a play. Then it is a case of relaying that in a way that they can action. It’s about asking the right questions, or sometimes it is as simple as repeating back to them what is there. They might think they are doing one thing in a scene when they are actually doing something else. Just pointing that out can be a really helpful thing.

Firebird is at Southwark Playhouse from July 9 until August 1.

Three shows to see next week

Cyrano De Bergerac - Noel Coward Theatre, until September 5

Simon Evans and Debris Stevenson’s Royal Shakespeare Company reworking of Edmon Rostand’s classic play about the lover with the long nose was hugely acclaimed when it premiered in Stratford last year. Now, it arrives in London, starring Adrian Lester and Susannah Fielding. You can read my chat with Fielding - star of This Time With Alan Partridge, of course - in The Stage and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

One Man Musical - Soho Theatre, until July 5

Comedy music duo Flo and Joan’s show about theatre’s most famous composer and impresario first ran at the Edinburgh Fringe two years ago, then transferred to Underbelly Boulevard Soho. Now, ahead of another Edinburgh Fringe run at Pleasance Courtyard, it is at Soho Theatre until Friday, with Edward Easton stepping into the shoes of SNL UK’s George Fouracres to play… him. You can read my chat with Fouracres about the show here and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

love you long time (already) - Theatre503, until July 25

Vietnamese-American writer Katie Đỗ’s debut play traces a complicated mother-daughter relationship from 1974 to 2018, melding dreams and reality in an intergenerational exploration of migration and memory. Workshopped and developed in California, it now makes it UK premiere in a staging directed by Jennifer Tang, whose previous productions include Further Than The Furthest Thing at the Young Vic and Cymbeline at Shakespeare’s Globe. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Thanks for reading and supporting The Crush Bar

Thanks to all 5061 subscribers and 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible…

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

If you are a free subscriber, you can only read the top bit. To access the stuff below the paywall, you have to become a paid supporter of The Crush Bar, which you can do for £50/year or £5/month, which is less than the price of a pint in a theatre bar.

Subscribe now

Theatres, companies, agencies, and organisations can also become champion supporters of The Crush Bar for £250/year. That gets their name on this dedicated tab on The Crush Bar’s Substack homepage and in the footer of every Friday issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Become a champion supporter

Last week in The Crush Bar:

Glasgow felt pretty hectic on Sunday afternoon.

Hordes of teenagers congregated on Glasgow Green to see Lewis Capaldi headline TRNSMT. An Orange walk paraded through the city centre. Most importantly, though, the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland took place at the Citizens Theatre. Hopefully nobody got mixed up and went to the wrong event, eh? I’m not sure a satsuma sash would have been appropriate at our awards, and I’m confident the majority of my fellow critics would have felt a bit awkward among the ketamine-fuelled adolescents at TRNSMT. Although, actually, I’m not entirely sure about that.

Thankfully, as far as I’m aware, everyone ended up where they were meant to be, and a great day was had by all. The CATS ceremony certainly went swimmingly. Gavin Mitchell and Joyce McMillan marshalled proceedings with aplomb, accompanied by a giant papier-mâché feline. Karine Polwart’s wonderful Windblown picked up Best Production, Dominic Hill won his sixth Best Director gong, and Johnny McKnight and Jessica Hardwick were popular recipients of the two Outstanding Performance awards. I was delighted to present Milly Sweeney with the Best New Play prize (to go with her The Stage Debut Award) for Water Colour, which I am equally happy to learn will finally be seen by a wider audience at the Traverse during the Fringe. If anyone let the side down, it was me with my cheap jibe at my male colleagues’ dress sense, and I would like to apologise for that here: chaps, I am sincerely sorry you have no style.

In other news related to critics in Scotland, the musical adaptation of One Day, which banned myself and several colleagues from covering it at the Edinburgh Lyceum in March, has secured a slot in the West End: it will open at the Garrick Theatre in November, with Jamie Muscato and Sharon Rose reprising their performances as Dex and Em. I am delighted. No, really, I am, because it is a great show made by great people, and its success will be a bit of a boon for the Lyceum. I have, however, also begun a covert campaign to get the producers to train me and my fellow Scotland-based critics to London for opening night, so they can right their egregious wrong.

I know, I know, I have previously prattled on about how much I hate the theatre industry’s reliance on doing stage versions of stories that are already successful on screen. At least One Day (the novel and the series, not the film) is half decent, though. Last week we learned that there will be a theatrical adaptation of Richard Curtis’ Yesterday, which I didn’t think anyone even liked the first time around, did they? I guess they have already shoved most much-loved movies into the screen-to-stage sausage machine, so they have started on the rest. See also: Fighting With My Family.

Whatever. There are bigger things to worry about, I guess, like the relentless rise of Reform inducing SOLT and UK Theatre to warn theatres that engaging with neo-fascist morons is “no longer optional,” and asking consultancy firm Portland to produce a “toolkit for Reform Engagement” to help theatres “identify common ground” and “engage warmly and professionally” with the party’s representatives.” Thankfully, we still have Stewart Lee, writing in his weekly column in The Nerve…

“Are female staff obliged to engage warmly with someone like Reform’s Makerfield candidate, Robert Kenyon, who said women should be denied abortions, even if they have been raped by a family member? Should black staff have to sell half-time family-size popcorn warmly to Reform’s Rayleigh West candidate, Stuart Prior, who said white people were the master race and had bigger brains than black people? Should Jewish staff have to serve ice cream with a smile to Reform’s Bootle West candidate, Jay Leslie Cooper, who said the Holocaust was a hoax?”

If you haven’t subscribed to The Nerve yet, by the way, you should. It’s a online publication set-up by some ex-Observer journalists that covers politics, culture and tech, which drops a batch of interesting articles in your inbox twice a week. Sometimes I do bits Scottish arts in their weekly “hotlist” of recommendations. As our ceremony on Sunday proved, there is no shortage of stuff to shout about up here.

Show news: Jesus Christ Superstar will tour with Sam Ryder; a fresh adaptation of The Turn Of The Screw by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm features in Reading Rep’s new season; it’s also in the Arcola’s new season, as are new versions of The Master Builder and Incident at Vichy; there’s new work from Alaa Shehada and Titas Holder in Taio Lawson’s first season at the Bush; the guy from Kaiser Chiefs is doing Secret Cinema’s Grease; Burlesque has appointed its third director in two years; Jack Holden’s immersive Peter Pan adaptation Club NVRLND is transferring to London.

Other news: World Cup games are affecting ticket sales; Audible is sponsoring the Edinburgh Comedy Awards; vacancies in the arts are down 25 per-cent compared to last year; the new Windrush Prize will award £10k to a British Caribbean playwright; Sofi Berenger is stepping down as chief exec of the King’s Head Theatre.

Read more

This is the free Friday issue, which usually contains an interview with a theatremaker or an essay on a theatre-related topic. This week, though, only partly because I have been ridiculously busy, it is a short newsletter teeing up a pre-Fringe issue I will be running in a fortnight’s time. After that, there’s your usual show recommendations.

In case you missed it, here is this week’s issue of Shouts and Murmurs, which is a weekly round-up of the most interesting writing about theatre elsewhere…

You can get Shouts and Murmurs straight in your inbox every Tuesday - and help keep this newsletter going! - by signing up as a paid supporter of The Crush Bar.

Subscribe now

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 issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Become a champion supporter

Seriously, what do you want to know about the Edinburgh Fringe?

I spend half my life discussing the festival, as regular readers of this newsletter are well aware. I interview people, here, there and everywhere. I rewrite press releases into news articles. I conduct fearless investigations. I review for anyone that will pay me. I write provocative opinion pieces. I assemble insightful features. When asked, I ramble on about the festival on panels, podcasts and the radio. What can I say? You have to make hay while the sun shines. You have to make the most of the world’s largest arts festival arriving on your doorstep when you’re a freelance journalist.

All of which is to say: you must be sick of me and my takes by now. That’s why, for this year’s pre-Fringe issue in a fortnight’s time, before we get into the main stuff in mid-July, it won’t be me holding forth on the festival. Instead, I have assembled a panel of experts, who are primed to answer any questions you may have. Well, I am in the process of assembling one. It is being assembled. Assemblage is occurring.

Who have we got/will we get? Only some of the biggest dogs in the festival pound! An eye-catching mix of experienced, articulate, and insightful people, working in a range of roles across the Fringe, drawn from my extensive network. Producers and performers. Critics and commentators. Directors and designers. Venue bosses and Fringe Society bigwigs. Locals and Londoners, and, who knows, maybe even someone from somewhere else. Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head. People with vast amounts of festival-related wisdom, which they are willing to impart to you. Woof!

So: send me your Edinburgh Fringe questions, I will put them to the appropriate expert, then collate all the answers right here in your inbox in a fortnight’s time.

Please do so, otherwise I will have to make them up myself. You can be anonymous if you like, but, if it is at all persuasive, I can also include your name and the linked name of your Fringe show, if you have one, where it will scroll past the eyes of all 5000-plus subscribers to The Crush Bar and surely lodge somewhere in their subconscious.

No topic is off limits! What are programmers looking for in a production? What is the best way of promoting your show? What are the key networking events to attend? What are organisers doing to keep costs down for artists and audiences alike? Where can you find the best sandwich in Edinburgh? How can you stay sane during the festival? What is the best source of Fringe content and why is it The Crush Bar? All great questions that I will probably include under a pseudonym anyway!

All you need to do to submit a question is reply to this email, or slide into my DMs on any of the social media platforms that are still functional and not filled with fascists. Please include your name and show, too, if you want that to feature alongside your question. And that’s it. Thanks for reading. Answers in a fortnight.

One more thing, actually: a quick reminder that the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland ceremony is this Sunday at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, and we could really do with shifting a few more tickets to make the event financially viable!

If you are in/around Scotland and want to celebrate an extraordinary year of Scottish theatre, then head over to the Citizens Theatre website and cop yourself a ticket.

I briefly thought about wangling some kind of discount for subscribers to The Crush Bar, but obviously it is far too late to sort out. Hey, if you come up to me in the bar and say the words “TCB till I die” to me, though, I will consider buying you a drink. Deal?

Three shows to see next week

Why I Stuck A Flare Up My Arse For England - Garrick Theatre, until June 21

Alex Hill’s one-man play inspired by that England fan is playing in the West End for one night only on Sunday, ahead of a New York run, before Hill appears in Kick It Anywhere Productions’ new play The Jolly Fisherman at the Edinburgh Fringe this August. You can read my interview with Hill here and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Springwood - Hampstead Theatre, until July 25

It is a travesty that American writer and director Richard Nelson’s work is not staged more often on this side of the Atlantic. The Rhinebeck Panorama, his cycle of quietly profound naturalist dramas set in upstate New York, is one of the greatest achievements in twenty-first century theatre, and I long for it to return to these shores in some form. Perhaps this will help: a new play about the 1939 meeting between George VI and President Roosevelt, starring Robert Lindsay, Jemma Redgrave, Andrew Havill and Rebecca Night. You can get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

The Only Way Out Is In - Pitlochry Festival Theatre, until June 28

This one-on-one immersive experience involves creator and performer Sharron Devine gently guiding blindfolding participants through a series of transportive sensory encounters, inviting them to meditate on what really matters to them. First staged as part of Coventry City of Culture five years ago, it has now taken up residence in a pine-built pavilion in the wooded hillside behind Pitlochry Festival Theatre, as part of Alan Cumming’s first season in charge of the Perthshire venue. You can read my review in The Stage here and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

Thanks for reading and supporting The Crush Bar

Thanks to all 5055 subscribers and 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible…

The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; 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 below.

Subscribe now

That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.

Fergus

If you are a free subscriber, you can only read the top bit. To access the stuff below the paywall, you have to become a paid supporter of The Crush Bar, which you can do for £50/year or £5/month, which is less than the price of a pint in a theatre bar.

Subscribe now

Theatres, companies, agencies, and organisations can also become champion supporters of The Crush Bar for £250/year. That gets their name on this dedicated tab on The Crush Bar’s Substack homepage and in the footer of every Friday issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.

Become a champion supporter

Last week in The Crush Bar:

“Rosamund Pike does her job.”

The Guardian chose not to go with that headline, but it could have, as that is essentially the story. That’s right, so craven is theatre journalism’s pursuit of engagement that we are not only reporting on incidents of actors stopping performances to call out audience members on their phones now, we are also reporting on when they don’t. I guess there was no Tom Hiddleston news this week and no-one could find an eye-catchingly expensive theatre ticket.

In brief: a fortnight after shushing the audience during a curtain call of Inter Alia and pointing the finger at an audience member she spotted texting during the show, Pike has, um, not done that. All that happened is someone forgot they had set an alarm on their phone, it went off during the show, and Pike “shot the woman a glare.” That’s it. Hardly Cambridge Analytica again, Guardian?

Close readers may have noted a certain weariness on my part when mentioning the recent explosion of chat about phones in theatres. I would like to emphasise straightaway that I do not think using your phone during a performance is okay, and I find it as annoying as you do. Well, maybe not quite as annoying, as I generally haven’t paid for a ticket, but it’s annoying. I am currently in London and saw 1536 the other night and someone’s alarm went off. It was annoying! I was annoyed! There was annoyance! (What a play that is by the way. Also: what the fuck?)

I admit that I find instances of big stars stopping shows to publicly shame individuals in front of hundreds of others a bit grim, perhaps because it seems a bit unprofessional, perhaps because the power dynamic of the situation a bit fascist-coded, perhaps because I am, deep down, just a contrarian. But my wider weariness stems more from the conversation around these incidents, which I find a) boring, b) mostly unhelpful, and c) a sad indictment of contemporary theatre journalism.

In recent weeks, it seems like every publication has been scouring social media for instances of audience misbehaviour to report, even directing their readership’s ire towards a baby, and asking their critic to put together a list of things they would forbid people from doing in the theatre, like laughing. When you find yourself echoing Giles Coren, maybe check yourself?

Of course, I worry. I worry about people being so addicted to social media that they can’t spend a couple of hours without checking their smartphone. I worry about how that is rewiring our brains. I worry about how that is eroding the social contract and rewiring our brains. I read James Marriott’s stuff with interest. I, too, have briefly flirted with getting a dumbphone. I, too, have fantasised about running away to live in the woods and listen to the birdsong and breathe.

But I also worry about other stuff. I worry about making theatres seem like places of stricture and censoriousness, and the impact that has on accessibility and audiences. I worry about making smartphones and social media integral to both the practical infrastructure of theatregoing (QR codes, app benefits, etc) and the marketing machine that supports shows (sorry, Lesley, I’m pretty sure producers love it when people film the curtain call and stick it on Instagram) and the hypocritical message that sends. And I worry that we have become a society of intolerant egotists who curate our day-to-day existence and chide anyone that disrupts it.

As ever, though, I mostly worry about the future of theatre journalism, and I long for more insight, more nuance, and more empathy in the discourse around stuff like this. And, as ever, Lyn Gardner comes to the rescue in The Stage. Her take: maybe just… put phones in bags and calm down a bit?

There will be plenty who will argue that audience members should be fully capable of finding the on/off switch on their phone and demonise those who can’t, but if theatres embrace a policy that is not predicated on audiences knowing and following the etiquette but rather about making everyone subject to the same policy – well flagged in advance – I can’t see the problem.

One more thing to flag up here. As I say, I’m down in London for a few days. I saw 1536 on Monday. I’m seeing The P Word today. The main event, though, was am-dram company Dulwich Players’ production of Babette’s Feast at the Brockley Jack last night, in which my sister, sub-editor and fellow Substacker Phoebe is thrillingly multi-roling as Alf, Blind Astrid, the lady of the court, Neighbour 1, and other parts. In return for her many years behind the mast of The Crush Bar, I said I would shout about the show, which was great fun. I’m told there are still tickets available on Saturday!

Show news: Stranger Things is closing in both London and New York; Shakespeare-Radiohead mash-up Hamlet Hail To The Thief will run at the Barbican; Martin Guerre and How The Other Half Loves feature in Matthew Warchus’ last Old Vic season; Stoppard’s Jumpers will be revived at the Hampstead Theatre; Alan Cumming has launched a new mini-festival showcasing Edinburgh Fringe shows in Pitlochry; Rory Kinnear will play John Maynard Keynes in a new James Graham play; The Traitors stage show will have five different endings, Paddington is going to New York.

Other news: Five independent regional theatres have formed an alliance; Phil&Ben and PW have launched a new partnership touring work to towns and small cities; Mean Girls cancelled its Belfast run due to civil unrest, but Belfast Lyric refused to close; a new tracker has revealed the real state of public funding in Scotland; BuildHollywood did it again; Hackney Empire wants to do more stuff; Samuel Macdonald has won A Play, A Pie and A Pint’s David MacLennan Award; Helen Mirren and Nick Hern have been recognised in the King’s birthday honours; the Shaftesbury has been renamed after Judi Dench; Cate Blanchett is going to Oxford.

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This is the free Friday issue, which usually contains an interview with a theatremaker or an essay on a theatre-related topic. This week, it is a chat with writer-director Emma Howlett, whose new show The Plot is running at Summerhall during the Edinburgh Fringe. Then there are your regular show recommendations for next week.

In case you missed it, here is this week’s issue of Shouts and Murmurs, which is a weekly round-up of the most interesting writing about theatre elsewhere…

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Every August for the last three years, writer-director Emma Howlett has created one of the most exciting shows at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Her 2023 debut, Her Green Hell, was a deliriously disorienting one-woman play about zoologist Juliane Koepcke’s extraordinary solo survival story in the Amazon rainforest in 1971. Her second show, 2024’s Sisters Three, was a three-handed metatheatrical romp through historical female trios, from the Gorgons to the Weird Sisters to the Sugababes. Her third, last year’s four-hander Aether, wove together several stories of women investigating the unknown and facing the consequences, from ancient Egyptian astronomer Hypatia to nineteenth-century medium Florence Cook, to a fictional physics student in contemporary Cambridge. Dazzlingly smart and inventively staged, like all Howlett’s work, Aether subsequently transferred to London’s Jermyn Street Theatre. This summer, working once more under the aegis of her company TheatreGoose, Howlett is returning to Summerhall for the fourth festival in a row with The Plot, a two-handed work inspired by The Gunpowder Plot.

Born in 1997, Howlett grew up in Bath and trained as a ballet dancer, before becoming obsessed with theatre as a student at Oxford University, where she founded TheatreGoose. In recent years, she has worked increasingly outside her company as both a writer and a director, penning several new plays and screen projects that are in the pipeline, and assisting Polly Findlay on her production of Copenhagen back in Bath and Lindsay Posner on his West End staging of A View From The Bridge. A big fan of her Summerhall shows, I have wanted to chat to her for The Crush Bar for a while. Earlier this week, we finally managed to make it happen…

Firstly, I want to ask about your company’s name, TheatreGoose, which we have discussed in the past. Where did it come from?

You do love to slander it. I was a student at Oxford. I had been to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time, having somehow got a part in a show with this company of very cool graduating actors, and it had been quite a life-changing month. I found an Alice Birch play, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. in a Blackwell’s up there and had this cosmic feeling of realisation about what I wanted to do. When I got back to Oxford, I formed a company, as that is how you apply for funding and produce a show there, and we needed a name. We went through some cringe options, like Thistle because we were inspired by Scotland. I thought about names like Kneehigh, Gecko and Complicité, names that mean nothing but have an offbeat energy to them. I liked Goose. I think I had seen a flyer for the comedy sketch group Goose maybe. Goose Theatre sounds rubbish, though, so I went with TheatreGoose. Although it is now theatregoose. I am having a lowercase turn.

My issue is that your work is very sophisticated and slick and smart, which are not characteristics typically associated with geese.

I see what you mean. I did this Hugo Burge Foundation residency with Summerhall last year, and there were three geese in the field between me and my study that petrified me. I couldn’t go back to my little hut because I was so afraid of them. Then there is Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese, harsh and exciting. There is something slightly playful about geese as well. And I like that they aggressively stand their ground. I didn’t think about any of this deeply at the beginning, though.

The Plot is running at Summerhall during the Edinburgh Fringe. What is it about?

It is about The Gunpowder Plot. It is about what happens when the stories we tell about the world and our place in it fall apart. It is about angry young men with time on their hands and deep dissatisfaction. It is about two brothers who have bet their lives on a plot and are reckoning with the fact that it has not paid off. It is about who has control of the story that will be told about them. And it is about Macbeth.

Were these brothers real people?

They were real. It is a pair of brothers called Tom and Robert Wintour. They are in that engraving at Charing Cross station. They were core conspirators. Guy Fawkes was just a mercenary hired to light the match really. These guys were the real plotters. They were all related to each other. They ran away to foment this rebellion in the Midlands. Tom was the one who gave all the evidence that made it into The King’s Book, which was James I’s government’s version of what happened.

How does Macbeth come in?

Well, some of the most famous plays in history were being written at the same time, so obviously there was going to be a play about the plot. That play is Macbeth, which was probably written in the months afterwards. Macbeth is saturated with the Gunpowder Plot. It is all about equivocation and half-truths and what we imagine into the space of what isn’t said. Macbeth himself is seen as a metaphor for the plot because he is led by an imaginary dagger and a prophecy into which he has imagined truth. Shakespeare couldn’t write directly about a plot to kill the king, of course, so he wrote Macbeth instead.

Two brothers becoming extremists. Are you writing a politically relevant play?

I think it might be. I shy away from that stuff, though. I don’t start from a place of relevance. I think the context I live in naturally seeps into everything I write. The plot was a case of radicalised young men forming a cell and becoming intoxicated by this idea of changing the world, and that idea leading them down a path of no return. That does not need labouring to feel prescient. It has naturally come to the fore. My work is political. I think all art is inherently political. But I don’t like to be heavy handed, or preachy, or didactic.

Where did the idea of a play about The Gunpowder Plot come from?

I think it was a David Olusoga podcast. That set me off on a Wikipedia deep-dive. Then I discovered the Macbeth connection. I was also interested in why we are so obsessed with The Traitors. I think there is a myth of Englishness that is founded on the idea of an enemy within, as opposed to an enemy without, which is quite an American idea. English history is full of plots. The Gunpowder Plot. The Essex Revolt. The Bye Plot. Modern politics is full of plots, too. “Plot” wasn’t actually used to mean a secret plan until after the Gunpowder Plot, though, so I thought there was a cultural and linguistic turn that I could root there.

You are working with your regular collaborators again: the actors Sophie Kean and Abby McCann, the designer Ellie Wintour, the lighting designer Ed Saunders and the sound designer Sarah Spencer. Why?

I love them so much. They are so extraordinary. They are the best at what they do, and they are also the nicest people and the dearest friends. When I was younger, I used to really judge directors that worked with the same people over and over again. Now, I get it. I think you can learn a lot from new collaborations, but I think the greatest learning comes from working with people that share a depth of understanding and taste. With Sophie and Abby, with Ed, with Sarah, with Ellie, I feel like I am cooking in a way I couldn’t with other creatives. There is such a rigorous back and forth. That is why, I hope, the work feels incredibly coherent.

This will be your fourth year in a row at Summerhall. How do you feel it is going?

Her Green Hell did some regional touring, which was great. After Sisters Three, I just wanted to roll straight into Aether. That transferred to Jermyn Street Theatre, sold out, then got extended by two weeks and sold out again. For me, the priority is always the next thing. I feel like I have made some headway at the Fringe. There was a bit of a hype around Aether that we hadn’t had before, maybe because it was science-y, maybe because it began with A. The Plot will be my fourth year in a row at Summerhall. I feel a bit more scrutiny this year. It feels like an opportunity. If I can make a brilliant show that the audience loves and the press are excited by, I will be really happy. If I can make the budgets balance, I’ll be even happier.

Can you explain how TheatreGoose works financially?

All the money flowing through TheatreGoose is either money made from shows, loans from various people, money made from other work, or this crazy angel investment we got after Her Green Hell. This random, unassuming man saw it and came up to me afterwards with his email on a piece of paper. Months later, we got on a Zoom. It turned out he and his wife used to be hedge fund managers. They had a charitable trust, the dregs of which they were looking to give away in a fun way. They came to the Fringe, saw forty shows in three days, and loved Her Green Hell the most. They gave the company £20,000. I couldn’t keep a straight face on the Zoom. We need more people like that. TheatreGoose has never had public funding. I’ve never tried to get any. I don’t think it is the best use of my time.

What about the finances for The Plot?

The budget for The Plot is, like, £50,000. I am doing a full hire with Summerhall, which means I keep 100 per-cent of the box office. That means we actually can make a lot of money if we do well. I am betting on myself. I am putting up quite a lot upfront to gain a huge amount if we do well. It is me taking a risk on me making an excellent show. It is not something I would recommend necessarily, but if you are confident about your work, it is a no-brainer.

Where did you grow up? How did you get involved in theatre?

This is your opportunity to redress the error in that article about me in The Stage. You alliteratively called me “Bath-born.” I was born in London in 1997, but I grew up in Bath. My dad is Irish. My mum is from London. She is more into classical music and dance than theatre. I did ballet from the age of two. That was incredibly formative. Growing up, I thought theatre was just big musicals in the West End. I didn’t know the National Theatre existed until I was about nineteen. I did Theatre Royal Bath’s youth theatre when I was a teenager, training with directors who now run major regional theatres, like Amy Leach and Lee Lyford. Somehow, I was just spending a couple of hours with these brilliant minds on a Wednesday evening.

When did you start making work yourself?

I had the choice of trying to go to dance school or Oxford. I chose to go to Oxford to study history. I kept getting in trouble with my tutors, though, because I was doing a lot of student theatre. I acted in my first year, then did that show at the Fringe, then started directing in my second year. I would get the Oxford Tube on my own every week to go see shows in London, too. I went to see Rebecca Frecknall’s production of Summer and Smoke four or five times. Complicité’s The Encounter was incredibly formative, too, especially for Her Green Hell. My taste is very eclectic, though. I love Katy Rudd. I love Rob Icke. Prebble, Kirkwood and Birch are my trifecta of goddesses when it comes to writing, obviously.

You have worked as an assistant director and an associate director, too, most recently on A View From The Bridge in the West End. How did that happen?

I crazily got this job with Polly Findlay on Copenhagen in Bath. I wrote her an email in my second year of Oxford about Beginning in the West End, she replied, and we kept in touch. We had a coffee after I finished doing a masters at Cambridge, and she was like: ‘You’re from Bath? I have a show opening there in two weeks. Do you want to be my assistant?” She was the best first person to assist in your career because she sets the bar so high for kindness and brilliance and rigour. And she actually named me as a director on the show because she went off to do a film that clashed, which was an extraordinary thing to do. It was her production that I was just restaging, really, but she was kind and bumped up my credit. It was a huge credit for a first job. I was so young, and it was Haydn Gwynn, Philip Arditti, and Malcolm Sinclair in the main house of the Theatre Royal Bath.

What about the writing side of your work? When did that start?

I never thought of myself as a writer until Her Green Hell. I saved up all my pennies from an ushering job I had at the Bridge Theatre and did this screenwriting course with the National Film and Television School. It is a popular course. Everyone and their dog has done it. You write a pilot over two weeks. It was a really caterpillar-butterfly moment for me. It was like the floodgates had opened. I wrote straight afterwards. That course completely changed me. Up to that point, I thought I would be a director, doing big classics and new writing. Now, I want to do it all.

What does your writing career involve at the moment, outside of TheatreGoose?

I am about to start writing episodes for this vertical short about sexy vampires. I was commissioned to write a pilot for this drama set in a boarding school. I have two unproduced plays doing the rounds. One is called Bumps and is about a medical trial of artificial wombs. The other I wrote as part of the Royal Court Writers’ Group and is a bit more stageable. It is called Passion Play and it is about nuns in a convent in Ireland. A few people are sniffing around that. I also have a commission that I am writing into a feature, but I can’t say what it is.

Do you feel a pressure to identify as a writer or as a director?

I do. I’m quite reticent to hang my hat on a particular bucket of work. People love to assign you to a silo. There is a tension in being a writer-director in this country, I think. A lot of buildings and people want you to be one thing or the other. They don’t trust you to do both. I don’t want that. I’m greedy. I want to do everything. That is why TheatreGoose has been the absolute best thing I could have done, as it has allowed me to do that. Older directors used to tell me that I would just graduate from assisting to directing, then get given my own show at the Almeida when I was 30 and everything would be fine. Then Rob Icke told me not to do that. He said that career path didn’t really exist anymore. He told me to go read every play ever and become the best-read director of my generation, which I have sort of done since then, and he told me to go and make my own work. It was the best advice he could have given. It has allowed me to set out my stall. I want to be seen as the artist I am and not pushed into a box. I write and I realise. That is what I do.

You have worked a bit in Europe, too, right?

I did a show in Belgium. That came about because of Copenhagen. This theatre company over there saw I had done it in Bath and asked me if I wanted to do my own version of it for them. I had this idea involving ping pong tables, but it fell through with a venue, so we did Grounded by George Brant instead. We did that in Brussels for a month, which was super cool. I’ve pitched them a couple of other ideas. I want to do this trilingual Romeo and Juliet where the lines are split into French, English and Flemish, so the language itself works as a metaphor.

What is next for you after The Plot? Will this be your last Edinburgh Fringe?

I don’t like to say for sure, but it feels like it might be. I am thinking, if The Plot does well, that I might move to Europe with my pot of gold. I’ve got an Irish passport. I’ve got that commission. I’ve met some cool people. I feel like I am graduating out of the Fringe in a way that Summerhall have always wanted me to, but I need meaningful relationships with buildings that support me to make work on a bigger scale, or I will have to keep doing stuff for myself. I can see that opportunity elsewhere. I won’t leave for good, though. I’m obsessed with London. I just want to carve out a space where I can make the work that I want to make.

The Plot is at Summerhall from August 6 until August 31.

Three shows to see next week

Hot Mess - The Other Palace, until September 6

Musical theatre duo Jack Godfrey and Ellie Coote have already chalked up two hit shows: 42 Balloons, which ran to acclaim in Salford in 2024, and Hot Mess, which premiered at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, winning a Fringe First, the Popcorn Writing Award, and a spot in The Stage’s Fringe Five, then transferring to Southwark Playhouse. Now, the show, which reimagines the history of humanity and the planet as a millennia-spanning relationship gone wrong, returns to The Other Palace. You can find my chat with Godfrey and Coote here and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

The Hen Night - A Play, A Pie and A Pint, until June 13

This three-handed comedy from A Play, A Pie and A Pint follows a group of Glaswegian gal-pals on a hen-do in Edinburgh that gets interrupted by an Irish goddess sent to save the bride-to-be from a toxic marriage. Written by Debbie Hannan, directed by Laila Noble, and starring rising stars Dani Heron, Laura Lovemore and Anna Russell-Martin, it is smart, satirical and ridiculously fun. You can read my five-star review in The Stage here, get tickets for its final performances at Oran Mor in Glasgow here, and get tickets for its Edinburgh run via the button below.

Book tickets here

Blue Mist - various, until June 30

Set in a shisha bar, Mohamed-Zain Dada’s ambitious debut play focuses on a trio of young British Pakistanis whose hazy happiness is jeopardised when one of them gets a job making a podcast that misrepresents their community. Milli Bhatia’s production started at the Royal Court in 2023, and now returns in a tour produced by Boundless Theatre that visits Leeds, Peterborough, Stratford, Birmingham and Leicester. You can read my interview with Bhatia here and get tickets via the button below.

Book tickets here

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Fergus